Leader Qualities Do Not Exist — a Matter of Type Settled by Your Own Nature, Not by Character

Leader qualities get explained as a list of properties one should possess. Judgement. Listening. Responsibility. Being fair. Gratitude and consideration. Being positive. Some articles line up ten of them, others narrow it to seven.

The properties listed are all good ones. Things proceed better under somebody whose judgement is quick, and information gathers better around somebody who listens.

The damage appears immediately after that list has been read. No small number of people who considered making a place step down at the first stage. The reason for stepping down is experienced as a shortfall in ability. I am poor at speaking in front of people. I cannot keep in touch reliably. I am not the sort of character who pulls people along. Each is a description of fact and, for the person concerned, accurate.

What they are being collated against, however, is not their own ability. It is an image: somebody bright, standing in front of people, addressing everyone, lifting the room. Compare yourself with the image and the adjudication always comes out on the deficient side. And since the image is fixed, no amount of acquiring changes the adjudication.

A question sits unanswered inside the format. Having counted how many items on that list you satisfy, what are you supposed to do next? In most cases the answer becomes acquire them. Where what is to be acquired is character, this advice cannot be carried out. Character is not something that changes by changing your method, so there is nowhere for the effort to go. Unable to carry it out, whoever read it collates the list with themselves and takes home only the adjudication that they fall short.

Some questions get no answer here. Whether you should be the bearer of that place is not settled in what follows. Even in a state where the type fits, where what you show you have actually been through, and where people bring you their questions, whether to continue is a separate judgement. Conditions on the bearer’s side do not produce that adjudication.

And replacing the measuring stick does not bring the number who step down to zero. The adjudication not suited does sometimes come out correctly. What changes is only whether the reason for stepping down is a real one. Somebody who stepped down after collating with the image cannot take away what it was that did not fit. Unable to take it away, they cannot try a different shape a second time.

In order: how the list gets made, the point research had already reached some eighty years ago, the structure of attribution that produces the image, and the demarcation by which type is settled by your own nature rather than chosen. Last, a way of finding the part that does not fit from your own record.

The Explanation That Answers What Are Leader Qualities

A leader is described as somebody who guides those around them so as to arrive at a settled purpose. The properties required for performing that guiding role are called qualities.

A list gets shown. Apt judgement. Communication ability. A listening posture. Composure when problems arise. A sense of responsibility. Fairness and integrity. A positive posture. Gratitude and consideration towards those around you.

What gets placed at the centre is shown too. In many arrangements, two skills are raised: managing members, and communicating with members. These two are the essence, some accounts write.

That they can be acquired gets emphasised as well. Qualities are not inborn but acquirable through development. Announcements of training courses follow because of this claim.

Specific individuals get cited at times. In the form of quoting a real executive and explaining that gratitude and altruism sit at the centre of the qualities.

As explanations, every one of them lands. Things not proceeding under somebody whose judgement is slow is a fact, and a group that cannot communicate failing to function is something observed. That qualities have a part which grows through development does not move either.

The premise the whole set holds in common is one. The more of the properties listed somebody possesses, the better suited they are as a bearer. In sequence, the property comes first and being able to become a bearer follows from it.

The premise is almost never made explicit. What gets written is the names of the properties and the reason each is necessary. Being necessary and having to possess it before starting are separate claims. The list format folds the two into a single reading. It is the folded side that reaches the reader, and self-adjudication starts from there.

This is not to say property and outcome are unrelated. A relation exists. The problem is that it is written in the direction of possessing it is what lets you become a bearer.

That the direction might run the other way is not examined on the list’s side. Perhaps those properties were acquired as a result of acting as the bearer. Or perhaps the situation demanded those properties.

Whether it is the same in practice either way is a possible reading. It is not the same. If the property comes first, somebody who does not have it now cannot begin. If the situation comes first, it gets acquired after beginning. The adjudication of whether you may begin comes out in exactly opposite ways.

The more carefully the list is made, the more it feels as though the precision of self-adjudication has risen. The adjudication only three of the ten apply to me is concrete and persuasive. The precision has risen, and whether the object being adjudicated is the right one is not verified on the list’s side.

Add items and this effect strengthens. A list of ten produces more non-applying items than a list of seven. The number of non-applying items gets read as the quantity of the shortfall. For whoever read it, the adjudication grew harsher in proportion to how detailed the list became. Detail is the writer’s kindness, and on the receiving side it does something else.

The List Is a Description, Written Afterwards, of People Who Did Well

In most cases the list of qualities is made by observing bearers who did well.

What becomes the object of observation is people currently functioning as bearers. People who did not function do not enter the observation. Not entering, what they held goes unrecorded.

In this structure, two things cannot be distinguished. The first is the case where they functioned because they held that property. The second is the case where just as many people held that property and did not function.

How much of the latter there actually is is not knowable from looking only at those who functioned. Not knowable, and the list is written so as to read those who hold these function.

That looking only at the visible side produces mistaken conclusions is the same structure as the one handled in customer testimonials. Even where the records are accurate, if the recorded set is skewed, conclusions drawn from it are skewed.

Suppose persistence is raised as a quality. People who persisted and came through are observed. People who persisted and did not come through have left the territory, so they are not observed. That persistence enters the list is also explainable as a consequence of this asymmetry.

That there is something to be learnt if people actually functioning share a trait is right. There is. The direction of the learning differs, though. The use I do not hold this, so I am not suited is unavailable. What is available is information on the side of the situation: in places that function, properties like these are apparently being demanded.

This is not to say every list is skewed. Studies that examined groups which did not function as well exist. In studies of that kind, the shape of the conclusion changes.

And whether a list is skewed is discernible by looking at it. Whether it contains the statement people who did not function held the same properties. A list without it is looking at one side only.

Begin doubting the list and it feels as though nothing at all can be said about a bearer’s properties. In fact, what can be said remains. What remains sits not on the side of the properties but on the side of what that place demands.

Restate it from the demand side and the addressee of the description changes. Not somebody who can listen is suited but this place begins from a state where participants do not write of their own accord, so the work of drawing things out is required. The latter leaves open who does that work and how. Drawing things out can be done by asking face to face, or by writing and having it answered. Write it with the name of a property and this option closes.

What Was Asked Was Not the Trait Itself but Its Relation to the Situation

On the research side, this question has been handled for close to eighty years.

Ralph Stogdill, in 1948, arranged 124 studies carried out between 1904 and 1947 (Stogdill, 1948, The Journal of Psychology, 25(1), 35–71). Studies handling the relation between an individual’s traits and coming to occupy a leading position within a group.

The conclusion of that arrangement was not the fixing of a list of traits. What was stated there is that a person does not become a leader by virtue of possessing some combination of traits. Traits carry meaning in relation to the situation the person is placed in: that is the form the arrangement takes.

The studies that became its object were mainly ones handling who comes to occupy a leading position inside an already existing group. They were not handling a situation where somebody running a business alone makes a place.

Even so, the shape of the conclusion is usable. It is the fact that the attempt to produce a list of traits did not arrive at an answer in that direction. The lists now in circulation have returned to a point reached once, some eighty years ago.

The proposition somebody with decisiveness is suited to leading has no truth value until the situation is specified. In a situation where information is complete and judgement is urgent, deciding quickly tells. In a situation where information is short and deciding cannot be reversed, not deciding tells.

Whether the conclusion of an old study may be applied to the present is a doubt that stays. What is being applied is not the conclusion but the shape of the conclusion. The history of trying to produce an answer from the trait side and failing to is a caution for reading a list of the same format now. What can be handled is only what has been confirmed.

This is not the claim that qualities are unrelated. They are related. The shape of the relation is whether it agrees with what that situation demands rather than whether you hold it.

Accordingly, the sequence of asking changes. Rather than asking first what you hold, you ask first what the place you are trying to make demands.

Ask from the situation side and the answer stops being generalisable. What a bearer needs can no longer be said in one line. Losing that is inconvenient, and it also means the one line available before specified nothing at all.

Who Is Making the Image of Somebody with Qualities

The image of a bright person who stands in front and livens the place up is not something observed but something assembled through two operations. Describe those who did well afterwards, drop the situation, extract the properties alone. The image accordingly does not exist.

Comparing yourself with something that does not exist, the adjudication always comes out as deficient. Whatever you acquire, for as long as the image side is fixed, the adjudication does not change.

The image has one older layer in its provenance. The sociologist Max Weber, in classifying the types under which rule is received as legitimate, defined a leader’s special quality not as a property they possess but as something attributed to them by those who follow (Max Weber, Economy and Society, 1922). The word charisma is used in this sense originally.

The word attribution is what tells. If a property sits inside the person, it can be measured and it can be acquired. If it is something those who follow attribute, there is nothing on the person’s side to begin with. That how to become charismatic cannot be written is not a problem of the writer’s competence. Neither the writer nor the person concerned holds the authority to designate who attributes what.

Somebody poor at speaking in front of people can run a place through writing alone. In the form of putting what they wrote somewhere everyone can read it, instead of addressing everyone. This shape is not contained in the image, so it does not surface as an option.

That you need not force it if you are not suited is a sound judgement. The problem is only that the ground for the adjudication not suited is the image. Where the ground is not the image but a collation of your actual nature with what the place you are making demands, that adjudication is correct. This is not a denial of adjudicating but a discussion of the measure used to adjudicate.

This is not the claim that anybody can do it. A place shaped against your own nature genuinely does not continue. What can be said is that one shape being confirmed as unfitting does not make the other shapes unfitting.

And encouragement does not work. Told it is all right not to be suited, the image stays exactly as it was. For as long as it stays, the person understands they are merely being treated as an exception. What works is understanding that the image itself was made afterwards.

Remove the image and the object of aspiration disappears. A goal in the form of becoming like somebody becomes unusable. What is required instead is the work of grasping your own nature first. Grasping is plainer than comparing yourself with somebody, and it takes time.

Type Is Settled by Your Own Nature, Not Chosen

A bearer’s conduct has at least two shapes.

The first shape is walking a little ahead. By showing the route you went through first, you put those coming behind in a state where they can see ahead of themselves. There being distance, day-to-day exchange is sparse.

The second shape is walking at the same speed. You are in the same position as participants and proceed alongside them. The distance being short, the quantity of exchange is high.

These two are not chosen. They are settled by which is the shape that costs you nothing unreasonable. The reason is simple: a shape that does not fit does not continue.

And the two are illustrations, not a classification. Actual shapes are countless, including intermediates and shapes used differently by situation. Dividing into two was to show that this is not a matter of choosing.

Suppose somebody not good at close-range exchange chooses the shape of walking at the same speed. The first few months hold together. At the point where the quantity of exchange passes a certain level, replies begin to run late. The lateness is not a problem of character but the appearance of that shape not fitting that person’s nature.

Matching the shape the market responds to is another way of thinking. It does get a response. Choose the shape that gets a response and you end up performing yourself in order to maintain it. A performed state tends to show in the variation of how much gets written and in the timing of replies. The short-term response and whether it continues sit on separate axes.

Nature is not fixed. Over some years, what was unreasonable can stop being unreasonable. What can be said is only that designing on the premise of what is unreasonable now is unwise.

The material for adjudicating sits in the past record. Which kinds of involvement have continued so far, and which broke off. The shape that continued is the shape that fitted that person’s nature.

And type interlocks with the design of the place. Take the shape of walking ahead and the route you went through has to remain somewhere readable. Take the shape of walking at the same speed and somewhere for exchange to occur is required. Make the shape of the place first without settling your type and an operation that does not fit your type gets fixed afterwards.

Settle it from your own nature and the shape of the place ends up different from the shapes spoken of generally. Being different, there is nothing to compare it with. Being unable to compare is unnerving, and a comparable shape also means a shape the same to the degree that it is comparable.

Being unable to compare carries a practical cost too. Since whether it is going well cannot be confirmed against outside cases, adjudication gets done on your own record alone. While the record is short, that adjudication does not work. Just after starting, a period continues in which the material for judging fit is short on both sides. This period does not get read as evidence of not fitting.

Perform a Type That Does Not Fit and It Surfaces in the Volume and the Timing, Not the Content

Where a bearer is performing a type not their own, it surfaces in the writing.

Where it surfaces is not the content. Content can be put in order. What surfaces is the fluctuation in how much gets written, and the timing of replies.

The mechanism is simple. A performed shape carries a surplus cost for that person. Carrying a cost, it is maintainable when there is slack and unmaintainable when there is none. Periods of being unable to maintain it arrive at regular intervals.

Those taking part read that fluctuation. Even without putting it into words, the adjudication they have been overdoing it lately moves. Once it moves, the credibility of what your side says drops.

Seen from the side of the writing, this structure is the same shape as the mismatch handled in the principles of sales copy. What was carried out as a technique gets through as a technique.

Suppose you decide to raise your publishing frequency and settle on writing three times a week. Two months hold. In the third month a gap opens, and into the writing after the gap goes the line it has been a while since the last update. That line reports that the frequency did not fit your type.

The hope that continuing even unreasonably widens the type holds conditionally. It widens where you find value in that shape and the reason for paying the cost sits on your own side. Where you are paying because it gets a response, it does not widen and you get worn down. Telling them apart comes from whom you chose the shape for.

Fluctuation existing is not itself a problem. Everybody has busy periods. What becomes a problem is where the cycle of the fluctuation agrees with the cost of maintaining the shape. Whether it agrees is discoverable by lining up the record.

And sometimes the person performing is unaware of it. Being unaware, they explain the cause of the fluctuation as there was no time. Whether the explanation is correct becomes clear from looking at what was prioritised in the period when time was short.

Choose the shape of not performing and your weaker parts become visible in the place. Being visible feels as though it lowers your authority as bearer. What actually drops is authority, and what rises is the side of it is all right to do this. Which of the two you take is settled by which you want to supply.

And the two cannot be maximised at once. Authority works with distance; it is all right to do this works with closeness. The same conduct raises one and lowers the other. Which is required is settled on the side of the place, not by the bearer’s preference. A place where people gather and test things with each other requires the latter; a place people come to in order to receive answers requires the former. Before settling your type, which of the two the place is gets settled.

Influence Is a By-Product of the Fact That You Went Through It First

When somebody takes in what another person says, the reasons for taking it in are several.

There is the reason of position. What somebody holding decision rights says cannot but be taken in. A voluntarily gathered place does not have this reason.

There is the reason of expertise. What somebody who knows the territory says is worth consulting. This works in a voluntary place too.

And there is one more. The fact that the person has actually been through what they are saying. This reason cannot be produced with words.

Of the three, the one that works most strongly in a voluntary place is the third. The reason is that participants can verify it. Expertise is hard to verify from outside, whereas whether somebody went through it appears in their past record.

Suppose two people write it is better to keep publishing. One holds a record of having written for three years. The other holds only the grounds for the claim. The content of the claim being the same, how it is received differs.

The worry that nothing can be said about territory you have not been through does not hold. Things can be said. Only the manner changes. For territory not gone through, the form becomes introducing the record of somebody who has. The difference is writing it as your own experience or as somebody else’s record, and both hold. What does not hold is only writing what you have not been through as though you had.

Having been through it first is not always an advantage. The more particular the route you went through, the less reproducible it is for those coming behind. Show an unreproducible route and participants judge they managed it because they are who they are. Once judged, influence turns into admiration.

Admiration does not produce action. What produces action is the adjudication that you might get through it too. Accordingly, what should be shown is not the result of going through but the reproducible part of the process.

This provenance also has the property of taking time. Position and expertise work from the moment they are presented. The fact of having been through it takes exactly as long as going through it took. There being no way to shorten it, a bearer who has just begun cannot use this reason. What can be done during the unusable period is to put out, as a record, the fact of being in the middle of going through it now. It is weaker than a record of having finished, and it shares the property of not being constructible in retrospect.

Showing the process means showing the parts that did not work. Show them and the places where your judgement was loose remain as a record. A record that remains cannot be conveniently rewritten later. Since the provenance of influence is fact, the inconvenient parts of the fact come attached.

Self-Awareness Is Unreliable — the Adjudication Sits Only Outside

What type you are conducting yourself in is not accurately knowable by yourself.

The reason is that what your side is looking at is intent. What you meant by writing it, what you meant by replying that way, is knowable only to you. What the receiving side looks at is not intent but conduct.

The two do diverge. Keeping your distance gets received as coldness; meaning to be on equal terms gets received as looking down. That there is a divergence is not observable from your side.

Accordingly, the adjudication gets taken from outside. Most reliable is how somebody in regular contact with you sees you. The impression of somebody watching continuously has higher precision than that of somebody newly met.

Suppose you run a place thinking I want to be on equal terms with participants. Ask participants and the answer comes back that you are. That answer emerges inside the relation of your being the operator. Somebody outside the relation — somebody who took part before and left, or a peer in a similar position — holds observations of higher precision.

The resistance that asking around is unnatural in the first place holds. There is no need to ask formally. The material available is already to hand. What kinds of question come to you, and what kinds do not. If there is a kind that does not come, an adjudication is at work there: this cannot be said to this person.

Observation from outside is not complete either. The person watching has their own frame. One direction is therefore not enough. Adopt one person’s impression as your image and you take that person’s frame for your own nature.

And the material taken does not get used as material for correcting yourself. It gets used to know whether the type you assume and the type actually arriving diverge. Where they do not diverge, no correction is required.

The frequency also gets settled. Minding it constantly produces a side effect. Taking it once or twice a year as an occasion for confirming your type is enough. Type does not change over short periods, so taking it more often adds no material.

Begin minding how you look from outside and conduct leans outward. Leaning, it returns to the performing side. Unless the purpose of taking it is fixed as to know rather than to match, the very act of taking readings from outside becomes part of the performing.

Whether it is fixed becomes clear from what you do immediately after receiving the material. Taken in order to know, you change nothing after receiving it. Taken in order to match, conduct moves from the next instance. Where it moves, that conduct is matched to somebody else’s frame and is not your type. The frequency of once or twice a year is required for this discrimination to be possible too. At high frequency, whether you changed something becomes untraceable even to you.

The Part That Does Not Fit Surfaces in the Record Outside

Whether you are working as a bearer is adjudicable from your own record, without asking participants for an assessment. Asking is unnecessary because the part that does not fit leaves traces on the side of the record.

The first confirmation is to line up the kinds of involvement you have continued and the kinds that broke off.

What has continued is the shape fitting your nature. If something that broke off will not continue however you try, that is a matter of type, not a matter of the quantity of will. Lining them up is enough to adjudicate.

The second confirmation is to verify, one item at a time, whether you have actually been through what you are currently showing.

Things gone through and things not gone through separate. Look at whether you have written anything not gone through as your own experience. If you have, that is an object for rewriting.

The third confirmation is to write out the kinds of question that do not come from participants.

If there is a kind that does not come, there is a type that is not arriving. Since what does not come produces nothing, it goes unobserved for ever unless deliberately written out.

None of the three collates against a list of properties. What should be collated is not a list but your own record and the demand on the side of the place.

Having counted how many list items you satisfy, what are you supposed to do next? The answer is to move what gets counted from the list to your own record. What a count of the list means is not guaranteed by the list’s side. Count something unguaranteed with precision and the only thing whose precision rises is the adjudication.

What gets counted instead is the three checks on the record. All three count your own record and refer to no image. And at the point where the image is no longer referred to, the adjudication not suited does not disappear; its meaning changes. It becomes information that one shape has been confirmed as unfitting. As information, it settles the next shape to try.

What the three do not answer is also plain. None of them adjudicates whether you should bear that place. What is adjudicable is only where the part that does not fit sits right now. With the part known, you can choose to change the shape, change the parties, or change the scale. Without it, the only object left to change is your own nature, and that is unchangeable. The state of being stopped while trying to change your nature is the position of the person who stepped down before making the place. The position is the same, and there are two routes to it. Stepping down after collating with the image, or setting aside one shape after collating with the record. The first has no next; the second does.

Settle the type and the design of the place gets settled with it. What that place supplies to participants is in the two certainties place-building supplies, the order for bringing in hands other than your own in the order of team building, and what shifts once a fee is charged in the conditions under which a membership business keeps running. Choosing a shape again is possible because being together does not come in one shape. Where that difference of shape comes from sits in community management as a whole.