The Origins of Startup Leadership: Genetic or Environmental?
Are startup leaders born or are they forged in the cauldron of their industry and times?
According to genetic researchers, the marker rs4950 “residing on a neuronal acetylcholine receptor gene (CHRNB3) – has a significant relationship with the propensity to occupy a leadership role.” (Source: here)
Yet many accounts of how leaders attained their lofty status focus heavily on environmental factors. They cite major challenges leaders faced early on, and how those trials and tribulations spurred them on.
So, is it genetic or environmental factors that shape the leader, and their path and reception as a leader? Or is it some combination of the two?
A regular reader of this blog has suggested via email that in addition to genetic and environmental factors, leadership is like IQ and EQ – ruminated in this blog here – that there’s a leadership quotient, or ‘LQ’. While I don’t fully agree, I do like where this idea is headed.
So what is it? What’s the source of the spark that ultimately forms a leader? One way of answering this question is to start with what it’s not. Startup leadership has nothing to do with one’s:
connection to the company’s founding,
title,
financial compensation,
place on the cap table (i.e., amount of ownership),
support derived from the investors (read VC) in the company,
place in the larger industry, or
numbers of direct and indirect reports.
In startups, true leadership has everything to do with the way one:
draws on experience, education and technical skills,
balances strategic and tactical know-how,
solves problems,
executes as smoothly and efficiently as possible,
communicates,
utilizes management skills in challenging or high-stress situations, and
leads by example.
But most of all leadership has everything to do with achieving goals by empowering others, utilizing known information while filling in the unknowns, and how he or she conducts themselves interpersonally.
So is leadership genetic, environmental, emotional, psychological, or even spiritual? The answer is “Yes!”