Written by Scot Chisholm
| Leadership, Founders | November 23, 2025
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But after scaling my company from zero to $100M+, and coaching hundreds of CEOs through Highland Academy, my thinking has changed. So, are leaders born or made? Research proves that 70% of leadership effectiveness comes from learned skills and experience, while only 30% traces to innate traits.[1] This matches what I’ve witnessed hundreds of times: green individual contributors transforming into exceptional managers, directors and executives. First-time founders developing into world-class CEOs.
Leadership isn’t a personality type or genetic gift. It’s a collection of trainable skills that can be taught, practiced, and mastered. The companies that understand this truth develop leaders at every level, while those clinging to the “born leader” myth wait for charismatic leaders to rise and save the day.
I was 22 years old, sitting in front of a room full of military leaders at a base in Norfolk, VA. I was a management consultant at the time, doing industrial engineering and lean six sigma for Booz Allen Hamilton. This was my first time leading a project team (or any team). I had prepared for hours, but I was still shaking. I couldn’t find my voice. The Admiral gave me a death stare from across the table, then smirked. “Hey kid, does your mom know you’re here?”
The room erupted in laughter.
I recovered enough to keep my job, but that was it. My presentation lacked command. I wasn’t clear enough. My team wasn’t on the same page. Blood in the water, and the Admiral knew it.
I had viewed myself as something of a leader growing up. I had the innate ability to persuade others. As a kid, I ran semi-productive projects: random adventures and “businesses”. And not so productive, like convincing the neighborhood kids to break my neighbor’s window because he was a pirate. My ability to influence landed me the lead role on this Navy project at 22. But I learned the hard way, that this alone didn’t make me a leader.
This experience launched a twenty-year investigation into a question that shapes how teams rise or fall. Are leaders made or born?
The answer matters more than most think. If leaders are born, companies are limited by the genetic lottery of their talent pool. Always searching for the charismatic leader to save the rest of the team from mediocrity.
But if leaders are made, if leadership is a craft that can be taught, practiced, and mastered, then every organization can develop extraordinary leaders at every level. They’re in the driver’s seat.
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When people talk about “born leaders,” they’re usually describing the same personality type Hollywood sells us: the charismatic CEO who commands every room. Steve Jobs. Richard Branson. Elon Musk. A prophet who paints the future and bends reality through sheer force of will. They never doubt. They never stumble. They seemed born knowing exactly where the world needed to go.
But here’s what nobody mentions: Jobs got fired from Apple. Branson had 15 failed businesses. Musk slept on factory floors learning how to manufacture cars himself. Even the poster children for ‘natural leadership’ had to learn how to lead.
After building and selling Classy (acquired by GoFundMe in 2022), scaling it from nothing to over 300 employees, I’ve watched hundreds of people transform into leaders. Not one of them was born ready. All of them got dirt on their hands and egg on their face, like I did at Booz Allen.
Adversity accelerated their learning, but that wasn’t all. Each person developed through specific training, coaching and reinforcement. It wasn’t rocket science, but it wasn’t accidental either. If companies invest in leadership development, they create more leaders.
The opposite is sad to see. Companies stop developing people who don’t fit the Hollywood archetype. Quiet brilliance gets overlooked. Introverted operators never get chances to lead. And organizations wonder why they have a “leadership pipeline problem.”
I’ve watched companies transform by abandoning this myth and committing to the idea that leaders can be made. This article is what two decades of making leaders has taught me about how leadership actually works.
The research demolishes the “born leader” myth. A study of identical twins raised apart found that only 30% of leadership emergence traces to genetics. The other 70% comes from learning, practice, and experience.[2]
Why twins? They share 100% of their DNA. By studying twins raised in different environments, researchers isolated exactly how much of leadership comes from nature versus nurture. The results were clear: genetics play a minor role.[3]
But the best proof doesn’t come from labs. It comes from companies that consistently produce exceptional leaders. GE’s Crotonville campus has produced more Fortune 500 CEOs than any other institution.[4] Amazon’s Leadership Principles scaled from startup to 1.5 million employees.[5] Military academies transform 18-year-olds into officers who lead in life-or-death situations. If leadership were genetic, these programs would fail. McKinsey found that companies with strong leadership development are 2.2 times more likely to outperform peers financially.[6] You can’t coach genetics. You can absolutely coach leadership.
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Leadership is moving a group of people from where they are, to where they need to be. From current state to desired state. How you measure this will vary based on the company or group’s intent:
Or a mix. Either way, the journey from current state to desired state is rarely a straight line. More like climbing a mountain than walking the beach. You’ll face threats. Your team will lose faith. Some will quit. The leader’s job is to find a way forward.
Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, spent years trying to identify the essential quality of successful founders. After evaluating thousands of startups, he landed on two words: relentlessly resourceful. But here’s the part most people miss. Graham didn’t just identify this trait. He set out to teach it.
“Surprisingly often [resourcefulness] can be taught,” he wrote. “Not to everyone, but to many people.”
Think about what Graham is saying here. The core trait that separates successful founders from failures is teachable. Not inherited. Not gifted. Taught. PG nailed the foundation. But after twenty years of making leaders, I’ve identified six other skills that increase success. Like resourcefulness, every single one can be taught.
Many founders arrive at Highland Academy unconvinced they’re the right leader for the job. Maybe growth stalled, the board lost confidence, their cofounder quit. Whatever it is, they’ve internalized a dangerous lie: that they’ve topped out. That great CEOs are born, not made.
But this is wrong. More founders can become great CEOs than they think. That’s why I started Highland. To help them bridge the gap between early stage founder and professional CEO. It doesn’t take long to get them confident again. They need to see that leadership is a skill anyone can develop, even a CEO.
The Highland curriculum is built on these 7 leadership skills:
1. Clarity of Communication – Most leaders underestimate the clarity of their own communication. They witness their team going in five different directions, and wonder why. You create clarity by teaching the PDP:
Every leader should know the answers to these three questions at all times, and so should their team!
2. Resourcefulness – This is PG’s “relentlessly resourceful” in action: solving problems with whatever you have. Doing more with less. Figuring out ways to keep your vision alive, and your customers happy. If you’re a bootstrapped founder, you know this one well. But you can teach anyone this by giving them progressively harder problems with progressively fewer resources.
3. Speed of Decision Making – Great leaders make decisions with incomplete information, under time pressure, with real consequences. Forward progress beats the perfect data set. You develop this through repetition and hypothesis thinking: if we do X, Y will happen. If it doesn’t, reverse or adapt.
4. Self-Awareness & Learning – The leaders who grow fastest see themselves clearly and adjust quickly. You develop this through structured reflection: “What went well? What didn’t?” Plus honest feedback from the team and some form of executive coaching. The best leaders have an endless thirst for learning beyond their own four walls. Books, podcasts, articles. They devour anything that will make them better.
5. Personal Accountability – The leader owns all outcomes, positive and negative. Nothing destroys culture faster than blaming others. You teach this by changing language: every time someone says “They didn’t deliver,” make them ask “Were the expectations clear enough? Is there anything the team could have done to support this person more?” Within weeks, the ownership mentality spreads.
6. Getting the Most Out of Others – This is where good leaders become great: developing capabilities, setting standards, using influence rather than authority. They help each person become the best version of themselves. It starts with the language you use (“we” not “I”) and treating people like genuine partners, not employees. Then it’s all about your coaching skills. It’s not easy to give feedback the right way, at the right time. This takes practice.
7. Resilience – Every leader gets knocked down. The ones who last get back up. This skill is the hardest to teach, but arguably the most important. At first it was hard for me to identify why some people had more resilience than others. Usually it came down to their background. They’d been through hardship. To teach this, you give people more responsibility than they’d normally get. Then let them make mistakes and fail. Each failure gives them thicker skin. Until the mistakes are few and far between.
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The highest level of leadership isn’t about how well you lead. It’s about how many leaders you create. If leadership were genetic, great leaders couldn’t consistently develop other great leaders. But they do, over and over, using reproducible methods.
I learned this the hard way at Classy. For the first few years, I tried to be everywhere, make every decision, solve every problem. The company grew, but it was fragile. Dependent on me being in every important conversation. Then I changed my mindset and started developing others. Provided strategic context. Taught them my frameworks. Gave them real responsibility. Coached them through challenges instead of solving problems for them. The company didn’t just grow faster. It grew stronger.
By the time we sold to GoFundMe, we had leaders at every level who could run their domains better than I ever could. GoFundMe even cited our leadership strength as a top reason for the purchase. Not bad for a couple of founders with zero management experience.
Leadership is a collection of skills anyone can develop if they’re willing to do the work. The question isn’t whether you were born a leader. The question is whether you’re willing to become one.
This truth means your company has more leadership potential than you realize. A sales rep could lead a division someday. A quiet analyst could become your best executive. An anxious first-time founder can become a world-class CEO. I’ve seen it over and over.
But it also means there’s no excuse. If leadership can be learned, then stagnation is a choice. The most successful companies don’t rely on unicorn leaders. They build systems to create leaders at every level.
Final verdict: Leaders are made, not born. And the best leaders? They make more leaders.
Are leaders born or made? Made. Research on identical twins raised apart found that only 30% of leadership emergence traces to genetics. The other 70% comes from learning, practice, and experience. The myth of the “natural born leader” makes for good movies, but bad talent acquisition.
What’s the evidence that leadership can be taught? General Electric’s Crotonville campus has produced more Fortune 500 CEOs than any other institution. The military academies transform 18-year-olds into combat officers. Amazon scaled leadership culture from startup to 1.5 million employees. If leadership were genetic, these programs would fail. They don’t.
Can introverts be effective leaders? Some of the best leaders are introverts. Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. Introverts often excel at deep thinking, careful listening, and thoughtful decision-making. The Hollywood archetype of the charismatic extrovert is one leadership style, not the only one.
How long does it take to develop leadership skills? Significant improvement happens in 6-12 months of deliberate practice with good coaching. Like anything, mastery takes time. For most founders in Highland Academy, it takes 3-5 years to develop into a truly world-class CEO. The key variables are quality of feedback, access to frameworks & systems, and willingness to reflect honestly with the coach or peers.
What are the most important leadership skills? Seven core skills can be taught: clarity of communication, resourcefulness, speed of decision-making, self-awareness and learning, personal accountability, getting the most out of others, and resilience. Every effective leader I’ve worked with has developed strength in most of these areas.
Can anyone become a leader? Anyone willing to do the work. The limiting factor isn’t genetics or personality. It’s willingness to take responsibility, receive hard feedback, and keep improving. Some people develop faster, but leadership is accessible to anyone who commits.
How do you develop leaders inside a company? Four elements: stretch responsibility that puts people in over their heads, tight feedback loops so they learn fast, structured reflection so lessons stick, and psychological safety to fail without career destruction. Companies that build systems around these four things produce leaders consistently.
Is leadership development worth the investment? McKinsey found that companies with strong leadership development programs are 2.2 times more likely to outperform peers financially. Better leaders make better decisions, build stronger teams, and create cultures that compound. The ROI exceeds almost any other investment in people.
What’s the biggest mistake companies make in developing leaders? Waiting for “natural leaders” to emerge instead of building systems to create them. They overlook quiet operators who don’t fit the charismatic archetype. They promote individual contributors without teaching them to lead. Then they wonder why they have a leadership pipeline problem.
How do the best leaders multiply their impact? By creating other leaders. They teach frameworks, not just solutions. They give people real responsibility with support. They coach through challenges instead of solving problems themselves. They measure success by how inessential they become, not how essential.
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