We’ve spent the last couple of days talking about two distinct problems with the use of leadership characteristics lists to develop leaders. We noted that when advocates of superlative individual leadership attempt to raise the leadership persona to a level of self-referential virtue, they may actually be inadvertently promoting a harmful cult centered on personal loyalty, rather than the pursuit of organizational aims. But, of course, we persist in trying to sort out this fundamentally flawed premise. So, today, we’ll briefly cover a third problem: the notion that we can use such lists of traits to identify people as (or as not) leaders, and safely assign or promote them on that basis.
