Are leadership qualities born with the person?

Hi all,

Its been a long while since I last updated my blog. A lot has been happening around my life recently.... Good and not so good stuff...

For the past few months, life at work has been a never ending struggle to keep up with the never-ending work that surrounds me... And it does not get any easier when there are people in your team that has the position to lead but does not appear to have the qualities to lead....

Are leadership qualities born with the person?

In my personal opinion, I believe that some part of that statement has truth in it... But I am believer that a person can be better even if that person is not born with a innate talent...

That said... There are people who choose not to strive to be better and just live life as it is... Dun get me wrong... There is nothing wrong with them... But if they are in a position to lead a team of people to excel, and yet he does not want to excel himself, it will turn into a disaster....

And I am facing this challenge at work.... I will always try to do better and set a high expectation of myself to my own work... It would not be so bad if I am working alone and my work does not involved dealing directly and working closely on deliverables with such a person... but sad to say, my job requires me to do otherwise....

I shall not go into the pain I am going through... but rather I would rather focus on the various harmful side-effects of such a person when in position to lead a team of people....

From experience, if the person is an long-standing employee in the company... the problem would be even harder to tackle than a new one who is given that position to lead....

In the aspects of the long-standing employee..
1. He would have created a comfort zone within his area of work... Knowing what he likes to do and what he does not like to do... Shoving those aside or worse to those he has power over...
2. The team's morale is generally low... Though there may be 'occasional' perks from the person... but due to the personality of the person, the daily actions at work will show the negative qualities of the person and reflect on his work... And that will have a negative impact to the morale of the team under him.
3. The team's communication will be weaken. Without proper leadership and in a culture of pushing and shoving, most will take the path of being the silent one and have minimal communication with the team members (just in case they get scolded for whatever they did).
4. Resulting on those, cooperation among the team will reduce. There is no one leading the team positively from the start; my question would be 'how would it even start to have cooperation in the first place'?
5. The resulting consequence to the above would be a poor performing team. And its not the team at fault, but the ownership of these issues is always top-down. The leader must bear this responsibility. The poor performance will be felt through the company for those who have to deal with this team. Thus, other people working with this team will have negative comments towards them. And for people who are trying to be better, it would be a brick wall that is hard to tear down.

Nuff said.

And by the way, I am still work @ 1am while typing this.

Best Regards,
Ken