A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference

Executive coaches, boot camps, and workshops promising to develop leadership skills are incorrigibly ineffective, according to this provocative takedown. Stanford psychiatry professor Aboujaoude (Virtually You) argues that the tendency to conflate holding a leadership position with success has pushed individuals to seek out the C-suite even when it’s not a good fit. For instance, he describes how one of his patients, Jeff, was beset by anxiety during his MBA program’s public presentation exercises. Aboujaoude recommended Jeff reevaluate if the program was worth the trouble, leading him to drop out and take a less public-facing job at a solar energy plant, where he’s much happier. The problem with leadership programs, Aboujaoude contends, is that “great leaders are... mostly born” great or become so via circumstances outside their control. Unfortunately, his evidence is less than convincing, as when he claims in a bit of circular logic that former Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher’s natural leadership skills explain why he was well-liked and why leadership can’t be taught. Still, Aboujaoude makes a thought-provoking case that pat, multistep prescriptions for good leadership generalize too broadly and fail to account for the importance of chance (Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s leadership skills, Aboujaoude posits, were forged by unforeseen circumstances, not by a program or coach). This doesn’t always convince, but it will leave readers with much to contemplate. Agent: Howard Yoon, WME. (May)