Articles and articles about leadership. Is it charisma? Can it be taught? What makes a great leader? All over the world people want to know this. In fact, I’ve just been asked to submit a proposal to do a workshop on EQ and Leadership in Saudi Arabia, for a bank. They knew the competencies of emotional intelligence and they know they want their people to have them. It’s a worldwide phenomenon, and for good reason.

Can leadership be learned? Yes, I think so. In the same way that you can learn to be a therapist. They used to tell us in graduate school, “It can’t be taught, but it can be learned.”

Three things factor it: wanting to be a leader, observing good leaders with your thinking cap on and your feeling heart open, and then practice – on the firing line!

We’re observing this right now with President Bush. As I write this from my office in south Texas, we’ve been under threat of Hurricane Rita for two days, and millions of Texas have fled to hopefully higher ground. I just opened an article in the Washington Post that began, “President Bush flew here ahead of Hurricane Rita on Friday to show command of a federal disaster response effort that even supporters acknowledge he fumbled three weeks ago.”

Everyone seem to have fumbled the ball with Hurricane Katrina. Those who learn from their mistakes still have a chance. Bush appears to be one of them. He is quoted as having said to reporters before leaving Washington, “I need to understand how it works better.” He is also, of course, scrambling to regain the confidence of the people. At his level, he gets to fail in public. But he also gets to succeed in public.

I read also that a military leader was heading out to the scene because he “wanted to watch the troops in action during a disaster.”

I can't stress enough that a leader shows up and pitches in. I see this frequently in offices. There's a deadline -- let's say the brief has to make it to the 4th Circuit which means a 7 p.m. Fed-Ex deadline, and everyone’s working overtime already. There are two ways the head guy (or gal) can handle this -- well, 3 actually.

One is to disappear completely, because it's chaos. That gets minus 2 points. (Ask Bush.) Hiding in your office is bad. The major point about primal leadership is that the leader models the emotion the workers are “supposed” to have, and we do pick up on that. If the leader disappears at the crucial moment, we are left to our fantasies, and they are never going to be positive.

The second is to stand around looking worried, disgusted or angry – say off to the side with your arms crossed. While everyone else is running around like chickens with their heads cut off? This gives you zero points. I don’t think people who do this understand the impression this makes. I might even give this a –2 and give the disappearance the zero. It smacks of arrogance, of disdain, or being separate from, or above it all. The first thing they tell us in management class is if there’s a crisis – get help. More hands are needed. And there’s a set of hands that won’t pitch in? This annoys people. To say the least.

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