Have you ever done a ‘leadership’ exercise?
I’m sure you know the sort of thing – You’re on a corporate “training day” and after being placed into arbitrary groups in a stuffy meeting room, you are given a handful of straws, paperclips and plastic cups and told to build a tower that reaches the ceiling. Oh, and it’s a race.
Normally billed as a light-hearted ‘ice breaker’, such tasks are watched by an eagle-eyed organiser – on the lookout for the ‘natural leaders’. Which people are the ‘doers’; who are the diplomatic types; and who like the sound of their own voice a little too much?! These activities make me cringe – they feel artificial and forced – and worse, presume that true leadership can be identified in a conference room.
But is leadership really an inherent ability that some of us have but others don’t? Researchers from the University of Amsterdam seem to think so. In newly published work, they claim to have developed a computer program that not only predicts who are the best leaders from facial characteristics, but will also tell you who will win the next presidential election…