There’s a belief that floats around boardrooms, podcasts, and business schools like gospel truth: some people are just born leaders. They walk into a room, and people follow. They speak, and others listen. They have “it.”
James Lincoln has spent over 25 years building businesses, developing teams, and studying what makes leaders effective. He’s read the books, attended the trainings, and lived the messy reality of leading real people through real challenges. And he’s landed on a conviction that might surprise you.
The best leaders aren’t discovered. They’re developed.
That doesn’t mean personality doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean systems are irrelevant. What it means is that leadership sits at the intersection of all three: personality, system, and learned behavior. And the most important piece? Anyone can build it.
The Three Dimensions of Leadership
When James first encountered the popular idea that leadership is purely a system, his gut reaction was swift. “Boy, that’s absolutely wrong,” he recalls thinking. But then he paused and caught himself.
“Good leaders absolutely put in place good systems for good people to follow,” he explains. “That’s one of the first and foremost jobs of a leader.”
He’s right to pause. Reducing leadership to just one dimension misses the full picture. James sees leadership operating across three distinct dimensions, each one essential.
Leadership as a system means creating functional structures where people can excel. “One of the best things an owner can do is lay out a functional system for people to use so they can be good at their job,” James says. “I don’t care who you are as an owner or what personality you have. When you lay that out well, that is one of the traits of good leadership.”
Leadership as a personality involves the traits that move and inspire people. James describes it as “a set of traits that inspires people, allows them to be the best of who they are, and drives them to accomplish and produce in ways they never thought possible.”
Leadership as a learned behavior is where things get interesting. This is the dimension that opens the door for every business owner who has ever looked in the mirror and thought, “I’m not a leader.”
James is blunt about it: “Leadership isn’t something you’re born with or not. Even the leader with the most inborn skills in the world, if he doesn’t actually work on those skills, he’ll never get there.”
The reverse is also true. “The one who has no natural skills at all, if they spend the time and effort learning to be a better version of themselves, those leaders actually do get built.” Research from the Center for Creative Leadership supports this — leaders are made, not born, and leadership can be practiced and learned.
Self-Awareness: The Foundation Everything Else Stands On
James rattles off a list of leaders that couldn’t be more different from each other: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Winston Churchill, Gary Vaynerchuk, Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump. Their styles vary wildly. Their industries span technology, media, politics, and war. Their personalities share almost nothing in common on the surface.
So what’s the thread?
“The one thing you’ll see in all of them is the ability to know themselves,” James says. “Know who they are, know their strengths, know their weaknesses, and not be afraid to speak about them.”
He describes a quality that goes beyond simple confidence. “There is a joy about who they are, a self-acceptance. That ability to be very self-aware and self-confident becomes very, very true across all of them despite their remarkable differences.”
Why Self-Awareness Attracts Followers
This isn’t just feel-good advice. Self-awareness creates a magnetic force in organizations. When a leader knows who they are and owns it fully, people notice. They gravitate toward that honesty.
“People are very attracted to a leader who is honest about who they are and confident in where they’re going,” James observes.
And when self-awareness combines with structure and execution? That’s when real momentum builds. “When you’re able to accomplish that self-awareness and then put in place the structure you want to move towards, then put in place the ways you’re going to execute, and then hold yourself accountable to actually executing, what you’ll find is that the people around you are very attracted by that.”
The formula sounds simple. Know yourself. Build a structure. Execute. Hold yourself accountable. But simple and easy are very different things.
The University of Montana Story: Leadership in Action
Some of the best leadership lessons show up in unexpected places. For James, one arrived through his teenage son.
“My son decided as a junior in high school that he wanted to go to the University of Montana,” James recalls. “None of his friends had ever thought about it.”
His son didn’t pressure anyone. He didn’t campaign or lobby. He simply spoke up and laid out a clear argument for why Montana was the right choice for him. Distance from home. Specific personal reasons. A well-articulated case.
What happened next caught everyone off guard.
“Four members of his friend group all went to the University of Montana,” James says. “He articulated a mission, a vision, was confident in where he was going, and his friends followed. That’s leadership.”
The Conversation That Followed
James used the moment to teach his son something important.
“I said, ‘You do understand the ability you have to lead people, don’t you?'” James remembers. “And he kind of went, ‘No, I don’t understand it at all.'”
James pressed further. “When people follow you, when people look at you and see what you see and want to be a part of what you want to be a part of, that’s actually a really good test for what your leadership is and what your leadership can be.”
His son didn’t force anyone onto a plane to Montana. He cast a confident vision, and people chose to follow. That voluntary choice is the simplest and most honest test of leadership James has found.
“Never underestimate that,” he adds.
For business owners wondering whether they’re truly leading, this test cuts through all the noise. Are people choosing to follow you? Not because they have to. Because they want to.
The Long Road of Development
James doesn’t sugarcoat the timeline. Building leadership takes years, not weeks.
“It doesn’t get developed overnight,” he says. “Over the course of my career, I look at the book lists I’ve put together, the training sessions, the experiences I’ve had. That knowledge base and skill base has grown over time.”
He’s refreshingly honest about where he started. “When I was 20 years old and just getting started, I didn’t know very much if I’m being really honest. I’m surprised I was sitting at some of the tables I was sitting at. Half luck, half skill, I guess.”
What Growth Actually Looks Like
But something shifted over the decades. The skill set grew, yes. More importantly, so did the hunger.
“What’s also grown is the desire to be better,” James explains. “The desire to figure out the systems, to see and articulate a vision, to even put it to paper so the entire world knows exactly what we’re going after.”
That phrase, “put it to paper,” carries more weight than it might seem. James has witnessed firsthand what happens when a leader moves vision from an abstract idea in their head to a written, shared declaration.
“When I started articulating what the vision is, understanding it, and even putting it to paper, those around me started rooting for me like no tomorrow,” he says. “They were trying to help in any way they possibly can. Employees became bought in and started moving in ways I didn’t even think possible.”
The results compound over time. As James has pursued growth, the people around him have responded with increasing energy and commitment. “People follow harder. Teams engage deeper.”
Running With Your Horses
One of James’s favorite expressions captures his philosophy on leading strong teams: “Run with your horses.”
“Figure out who your best leaders are in your organization, but also figure out how you move with them,” he explains. “It’s about having the strength, the confidence, the knowledge, and the willingness to teach and coach and keep moving with the people who are your horses.”
This isn’t about sitting in an office and delegating. It’s about moving alongside your best people. Teaching them. Coaching them. Growing with them — making the shift from doer to leader that changes everything.
And it connects directly to what James sees as the hardest part of leadership: accountability.
The Guts to Hold the Line
James doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable truth about why many leaders stall. They can cast vision. They can build systems. They can inspire a room. But they can’t hold people accountable.
“It’s the guts to hold accountability in the organization so that the mission and vision actually get accomplished,” he says. “You can articulate a beautiful vision and build great systems, but without the courage to hold people, and yourself, accountable to executing on that, nothing moves forward.”
He calls it “guts” for a reason. Accountability requires difficult conversations. It means confronting underperformance. It demands that you hold yourself to the same standard you set for others.
“That’s where a lot of leaders fall short,” James admits. Gallup’s research confirms this — creating accountability is the lowest-rated competency among leaders, and less than half report they are outstanding at holding everyone responsible for delivering exceptional performance.
When he breaks down what leadership as a learned behavior actually contains, accountability sits right at the center. The full framework includes the confidence and strength in who you are and what you’re building, the ability to articulate your vision and mission, the ability to form a group of people inside a functional system that moves toward that vision, and the guts to hold accountability so the mission gets accomplished.
Every single one of those components can be learned. Every single one takes practice. None of them require you to be born with a special gift.
A Message for the Owner Who Doesn’t Feel Like a Leader
If you’re a business owner who has never seen yourself as a “natural leader,” James has a direct message for you.
“It starts with self-awareness, then building systems, then articulating vision, and then having the guts to hold accountability,” he says. “It’s a journey, and it doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen.”
Read the books. Attend the trainings. Seek the experiences. But most of all, cultivate the desire to grow. That desire, James has found, is what separates leaders who plateau from leaders who compound.
Leadership isn’t a magic trait handed out at birth. It’s a skill set built through honesty, effort, and courage. The leaders who change organizations, families, and communities aren’t the ones who were born knowing how to lead. They’re the ones who decided to learn.
The question isn’t whether you can become a leader. The question is whether you’re willing to start building.