Can You Teach Someone to Lead?

I've spent years watching people debate whether leadership is born or made. The question comes up in boardrooms, classrooms, and LinkedIn comment sections with predictable regularity.

Here's what I've learned: we're asking the wrong question.

The real question is not whether leadership can be taught. It's whether it can be learned and those are two very different things.

The Paradox Nobody Talks About

Scholar Donald Schon nailed it when he said leadership is "learnable but cannot be taught." That sounds like wordplay until you understand what he means.

You can sit in a classroom and learn every framework. Porter's Five Forces. Situational Leadership. The Balanced Scorecard. You can memorize them, ace the exam, and still have no idea how to actually lead when the pressure hits.

Because leadership develops in crucibles, not classrooms.

The data backs this up. Research shows that 86% of educational leaders agree leadership can be taught but they emphasize three pathways: formal education, mentorship, and leadership experience. Notice what's missing from that list? Pure theory.

The most effective approach blends all three. You need the frameworks to organize your thinking. You need the mentors to show you what good looks like. And you need the real-world experience to test everything against reality.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Let's talk about entrepreneurship education specifically, because the data here is clearer than most leadership discussions.

A study of 514 college students across 14 Chinese universities found something interesting. Both traditional classroom teaching and extracurricular activities increased entrepreneurial intention. But students who participated in action learning methods showed significantly higher entrepreneurial intentions than those who only sat in lectures.

Translation: doing beats listening.

China has gone all-in on this approach. By 2018, they offered over 28,000 entrepreneurship courses at public universities, employed 27,000 full-time teachers, and built 13,000 on-campus practice platforms. That's not just teaching entrepreneurship it's creating an ecosystem where people can learn by doing.

And it works. A longitudinal study tracking over 17,000 alumni from 1943 to 2017 found that as universities introduced entrepreneurial ecosystem elements, the probability of founding a business before graduation increased with each decade. Structured educational strategies produced measurable increases in alumni entrepreneurship rates.

The Gap Between Teaching and Learning

Here's where most programs fail: they teach the easy stuff and skip the hard stuff.

A 2025 European report on entrepreneurship education across 38 education systems found that schools emphasize financial literacy and basic business operations. Good. But they underplay higher-order abilities like vision, spotting opportunities, and coping with uncertainty and risk.

Those are exactly the skills that matter most.

You can teach someone to read a balance sheet. You can teach them to write a business plan. But can you teach them to see an opportunity where others see chaos? Can you teach them to make decisions when the data is incomplete and the stakes are high?

Maybe. But not in a lecture hall.

The India model offers a better approach. The Global Education & Leadership Foundation deployed its SKILLD curriculum, developed with Harvard and Columbia, across 3,000 schools, reaching 5 million students. The program uses gamified, experiential modules and year-long civic projects.

The results speak for themselves. Alumni include deep-tech entrepreneurs in sustainable materials and founders of renewable energy companies. These aren't people who memorized frameworks. They're people who learned to apply them in messy, real-world situations.

What Actually Works

If you want to develop leaders, whether in business, entrepreneurship, or any other domain, here's what the evidence suggests:

Start with self-awareness. You can't lead others if you don't understand yourself. This means honest reflection on your strengths, weaknesses, and decision patterns. Not the sanitized version you put on LinkedIn but the real version.

Build through experience. Give people real problems with real consequences. Let them fail. Then help them extract the lessons. This is where mentorship becomes critical, not to prevent failure, but to accelerate learning from it.

Teach pattern recognition. The best leaders I know don't have more answers. They have better questions. They've seen enough situations to recognize patterns and adapt their approach accordingly. You develop this through volume, lots of reps in different contexts.

Create feedback loops. Students who receive entrepreneurship education find more satisfying jobs, get promoted faster, and enjoy better working environments. Why? Because they've learned to identify opportunities and make better decisions. But that only happens when education includes real-time feedback on real decisions.

The Bottom Line

Can you teach entrepreneurship and leadership? Yes, but only if you redefine what "teaching" means.

If teaching means transferring information, you'll create people who can talk about leadership but not practice it. If teaching means creating environments where people can learn through structured experience, reflection, and skilled guidance, you'll develop actual leaders.

The gap between strategy and practice is real. Closing it requires more than coursework. It requires crucibles.

So the next time someone asks whether leadership can be taught, ask them what they mean by "taught." Because the answer depends entirely on how you approach the question.

Leadership is learnable. But it cannot be taught in the traditional sense. It must be developed through a combination of frameworks, experience, reflection, and feedback.

The countries and institutions that understand this distinction are producing the next generation of leaders. The ones that don't are producing people with impressive credentials and limited impact.

Choose your approach accordingly.