For centuries we have been obsessed with leaders and with identifying the characteristics required for effective leadership. A core issue for some time has been, whether or not leadership should focus on personality or behaviour. This in turn has implications in terms of strategies for developing leadership capabilities.

Is leadership a natural born set of skills? If a leader possesses superior knowledge in his or her field coupled with academically acquired set of business skills and ‘common sense’, what ingredients are missing that set the exceptional leader apart from the pack? Is there really an emotional intelligence that complements and accentuates the leader’s tools chest?

The world’s top corporations share a key element in their success: a keen understanding of the value of top notch leadership. Until recently the concept of leadership was shrouded in a great deal of mystique leading to the common perception that somehow, certain individuals were just singled out for leadership. In other words, leaders were born to lead and the trick was to discover these “born leaders”. Fortunately today an enhanced understanding of educational and developmental psychology has helped to unravel many myths and suppositions about leadership.

However, the value of potential cannot be overlooked. Together, potential and training are a powerful combination in developing the inspirational leadership necessary to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing corporate world. A solid educational background is usually considered essential, although some corporate stars have come from surprising backgrounds. An example is Thomas Watson Jr of IBM who struggled to complete a high school education but nevertheless has achieved corporate stardom.

It also may be difficult to pick out students with the qualities for top leadership from test results alone. Factors such as participation in extramural activities such as sports, journalism, drama and music may provide clues about student’ achievements in non-academic areas. Such activities provide opportunities for learning about negotiation, teamwork and motivation.

In today’s competitive business environment inadequate leaders cannot be tolerated.

Creative, innovative and inspirational leadership is too precious a commodity and one that is increasingly recognized as the key to success. According to conventional wisdom in psychology, leadership is about influencing people to contribute to group goals. Although the preferred way to exert influence has changed with the times—command and control during the predictable days of industry, a more engaging and humanistic approach for the networked knowledge economy—the core assumption remains that leaders affect organizational performance by inspiring, supporting, and motivating followers through interpersonal influence.

By all accounts, Steven Jobs, the late CEO of Apple Inc., was a difficult person—intense, brutally candid, obsessively controlling, perfectionistic, volatile, and supremely arrogant. Jobs was known to reduce subordinates to tears, take credit for their ideas, curse them in public, throw epic tantrums, and yell at Board members. He even parked his Mercedes in handicapped spaces. Jobs divided the world into stark black-and-white categories; people, projects, and ideas were either “insanely great” or “total shit,” and sometimes both in the same day.

No one accused him of having high emotional intelligence, strong leader-member exchange relationships, or a considerate approach. Jobs simply did not fit the psychological profile of a good leader. Nonetheless, under his leadership, Apple became a highly profitable and deeply admired company. Jobs cofounded Apple in 1976 but was forced out in 1985 and was replaced by John Scully, a former PepsiCo executive, because the Board believed Scully’s more composed and conventional style was needed to lead the business from an exciting start-up to a mature corporation.

The leadership transition failed, and Jobs was brought back in 1997 when Apple’s stock was trading around $10 a share, the same price as when he departed. When Jobs announced his retirement 14 years later on August 24, 2011, Apple’s closing price was $376 a share, making it one of the most dramatic turnarounds of all time. How are we to resolve the incongruity between the fact that Jobs’ abrasive interpersonal style was the antithesis of the standard psychological model of effective leadership, yet under his leadership Apple was phenomenally successful?

Although it can be a complex challenge to isolate the reasons for the success or failure of a leader, we believe that the resolution to the Apple paradox is that leadership concerns more than interpersonal relations. In addition to being harsh and temperamental, Jobs was also a prolific inventor (his name is on over 100 patents) and a true visionary (he revolutionized six industries).

He was deeply involved in the business (Jobs weighed in on design, technology, portfolio, and customer decisions) and recruited some of the best talent in the world. His judgment on matters ranging from the biggest strategic questions to the tiniest design detail was widely admired as shrewd, prescient, and almost always correct. And his ability to focus himself, the Apple staff, and resources to execute with relentless discipline was legendary.

Researchers distinguished leadership in an organization from leadership of an organization. Leadership in an organization concerned interpersonal, face-to-face relations, whereas leadership of an organization concerned solving organizational problems such as adapting to environmental change or achieving internal control with systems of coordination and integration. The vast majority of leadership research concerned interpersonal influence, but argued that it was actually less common in real organizational life and less consequential compared to influencing strategy and operating systems.

• Osawe is a human resource practitioner