Born, Not Made: The Genetics of Leadership
What the genetics of bipolarity and leadership have in common
When I went to college the college's unofficial motto was “leaders in the making.”The joke was, of course, given the role of its alumni billionaires Henry Kravis and George Roberts of Barbarians at the Gate fame, it was leaders on the make. Too true. Many of my classmates took their positions in middle management mediocrity. I oftentimes wish I had never gone. Round pegs and square holes.
For whatever reason I have always had strong leadership tendencies. I run my own companies — Traitwell — and do my own stunts. Others follow me. Or don’t. I elicit strong emotions everywhere I go.
No, I do not believe that leaders are made but I do think they might be revealed by circumstance. And I know they carry a burden. As with so much in life, so, too, with leadership. There are always trade offs. Many of the things we say we want come with it another problem altogether. (There’s a saying a friend grew up with that this made me think of, “Don’t make the right choices, make your choices right.” Same can be said for leaders. They make their choices work.)
Are leaders more depressed? Churchill reportedly called it the “black dog” (though my friend Doug Urbanksi, who produced Darkest Hour starring his friend, Gary Oldman, has his doubts on Churchill’s depression.)
Lincoln’s melancholy was legendary.
My time in business has more or less forced me to the view that many business leaders are also what has charitably been called as neuroatypical. There’s even a book about it called The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America, which came out in paperback in 2011.
Here’s the blurb:
Why is America so rich and powerful? The answer lies in our genes, according to psychologist John Gartner.
Hypomania, a genetically based mild form of mania, endows many of us with unusual energy, creativity, enthusiasm, and a propensity for taking risks. America has an extraordinarily high number of hypomanics—grandiose types who leap on every wacky idea that occurs to them, utterly convinced it will change the world. Market bubbles and ill-considered messianic crusades can be the downside. But there is an enormous upside in terms of spectacular entrepreneurial zeal, drive for innovation, and material success. Americans may have a lot of crazy ideas, but some of them lead to brilliant inventions.
Why is America so hypomanic? It is populated primarily by immigrants. This self-selection process is the boldest natural experiment ever conducted. Those who had the will, optimism, and daring to take the leap into the unknown have passed those traits on to their descendants.
A new study detailed in Genome Web makes clear that I might have been on to something.
Holding a leadership position correlates with nine genetic loci, including ones previously linked to intelligence and bipolar disorder risk, a new genome-wide association study has found.
Researchers from the National University of Singapore conducted a genome-wide association study of leadership using UK Biobank data and related supervisory or managerial job data. Twin studies have hinted that holding a leadership role could be partially heritable, and other studies have both suggested that there are both health benefits as well as health costs associated with holding leadership roles.
As they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, the researchers identified a handful of genetic loci associated with having a leadership role or managerial position, including ones that are also linked to bipolar disorder, intelligence, and schizophrenia. The researchers additionally noted genetic correlations between leadership roles and positive indicators of well-being, but also negative indicators like bipolar disorder and alcohol consumption, as well as shortened longevity, cardiovascular disease, and body-mass index.
"Our findings offer insights into the biological underpinnings of leadership, revealing top loci overlapping with those for mental health traits and the pervasive polygenity of work-related variables," senior author Qiao Fan from Duke-NUS Medical School and her colleagues wrote in their paper
Using job code data included in the UK Biobank dataset, the researchers classified participants as leaders or non-leaders based on whether their jobs entailed supervising others and managing people, resources, or tasks. Within their dataset, they identified 42,998 leaders and 205,642 non-leaders, as well as estimated for a subset of their cohort the level of management demands they shouldered. In general, individuals holding leadership positions were more educated and had a higher household income than non-leaders.
Through their genome-wide association study, the researchers uncovered nine signals associated with leadership or management demands, which they replicated in three independent datasets. The most significant loci — across all cohorts — fell in an intergenic region on chromosome 6 between miR2113 and POU3F2. This loci, the researchers noted, had previously been linked to educational attainment and intelligence, but also to bipolar disorder. Another top loci, rs4977839-A, was particularly linked to management demands and also was linked to bipolar disorder risk.
Other loci in KLF5 and near ZSWIM6 were also associated with leadership, both of which have previously been implicated in schizophrenia.
Meanwhile, Fan and her colleagues examined genetic correlations between leadership and 10 traits thought to correlate with it, such as risk tolerance, educational attainment, and height. Leadership, they found, has significant genetic correlations with risk tolerance, neuroticism, intelligence, and height, as well as with extraversion.
They likewise examined genetic correlation between leadership and measures of wellbeing to find positive genetic correlations between leadership and subjective well-being, overall health rating, exercise, and negative correlations with symptoms of depression, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, triglycerides.
But they also found positive genetic correlations between leadership and bipolar disorder and alcohol intake frequency, both indicators of low wellbeing.
Accounting for socioeconomic factors weakened many of the genetic correlations between leadership and measures of well-being, but the correlations between leadership and bipolar disorder risk and alcohol intake frequency held. By further investigating these ties, the researchers found that bipolar disorder could have similar underlying biological mechanisms as educational attainment and leadership but not income.
Elon Musk once noted his own tendencies toward bipolar, pointing out the “terrible lows” and “unrelenting stress.”
There’s often a lot of talk by the venture capitalist community about founders and how they need to be a certain way — the “cult of the founder.” Maybe VCs should just offer would be founders a Traitwell.com genetics test?
The best work gets done by teams and every real founder admits that.
To be sure I suspect a lot of leaders are bipolar, way more than we would care to admit, and these traits are especially essential in times of great peril.
I myself have a mild tendency toward schizophrenia — something long thought to correlate with higher intelligence. Indeed high IQ may well be protective against schizophrenia’s worst aspects.
Yet we all know my real superior power comes from having red hair. Or maybe it was just my paleness?
Here’s Nature from 2019.
About 1–2% of people of European origin have red hair. Especially female redheads are known to suffer higher pain sensitivity and higher incidence of some disorders, including skin cancer, Parkinson’s disease and endometriosis. Recently, an explorative study performed on 7,000 subjects showed that both male and female redheads score worse on many health-related variables and express a higher incidence of cancer. Here, we ran the preregistered study on a population of 4,117 subjects who took part in an anonymous electronic survey. We confirmed that the intensity of hair redness negatively correlated with physical health, mental health, fecundity and sexual desire, and positively with the number of kinds of drugs prescribed by a doctor currently taken, and with reported symptoms of impaired mental health. It also positively correlated with certain neuropsychiatric disorders, most strongly with learning disabilities disorder and phobic disorder in men and general anxiety disorder in women. However, most of these associations disappeared when the darkness of skin was included in the models, suggesting that skin fairness, not hair redness, is responsible for the associations. We discussed two possible explanations for the observed pattern, the first based on vitamin D deficiency due to the avoidance of sunbathing by subjects with sensitive skin, including some redheads, and second based on folic acid depletion in fair skinned subjects, again including some (a different subpopulation of) redheads. It must be emphasized, however, that both of these explanations are only hypothetical as no data on the concentration of vitamin D or folic acid are available for our subjects. Our results, as well as the conclusions of current reviews, suggest that the new empirical studies on the concentration of vitamin D and folic acids in relation to skin and hair pigmentation are urgently needed.
Just accept your red headed overlords! No, not Chuck Norris. Nor Prince Harry or even Amy Adams. I’m referring to the Red Queen herself.