Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Carlyle’s Heroes
- Weber on charisma
- Lewin’s climate studies
- Fiedler’s contingency
- Burns on transforming leadership
- Big Five leader studies
- Mandela’s presidency begins
- Sirleaf’s election
- Critical leadership studies
- Remote-work coordination
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Does this atlas rank groups by IQ, race or nation?
No. Pathways and evidence stay individual. Scores are browsing aids — never group biological or racial ranks.
Did psychology find a leader trait?
Small average correlations with extraversion and some other Big Five pieces. Not a destiny profile. Evidence is rated modest because of situation and halo.
What is the great-man problem?
Carlyle-style history treats outcomes as a soul. Structural and follower work (and ordinary luck) disappear.
Can schools teach leadership?
They can teach facilitation, argument, and ethics. A prefect badge is not identification.
Is charisma the talent?
Weber’s word is a social relation, not a glow. It can be trained as rhetoric and can be a false positive.
Do women lead differently by nature?
This page will not run essentialist leadership-sex stories. Access and stereotype explain much of the historic file.
Carlyle made leadership a soul. Armies and churches already had schools for it. Twentieth-century industrial psychology tried to test it and kept bumping into situations.
The timeline below follows dated arguments and institutions, not a national myth of genius and not a group ranking.
Origin
19th c. great-man to 20th c. org psych · Europe / US business schools — Carlyle made leadership a soul. Armies and churches already had schools for it. Twentieth-century industrial psychology tried to test it and kept bumping into situations.
Timeline
- Carlyle’s Heroes
The great-man essay that still infects business books.
- Weber on charisma
A sociological relation, later flattened into a glow.
- Lewin’s climate studies
Autocratic/democratic/laissez-faire as experimental climates — dated, still a teaching fossil.
- Fiedler’s contingency
Effectiveness depends on the match of style and situation.
- Burns on transforming leadership
A moralised contrast with transactional — influential and soft as measurement.
- Big Five leader studies
Modest trait correlations, lots of halo.
- Mandela’s presidency begins
A public file of coalition after prison — situation plus character talk.
- Sirleaf’s election
A postwar reconstruction leadership file in Liberia.
- Critical leadership studies
Followers, gender, colonial leftovers as the missing variables.
- Remote-work coordination
A new situation that broke some charisma theatres.
Eras
- Great man — Carlyle — Soul as cause.
- Charisma sociology — Weber — Relation, not glow.
- Climate experiments — Lewin — A classroom fossil.
- Contingency — Fiedler — Match the situation.
- Critical / follower — 2000s — The other half of the file.
Shifts
- From soul to situation 1967– — Fiedler’s cut.
- From man to many 1990s– — Sirleaf, Merkel, Ardern as ordinary syllabus, not tokens.
- From stage to distributed 2020s — Remote coordination weakens some theatres.
Leadership talent: keep the dates visible. Names of talents are younger than the work they try to capture.
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