[Ninja_Bait]

Our core leadership is student-elected, but that group of leaders does pick people for auxiliary leadership roles. Our main deciding factors are usually maturity, devotion and experience.

However, I do like Davis's story, and it opens the opportunity to paraphrase a bully quote from our friend TR: While some are born leaders, others have leadership thrust upon them. It's kind of hard to explain this, because it requires a lot of intuition and insight about your team. The idea is that there is someone who doesn't look like leadership material - they rarely take charge, they might be very quiet or inexperienced - but once they're in a leadership position they step up, going far beyond what you expected. You have to look closely to find these people, but oftentimes they're worth the work.

Our current Marketing president started out as a programmer, but through chance he ended up in charge of building our 2009 website, and is now one of our best presidents ever. The old captain who recruited him to work on the site probably had no intention of finding a president, but she did anyway.

Good luck!