There's something fishy about being a leader when things go swimmingly Leadership is an innate quality and leaders "are born, not made," says a new study ... of fish. The Cambridge University study of stickleback fish - a group of foraging species known to have bold and shy individuals - found groups tend to perform better with a combination of willing followers and strong leaders. But incentives, like higher salaries for humans, can cause natural followers to become leaders. The study predicted trouble in animal social groups - and also human ones - when natural roles are reversed. To probe whether natural followers can be turned into leaders and vice versa, the research team studied the fish in large laboratory tanks. Leaders were more prone to leave the deep, "safe" area of a tank and travel through "risky," shallow waters to get to a feeding station. The fish were then divided into pairs, each with one bold and one shy member, the team wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In one experiment, the fish were rewarded with food for displaying their natural behaviour - the leader for initiating a trip and the follower for trailing behind. In a second, they were rewarded for role reversal - the shy fish for each time it initiated a foraging trip and the bolder one for following. "Our prediction was that bold individuals would perform poorly when forced to adopt the role of follower, considering that they are less responsive to other individuals' behaviour," said study co-author Shinnosuke Nakayama of the University of Cambridge's zoology department. The opposite turned out to be true: leader fish were much quicker to adopt a follower role than the other way round.