Does a leader have to have charisma?
You ask an age-old question that never seems to lose relevance. When we hear your question on the road, there’s often some panic mixed in since the person asking has usually been accused of getting ahead on sheer personality or falling behind due to a lack of it. Indeed, almost everyone wonders at some point in his or her career how big a role charisma plays in success. So how big is it? In the short term, very. In the long term, very again—but not alone.
Now, we’re obviously not talking here about “bad” charisma, exuded without brains, vision, and character. That trait is useless, and even dangerous. In business, wow personalities with less-than-wow minds are called empty suits for good reason. Too many of these individuals manage to ho-ho-ho their way to the top, even to the ceo’s office, but most self-destruct after looking great for a couple of years while achieving little. On a larger scale, darkly charismatic leaders have the power to wreck lives and nations. And even though history warns us of their dangers, these types persistently emerge. Witness the recent hate speech by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at the U.N. He's a charismatic leader--too bad!
But good charismatic leaders are everywhere, too, leading with magnetism plus integrity and intelligence. And for them, charisma just makes the job a whole lot easier. Why? Because leaders have always had to energize their people.But in today’s fiercely competitive global economy, they need to energize them more than ever. They have to pump up their people to tackle unscalable heights and make them understand why change is constantly necessary, passionately explaining what’s in it for the company–and employees. All that can be done without charisma, using reasoning instead, but that approach takes a lot more of what global companies don’t have anymore: time.
There are, of course, leaders who succeed without charisma. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has won legions of followers by the depth of his thinking. But much more commonly, you find smart, capable people stalled because they lack the innate ability to win hearts and minds. Yes, innate, because charisma, for better or worse, seems to be inborn. It can’t really be trained into someone, and it certainly can’t be faked for long. So where does that leave people without it? Definitely not off the leadership track—just in a slower, more challenging lane.
This question and answer originally appeared in Business Week magazine on October 16, 2006.
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