Linking People, Strategy and Performance to Engagement and Training: "Revolutionary Research from Global Corporations"
Profiles International (PI) identified in new research in January 2011, and published in a book found on Amazon.com, entitled "Leadership Charisma", that Charisma, and Leadership Charisma in particular, is behavior based. Thus it is learn-able, can be coached, developed, and it can be trained. This is also supported and discussed by a recent article by Jessica Stillman entitled: "Charm 101: Charisma can be Taught". (The article can be found below).
PI's research was based on over 40,000 Managers and 400,000 employees world-wide, and it seems that more people and companies are becoming convinced of this fact, which before had only been debated without hard facts and research.
Why is Charisma important? Because Charismatic Leaders have been documented in numerous studies in the past, to have companies and teams that deliver even higher profitability and even more extraordinary products, than those with just good Leadership. This is accomplished through heightened "engagement".
Therefore, there is a cost benefit to hiring, or even more so now, developing and/or training managers to not only be good Leaders, but to become Charismatic Leaders. The ROI will easily justify training costs to develop Leadership Charisma in Managers!
So what are you and your HR team waiting for? Isn't it best to start now in developing even more effective Leaders especially grooming potential CEOs and Senior Executives? The choice is yours, but it is no longer a point to debate, but only a point to implement.
Charm 101: Charisma Can Be Taught
With the death of Steve Jobs, the media's attention has turned to his legacy as a business leader and his ability to inspire teams to create extraordinary products. The man, in short, may have been prickly but he was also extremely charismatic.Where does that ability to spellbind others to your cause come from? His biographer plumbed Jobs' past for answers, but recently psychologists took a more hands-on approach to the origins of charisma, testing whether this elusive and valuable quality can be explicitly taught.
Turns out, the answer appears to be yes. Researchers out of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland decided to see if charisma boot camp would be effective, conducting 360-degree evaluations of 34 managers and then sending them to a three-month charisma training course where they learned what the researchers dubbed CLTs or charismatic leader tactics. These include verbal techniques such as:
- Framing through metaphor
- Stories and anecdotes
- Demonstrating moral conviction
- Sharing the sentiments of the collective
- Setting high expectations
- Communicating confidence
- Using rhetorical devices such as contrasts, lists, and rhetorical questions
To double check the results, the researchers also asked 41 MBA students to give the same speech before and after undergoing charisma training. After learning to master their CLTs, the MBA candidates were rated more trustworthy, competent, influential, and moving when they gave their speech.
There are caveats for potential student of charisma. The researchers warn that a significant time commitment is need to improve charisma -- remember their course lasted three months, not a matter of hours. And it's also likely that when a student starts actively attempting to become more charismatic, their performance may get worse before it gets better as their attempts to appear charismatic often come off as stilted and stereotypical at first, leading to more laughs than loyalty.
Still, for the charisma challenged, the research shows that more traits that we think of as inborn are actually teachable. That's good news for those who need to be more charismatic to advance in their careers and perhaps also a call to action for others who have given up on gaining leadership skills because they thought they simply lacked the knack.
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