5 Steps to Better Leadership Charisma

August 15, 2012 5:56 am 0 comments Views:

Share this Article

  • TwitterTwitter
  • Facebook
  • DeliciousDelicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleuponStumble
  • RedditReddit
  • Follow Me on PinterestPinterest
  • Google+

Tags:

Author:

 brian evje

Source:

 inc.com

Charisma is not a substitute for genuine leadership. These five steps can help you develop, and blend, the two.

Leadership charisma and personal charisma are very different things. They both involve the same kinds of personal attributes-the ability to project confidence, the capacity to engage others, skill in articulating ideas, vision, and goals—which may explain why some leaders aim for one when they should be developing the other.

Personal charisma is centered on the individual, as is the case with celebrities. Leadership charisma exists when a leader is charismatic in the service of the organization, for a greater good, or a higher purpose.

While personal charismatic traits can help a leader, too much of a good thing becomes unhelpful. Leaders who concentrate on constantly influencing others, for instance, may reduce the motivation and ability of their people to stake out their own opinions.

Here are several things to consider when growing your own leadership charisma.

1. Ask yourself: Why?  The key to knowing which type of charisma you want to develop is rooted in your understanding of why you want to be more charismatic.  You must ask yourself, “Why do I want this?”  Do you crave attention, want validation, or are you trying to address some insecurity?  Do you want to be magnetic because you think that’s what a leader should be?  How does being more magnetic serve your leadership responsibilities?  How will this enable you to better serve the organization?  To better attend to your unique burden of being a leader?

2. You must be comfortable in your own skin. This is a broad encapsulation of the vital importance of knowing who you are as a leader, and why you are a leader, before you attempt to change your charismatic capabilities.  Your “skin” in this sense is everything from your personal values and drivers to the precise point you currently find yourself in your life’s journey.  Ask yourself, “What makes this leadership role at this time in my life the right role for me?  How have I prepared?  How will I continue to learn?”

Many leaders make the mistake of avoiding these difficult questions and instead focus on external characteristics of charisma. They simply think, “I need to be more persuasive when interacting with my direct reports,” and then go nuts trying to be more persuasive. Nobody likes that. Ungrounded charisma is abrasive and troubling.  (I’ll write about the dangers of charisma in the final installment of this series.)  If you do not first determine how you fit into your own skin, it will be painfully obvious.

3. You must be comfortable in your own body.  Effective charismatic leaders have a sense of their physical selves and an ease about how they show up in front of their teams.  This is not to say you have be Baryshnikov. But many of the attributes of charisma are expressed physically, and a leader must learn how to literally embody charisma.

How do you physically interact with people?  What are you physically aware of when you engage in one-on-one conversations, among a small group, in front of a large audience?  How do you modulate your voice, your listening, and your attention?  How do you non-verbally communicate your engagement with others?  How do you invite others to engage with you?  While the research is not universally conclusive, it is clear that the physical, unspoken interactions between people are overwhelmingly influential in human relationships.  Leaders who do not work on how they “show up” do so at their peril.

4. Practice, ideally with a Coach.  The attributes of charisma contain tangible and intangible elements – and working with a trusted Coach provides a framework for working on both these elements. You need to have an outside perspective on your physical behavior to learn about your internal thought process.

For example, if you want to work on a tangible element of charisma such as public speaking, you must connect the physical work of evolving your voice with the psychological work of why the work matters to you.  The recent film about Margaret Thatcher provides an excellent dramatization of a leader taking lessons to improve the tenor and tone of her voice and her ability to speak in public.  As a result of this work on her physical voice, Thatcher discovered her “internal leadership voice” that was grounded in her personal convictions.  It is a defining moment in her leadership development – and the result of practice.

5. Practice in a safe place.  Too many leaders think they can wing it when it comes to developing their leadership.  They try new things in front of their teams without first practicing, sometimes without much forethought. Bad idea. Performing well in the moment depends on practicing before the moment.

Practicing in private with a coach provides an opportunity for clarity on your intent, and allows for trial-and-error.  While mistakes in public are inevitable and necessary, many mistakes are made much more usefully in private.

The good news is that if you want to practice leadership charisma, a little goes a long way. You are not endeavoring to call attention to yourself – you are developing new capabilities because your role requires you to shift your focus slightly and exercise these attributes.  You don’t have to become someone else or transform yourself. Just find the connection to your organization that will allow you to stretch yourself.

As noted in a recent article on Presidential leadership in The Atlantic, “Not even FDR was FDR at the start.”  He practiced, he learned, and he developed genuine leadership charisma.  You can too.

By Brian Evje, from: http://www.inc.com/brian-evje/five-steps-to-better-leadership-charisma.html?nav=next

Brian Evje: Brian is a management consultant with the organizational effectiveness practice of Slalom Consulting and an advisory board member ofAstia, a global not-for-profit dedicated to increasing women’s participation in high-growth businesses.

Leave a Reply



× six = 30

Latest News

  • EPM Finance Management Risk Management Stocks Perform Better If Women Are On Company Boards

    Stocks Perform Better If Women Are On Company Boards

    In the U.S., 36 percent of companies still have no women on their boards of directors, according to a report by researcher GMI Ratings on gender diversity released today. The average corporate board has about nine members.

    “Multiple academic studies have concluded that diverse corporate boards exercise more diligent oversight,” Michelle Lamb, author the study, said in a report. “They have better attendance records than homogeneous boards, and they invest more effort in auditing when the complexity of the business warrants heightened scrutiny.”

    Read more →
  • Careers EPM FYI Management Top Lists 7 Best Practices To Get More Creative

    7 Best Practices To Get More Creative

    “Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything.” ~George Lois

    Continuing our series on How to Be More Creative, here are another 7 techniques for breaking through a creative block in order to create innovative solutions to your organization’s challenges.

    Read more →
  • Careers Management Strategy 5 Steps to Better Leadership Charisma

    5 Steps to Better Leadership Charisma

    Charisma is not a substitute for genuine leadership. These five steps can help you develop, and blend, the two.

    Leadership charisma and personal charisma are very different things. They both involve the same kinds of personal attributes-the ability to project confidence, the capacity to engage others, skill in articulating ideas, vision, and goals—which may explain why some leaders aim for one when they should be developing the other.

    Personal charisma is centered on the individual, as is the case with celebrities. Leadership charisma exists when a leader is charismatic in the service of the organization, for a greater good, or a higher purpose.

    While personal charismatic traits can help a leader, too much of a good thing becomes unhelpful. Leaders who concentrate on constantly influencing others, for instance, may reduce the motivation and ability of their people to stake out their own opinions.

    Here are several things to consider when growing your own leadership charisma.

    Read more →
  • Biz Intelligence EPM Management Strategy How to Boost Your Medal Count in Seven Easy Steps

    How to Boost Your Medal Count in Seven Easy Steps

    What do the Olympics and the global economy have in common?

    Many times, the teams that focus on their strategy, prioritize goals, and have the resources to focus on infrastructure, training, and process, are the ones which win the most medals.

    Read more →
  • Biz Intelligence EPM Management Analytics and Big Data – Press Pause on the Stairmaster

    Analytics and Big Data – Press Pause on the Stairmaster

    Our lives have become hectic.

    We are working harder and longer. We talk about life balance, but for so many of us we continue to have imbalance. Every once in a while we need to step back, press the “pause” button on the Stairmaster exercise machine, take some deep breaths, and reflect on just what the heck is going on. I’d like to reflect with you my take on what is driving the accelerating interest in analytics and Big Data.

    Read more →
  • EPM FYI Management Marketing and Sales Analytics Top Lists How To Be Happy At Work

    How To Be Happy At Work

    If you’re unhappy at work-or anywhere else, for that matter-it’s because you’ve made yourself unhappy. There’s an easy way to change that.

    Let me start off with a little story.

    I once knew a saleswoman–young, divorced–who got a diagnosis of breast cancer. She had to work and raise two kids while fighting the cancer. Even so, she managed to be happy at work, noticeably happier than her co-workers. In fact, she not only won her battle with cancer but subsequently became one of the top salespeople at Bristol Myers.

    She was not, as it happens, naturally cheerful. Quite the contrary. When she started full-time work, she was frequently depressed. But she turned it around, using the techniques I’m going to provide you in this column.

    Read more →
  • Careers EPM Featured Management Strategy Do Less (or, Why Managers Should Stop Micromanaging and Trust Their Employees)

    Do Less (or, Why Managers Should Stop Micromanaging and Trust Their Employees)

    In looking at the great leaders of history—whether they are political leaders like Julius Caesar or business leaders like Steven P. Jobs—many people probably assume that they must have taken a particularly active role in running their organizations. Caesar, after all, personally led his troops into Gaul, and Jobs was famous for checking the design of even the smallest inner workings of every product at Apple.

    “Most leaders do too much,” Murnighan says. “And when they do, they’re seen as micromanagers.”

    Read more →
  • Biz Intelligence EPM Featured Marketing and Sales Analytics A Favorable Product Mix Caused Us To Miss Our Forecast On The Upside, Said No One Ever

    ‘A Favorable Product Mix Caused Us To Miss Our Forecast On The Upside,’ Said No One Ever

    What type of data do our brains need to evaluate one of the most important aspects of business planning, ie The Forecast?

    ———————————————————————————————————————-

    As leaders and managers of human beings with million year-old brain structures, as part of our managerial toolkit we need to keep ourselves knowledgeable about psychology and the cognitive science of how people make decisions. You have undoubtedly read about how innately bad we are at making certain types of decisions, especially those involving risk, probabilities and shifting time horizons.

    Part of the reason for this difficulty is the structure and function of our three-layered brain. The complexity and size of the neocortex, especially the pre-frontal cortex, is a very recent evolutionary development. Prior to this development, our mammalian ancestors still made decisions, but they did so relying heavily on the more intuitive, emotional limbic layer. It would be fairly accurate to say that our emotions are simply a different way to make a decision. It’s quick, can still be trained by experience and learning, and can be wired directly into rapid motor responses that most likely saved our ancestors lives countless times, who faced more binary decisions than probabilistic ones. Gut-feel is really “brain-feel”.

    Read more →