Becoming your most charismatic self

strategy+business, November 27, 2019

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Klaus Vedfelt

Peter Drucker, my favorite managerial touchstone, didn’t think much of leadership charisma. You can almost hear him grinding his teeth as he describes, in his 1992 book, Managing for the Future, being asked to run a seminar on “how one acquires charisma” by a vice president of HR at a big bank.

It’s the prelude to a bit of a rant. “History knows no more charismatic leaders than [the 20th] century’s triad of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao — the misleaders who inflicted as much evil and suffering on humanity as have ever been recorded,” Drucker fumes. “But effective leadership doesn’t depend on charisma. Dwight Eisenhower, [former Secretary of State] George Marshall, and Harry Truman were singularly effective leaders, yet none possessed any more charisma than a dead mackerel.”

Drucker’s antipathy toward charisma is understandable. An Austrian working in Germany, he witnessed the rise of Adolf Hitler, and he was forced to flee to London a few months after Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933. But Drucker may have gotten this one wrong: He seems to be conflating the effects of charisma with the ends to which it is applied.

It appears, upon further reflection, that charisma does contribute to leadership effectiveness. “A meta-analysis of data spanning close to a quarter of a century has shown that charismatic leaders not only possess an ability to inspire their troops to ever higher levels of performance, but also simultaneously embed deeper levels of commitment in their psyche,” report academics Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks in their book, Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why.

Sounds promising. But what if a leader indeed possesses no more charisma than a dead mackerel? Can it be cultivated? Read the rest here