Think top executives have to have charisma? Think again.
When you read the business press, it’s easy to get the impression that all you need to do to make your company great is add a charismatic CEO. Find the next Steve Jobs, Jack Welch or Phil Knight and you’re halfway home. And maybe you would be — if you happened to sign that one-in-a-million leader.
The problem is that, among charismatic executives, for every Steve Jobs, there is at least one Dick Fuld — maybe more. Persuasive and strong-minded, Fuld presided over the downfall of Lehman Brothers. Nor is Fuld alone: Six out of 18 of Germany’s most recent winners of the title “Manager of the Year” were responsible for dramatic missteps, including Daimler’s disastrous acquisition of Chrysler Corp. under CEO Jürgen Schrempp. That raises a question: do charismatic business leaders typically outperform their more ordinary counterparts over the long run?
The simple answer is no. In a study of 100-year-old European corporations, leaders of the higher-performing companies were often not charismatic — and were, in fact, less likely to be charismatic than the leaders of the lower-performing companies. The problem with charismatic leaders is that exceptional powers of persuasion make it easy for them to overcome resistance and opposition to their chosen course of action. If your company is heading in the right direction, a charismatic leader will get you there faster. Unfortunately, if you’re heading in the wrong direction, charisma will also get you there faster.
5 Comments On: Why Good Leaders Don’t Need Charisma
How do you measure charisma?
Mait,
thanks for this question. Our work uses cases studies and therefore we do not measure charisma. Which does not mean that we have not thought about the concept carefully. In our article we follow the famous German sociologist Max Weber and see charismatic superstars as ‘super-humans’ who have the seductive ability to turn employees into devoted followers.
In The Theory of Social and Economic Organization the German Sociologist Max Weber defined charisma the following way: Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.
Christian Stadler
good issues, something to think about.
Attempts to measure charisma do exist:
By Alex “Sandy” Pentland (MIT):
http://hbr.org/2010/01/defend-your-research-we-can-measure-the-power-of-charisma/ar/1
By Kenneth J. Levine (University of Tennessee), Robert A. Muenchen
(University of Tennessee), Abby M. Brooks (Georgia Southern University):
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03637751.2010.499368
Often times people confused a good speaker/motivator with a good leader.
However in this article, the definition of a good leader seem to be a bit too narrow as they refer to the “intelligent conservatism”, which they seem to paint as mere traditionist.