Charisma in Leaders is a Dangerous Thing.

Students of leadership theory know about traits-based approaches.  Traits are a basic attempt to address the question of what good leadership is.  I believe people tend to form a picture in their minds of good leaders by picking famous ones.  Famous leaders are usually charismatic.

So it is no surprise that most people think charisma is required for effective leadership.  I did an informal survey to check.  I asked 100 people (63 women and 37 men) to agree or disagree with this statement: “Charisma is required for effective leadership.”  The results:

All Respondents:

Strongly Agree	Agree	Neutral	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
20.00%	54.00%	8.00%	16.00%	2.00%

Women (63):

Strongly Agree	Agree	Neutral	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
20.63%	53.97%	7.94%	14.29%	3.17%

Men (37):

Strongly Agree	Agree	Neutral	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
18.92%	54.05%	8.11%	18.92%	0.00%

College Graduates (66):

Strongly Agree	Agree	Neutral	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
21.21%	51.52%	9.09%	15.15%	3.03%

Again, not surprising; but there is a problem.  Research shows that charisma is not required, and can in fact be a dangerous.  The biggest issue in my mind is Charisma is hard to quantify for an individual leader, and even if it is not, it is nearly impossible to quantify its impact on particular results.  Before we get into that let’s define the terms.

Charisma is assessment that the leader has mystical in-born qualities to the extent that followers become disciples.  This has nothing to do with the morality of outcomes.  But notice charisma is ascribed by followers to the leader.  More on that later.

Effective Leadership is the attainment of the organization’s goals to broad satisfaction of its stakeholders.  Notice I do not say all stakeholders; only those who support the organization’s goals.  Thus we are not making value judgements about the morality or ethics of the results.

The Trait Theory of Leadership attempts to establish the set of characteristics of effective leaders.  Since the thirties various studies have listed different groups of traits, and presented evidence on the positive impact or need for charisma.  Few have looked at how charisma was ascribed or even measured until recently.  Pentland (2010) demonstrates measurements for charisma.  But little work has been done to show whether results were because of charisma, or if good results generated the assessment of charisma in retrospect.  But there has been substantial history showing charisma has a positive effect on “rallying the troops” in times of urgency.

At the same time, there is a growing body of research warning against the “hero bias,” or our willingness to believe in attractive people (Yukl, 1999).  Think of leaders like Pol Pot, or Hitler or “hot criminal” Jeremy Meeks, a violent felon who is getting a second chance because of his looks.  Ugly felons won’t get that attention.

So this emphasis on charisma obviously has problems.  Michael Frenzel, the CEO of TUI-AG took a thriving steel business and turned it into a failed travel company because he thought the expertise in shipping would translate.  Nobody told him it was a bad idea.  Dick Fuld destroyed Lehman Brothers by cajoling his sales personnel to break the law.

Charisma can create all kinds of problems (Nadler & Tushman, 1990 and Chamorro-Premuzic, 2013):

1.       Unrealistic Expectations – the ego may allow for the creation of impossible goals.

2.       Dependency and counter dependency – dependency on the leader for all direction, or a need to show how leader is wrong.

3.       Reluctance to Disagree – a culture of ‘Yes-men.’

4.       Need for Continuing Magic – if the leader makes a mistake, credibility suffers.

5.       Potential Feelings of Betrayal – failures can create anger amongst followers.

6.       Disenfranchisement of Next Leadership Level – lower level leaders lose influence because of dependency on the charismatic leader.

7.       Limitations of Range of the Individual Leader – time, energy and expertise is limited, cannot be everything to everyone all the time.

So it is pretty clear that Charisma is dangerous.  But can we have effective leadership without it?  The answer is a resounding “yes.”  There is, admittedly, little research on uncharismatic leaders (what fun is that?).  Stadler & Dyer (2013), surveyed 100 successful European companies with long track records.  They found that the majority had leaders not considered charismatic by their employees.  Look at people like Mother Teresa, Angela Merkel, and François Holland, all effective leaders and not generally considered charismatic.

Still it depends who you ask.  Charisma is attributed.  We need to understand better how that works.  The question of values congruence has been explored (Brown & Treviño, 2009), and leaders with values similar to their followers are more often seen as charismatic.  Ask a Republican about President Obama, and you might get a very different response than if you ask a Democrat.  Further the research only looked at the one to one relationship, rather than the group process.  Leadership requires followers so it is a group process.  The bottom line is charisma is poorly understood in general.

There is more work to do.  For practical reasons, charisma should be more of a warning than a desirable trait for leaders.  In terms of developing leaders it should never be a requirement.  In fact special effort should be made to find the quiet, unassuming people who steadily produce strong results and show loyalty to the organization, and their colleagues.