KARL MOORE – This Is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, Talking Management for The Globe & Mail. Today I am delighted to speak to Raina Brands from the London Business School.
Raina, what is a charismatic leader? How would you define it?
RAINA BRANDS – A charismatic leader is really someone who is very transformational. So it encapsulates a lot of different things but it is somebody who can really set a vision for the organization and inspire people just through sheer force of their personal charisma, for want of a better word, to really come on board with that vision and give of themselves to achieving that vision for their organization. So it is a very inspirational and transformational leader.
KARL MOORE – Is being a charismatic leader about having presence to a certain degree?
RAINA BRANDS – Yes, but what is interesting is that presence is very much in the eye of the beholder, so it is not something that you actually have in that we attribute you with charisma. Some people will feel that charisma and some people will see you as very charismatic, but some people won't be affected by you at all. So that is why we really took the attributional approach because we really wanted to understand what primes people to see you as charismatic and not necessarily what makes you charismatic.
KARL MOORE – Raina, can a person learn to have more charisma?
RAINA BRANDS – Yes I think so, yes. What we know from lots of research is that you can train people to communicate in a very charismatic way: so that is about lots of eye contact, big gestures, using specific types of language like metaphors. So yes, you can very much be trained to be more charismatic.