Every executive team has someone who can change the temperature of a room.
They walk into a stalled conversation and somehow get people talking again. They can challenge without immediately provoking defensiveness. People listen when they speak, but just as importantly, people seem to speak more freely around them.
We tend to call that charisma, admire it, and move on….
Meanwhile, when we think seriously about leadership capability, we give our attention to the things we can more easily measure: strategic judgement, intelligence, commercial acumen, expertise, credentials, execution under pressure.
All of these matter enormously. But we routinely overestimate how far they can carry a leader on their own.
You can be exceptionally bright yet fail to move a room; be brilliant yet still struggle to bring people with you. You can be highly experienced, even the go-to expert, yet still not be the person people trust enough to tell you what you really need to know.
Capability gives you credibility. Intelligence gives you insight. Experience gives you judgement.
Charisma is the honey that binds them together and turns capability into influence.
Charisma is often treated as personality: fortunate if you have it, unfortunate if you don’t.
Yet research from the University of Lausanne challenged this assumption. Participants were filmed, trained in specific charismatic leadership behaviours, then filmed again several weeks later. Independent observers, unaware of who’d received the training, rated the trained participants as more charismatic.
Participants had not miraculously acquired different personalities. They’d simply changed what they did.
This distinction is important, because it moves charisma out of the realm of mystique and into the realm of leadership development.
And when you look at the wider research on human connection, some of the behaviours involved are much less theatrical than the word “charisma” might suggest.
Take attention…..
Research into real conversations has found that people who ask more follow-up questions tend to be better liked. The interesting part is not simply “ask more questions”. Most competent professionals can and do do that.
It’s the second question that tells you something.
Someone tells you about a difficult meeting. Do you immediately give your view, tell them about a similar experience or start solving it? Or do you stay with what they’ve just said long enough to ask the question beneath the first answer?
This small difference changes the experience of being with you.
Senior leaders, in particular, can become very good at contribution. They’ve usually been promoted because they can assess quickly, see patterns, offer judgement and solve problems. Useful strengths for sure, but they can also become so automatic that curiosity gets crowded out.
Then there’s warmth.
We tend to lead with competence because competence feels safer. In an important meeting or a new relationship, we want people to know that we belong there, so we establish our experience, our knowledge and the weight of our view.
Yet decades of social psychology suggest that warmth and competence are both fundamental to how we judge other people.
The point is not that competence suddenly becomes less important but that competence is interpreted through the relationship around it.
The same directness can feel clear from one leader and contemptuous from another. The same confidence can reassure or alienate. The same challenge can provoke thought or simply close someone down.
This is where charisma becomes practical. It affects how much access people have to the capability you already possess.
Recognition is another part of it.
Leaders are trained to spot what is wrong: risk, slippage, gaps, weak assumptions, missed targets. Again, it’s part of the job. But people also pay attention to whether, and how, you notice what’s going right, and whether you notice it with any accuracy.
“Great work” is fine.
“You stayed calm when that conversation became difficult, and because you did, everybody else did too” tells someone something more useful. It shows that you were actually watching.
Research into compliments suggests we underestimate how positively sincere appreciation will land. I suspect it’s particularly relevant in senior environments, where praise can become so scarce or generic that people stop expecting to be seen at all.
The same is true of good news. We invest heavily in teaching leaders how to respond to problems, conflict and underperformance, but far far less time thinking about what happens when somebody brings us a success.
The default executive response is often efficient: excellent, well done, what’s next?
Yet research on positive-event sharing suggests that the way we respond when things go well contributes meaningfully to relationship quality.
Sometimes the more influential response is to resist moving on quite so quickly: How did that happen? What are you most pleased about? What does it make possible?
Thirty seconds is not a great sacrifice of executive productivity. But to the person in front of you, it may be the difference between having an achievement acknowledged and having it genuinely shared.
And then there’s humanity.
Many leaders become increasingly polished as they become more senior. They learn to contain, present, reassure and project certainty.
There are good reasons for this, but too much polish creates its own problem. If the person at the top appears never to doubt, revise, need input or get anything wrong, everybody else learns something about what is safe to reveal.
Research into the “beautiful mess effect” suggests that we judge our own vulnerability more harshly than other people often do. An admission such as “I got that wrong”, “I don’t know yet” or “I’ve changed my mind” may feel exposing from the inside and look like confidence from the outside.
None of this requires a leader to become more charming, louder, more extroverted or more performative.
Quite the reverse.
The common thread is attention: how much of it is trapped in proving, managing and protecting yourself, and how much is available for the person in front of you.
That may be one reason accomplished people sometimes become less charismatic when the stakes rise. The more concerned we become with demonstrating our value, the easier it is to stop noticing what is happening around us.
And yet that relational layer is where leadership either gathers momentum or quietly loses it.
People decide whether to speak. Whether to challenge. Whether to bring you the problem early. Whether to risk an unfinished idea. Whether they leave an interaction feeling energised, diminished, clearer or more cautious.
Far from peripheral to leadership, these responses shape the quality of information you receive, the conversations your team is willing to have, and ultimately the decisions you are able to make.
We spend years developing the ingredients of leadership: intelligence, judgement, experience, expertise and credibility.
Charisma is the honey.
It’s not a substitute for substance, and without substance it can become dangerous. But when it is present alongside real capability, it binds those qualities into something other people can actually experience, trust and respond to.
Which makes it rather strange that we still leave so much of it to chance.
Rachael Hudson
