Charisma and Leadership

I originally wanted to title this post "Charisma versus Leadership" but... on second thought, I don't believe the relationship between charisma and leadership to be adversarial... though often times people confuse one with the other.

For example, I will use the archetypal example of Hitler being someone with great charisma, but I would argue that he was not a "leader" but merely a demagogue. He gave rousing speeches that played off of the base emotions and prejudices of a downtrodden German public. However, he never really thought about what the people really wanted. He was selfish and thought about what he wanted (to be the "emperor" of a 1000 year German empire).

But wait, you might ask, "But didn't he say things like wanting to bring prosperity to the country?" To that I would answer, "Yes, of course he said those things." But did he really bring about what he promised? Wouldn't the logical thing for a leader during those times be to encourage the people to continue along a path to revitalization, even though the road ahead may look tough and the rewards far away? I would think so.

Today we can see similar things in our everyday lives. We might point to the CEO's and CFO's of the Enron's, the Worldcom's, Tyco's, and the Global Crossing's of the world, who broke the rules to "make more money for investors", but in the end were grabbing as much cash as they could to line their own pockets. The more political among us may even point to our current administration and the war in Iraq as another example of demagogues taking on the guise of leadership.

OK, so before you go off screaming "Ahhhh! charisma is bad!" hold on for one minute. First of all I never said that. Secondly, charisma is actually a very good and useful tool in leadership. This is because people are by nature social and emotional creatures. (See MySpace and Facebook as examples of humanity's thirst for social interaction). We like to see what our friends / peers / acquaintances are doing... and more often than not monkey see monkey do. Our emotions also play a big part of our lives. Have you ever tried to convince someone about an emotionally charged topic, oh I dunno like stem cell research, using pure logic? It's not gonna happen. But if you for example used a story about about a child stricken by some terrible disease that could possibly be cured through stem cell research... I'd expect you to be at least some-what more successful.

This is charisma, that ability to connect with people and eventually to influence and persuade them to take up your vision and follow your plan. Leadership, though would use charisma to influence people stick to the team's plan to make the vision happen.