Charisma

Despite Steven Covey’s declaration that “charisma is dead,” managers constantly seek charisma because of its ability to generate exceptional performance. This is  why charisma-related leadership theories are so highly regarded among the 70+ leadership theories. However, simply imitating a charismatic leader does not guarantee outstanding results. There are inherent charismatic traits that others cannot replicate, and there are behavioral aspects of charisma that anyone can learn. It’s essential to approach them separately. The following are examples of inherent charisma.

The awe and identification that Japanese female fans express towards Korean star Mr. B are beyond imagination. They revere him like a Messiah, imitate his actions, and cherish his symbols. One winter morning, on the day of Mr. B’s wedding, hundreds of Japanese female fans braved the cold and lined up in front of the hotel wedding hall from dawn, waiting for him. Seeing this, Mr. B, to repay their love, bought lunch vouchers from a nearby restaurant and distributed them. However, something strange happened. The restaurant that issued the vouchers contacted him, saying that not a single voucher had been used. The fans regarded the vouchers given by Mr. B as precious “gifts” from him and decided to keep them. After the ceremony, when the venue was opened to the public, they even searched through the trash cans, sweeping up all of Mr. B’s “gifts” without leaving anything behind.

Inherent charisma arises when people encounter an individual’s unique traits (intense gaze, appearance, voice, etc.) and develop an emotional sense of awe and identify with them. These traits are unique to each individual and cannot be replicated by others.

On the other hand, behavioral charisma is like driving a car. Just as anyone can drive a car by mastering operational actions like acceleration/deceleration, steering, and adhering to traffic laws, as well as safety behaviors like surrounding awareness, ordinary leaders can build charisma by mastering a series of actions. Professor Jay Conger explains the formation of charisma focusing on the leader’s vision presentation behavior. According to him, building charisma begins with dissatisfaction and anxiety about the current state. For example, after visiting Italian coffee culture, Howard Schultz felt dissatisfied with the unrefined American coffee culture of drinking coffee like water and founded Starbucks. Samsung’s Lee Kun-hee felt a sense of crisis that if they weren’t the best, they would all fail, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang had anxiety that the company could fail in three months, which were the starting points of charisma.

Building charisma gains momentum when a leader presents a bold vision that can resolve these dissatisfactions and anxieties. Schultz set the creation of premium coffee culture as the vision of Starbucks. It was revolutionary at the time for Americans to sit in coffee shops with a rich coffee aroma, drinking good coffee and conversing. Lee Kun-hee declared ‘top-class’, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ‘the world’s mos customer-centric company’, and MS Bill Gates ‘the world’s best empowerment company’ as visions.

Raising dissatisfaction and anxiety and presenting a vision is something anyone can do with a little effort. The difficult thing is the effort to align the vision, making employees identify the organization’s vision with their own. For example, Jensen Huang pays half of the employees’ salaries in cash and the other half in stock, aligning the company’s destiny with the individual vision of the employees. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer imprints the company’s vision on employees through powerful education, and uses a strategy of weeding out employees who do not share the vision. However, vision alignment is not achieved just by giving a lot of money and providing a lot of education. What is important is the top manager’s sincere immersion and dedication to achieving the vision. Schultz himself visited stores to preach the vision to employees and appeal for participation. Palantir founder Peter Thiel showed dedication to realizing the ‘Zero to One’ vision of creating something from nothing through constant communication, introduction of innovation systems, and strategic recruitment.

When the vision is consistent between the company and employees, it means that the leader has received heart investment from employees through the vision. There is a trap here. Leaders often mistakenly believe that they have been delegated the power to do whatever they want. It is at this point that the leader falls into a state of opacity, unilateralism, and abuse of power. However, a true charismatic leader focuses on building a vision implementation system through intense debate, scientific analysis, and meticulous verification. This is called ‘institutionalizing charisma.’ A charismatic leader is never a personification of opacity and unilateralism.

Building charisma is completed with the leader’s “unconventional behavior.” Unconventional behavior has the effect of clearly imprinting the vision that the leader pursues in people’s minds. Lee Kun-hee’s burning of Anycall phones and Park Tae- joon’s demolition of poorly constructed buildings serve as landmarks when explaining their charisma. Elon Musk’s declaration of a Mars colony or former Intel CEO Andrew Grove’s order to “be paranoid” were also unconventional. These are all models of behavioral charisma that pursued perfect systems.

Today, managers do not try to dedicate themselves, and the MZ generation does not try to follow. However, from a long-term perspective, followers have always hesitated. Charismatic leaders do not blame difficult situations.