All posts by Ian MacFarland

Can charisma be taught?

Learn Ferociously

This profile of Olivia Fox Cabane in Matter offers an interesting take on the question of whether charisma, which we usually think of as an innate quality, can be taught — something Ericsson talks about in his HBR article.

Largely through introspection, Cabane developed an alternative definition of “charisma” that breaks the process down into three sets of skills: technical, external and internal. She argues that to be truly charismatic one needs all three sets of skills, and that internal skills are the key: learning to understand and manipulate one’s own feelings to prevent them from leading to socially awkward behavior.

Maybe you can learn these skills and be charming in crucial social situations, but is that really the same thing as having charisma? Or is it more like learning to fake it convincingly? Maybe for charismatic people these skills come easily and naturally, while the rest of us have to work at it. You can fool other people, but you can’t fool yourself.

Positive pressure

Move People

We talked a lot about peer pressure as a lever that managers can use to control their employees, but it’s also important to think about how peer pressure can be used in a more empowering context, where people voluntarily submit to peer evaluation to help themselves accomplish a desired goal when many demands are competing for their time.

I can give an example from personal experience. It wasn’t done within a work context, but the basic mechanism applies.

I worked as a newspaper journalist in New York for several years before coming to the I School, and the old cliche about every reporter having an unfinished novel stashed in his or her desk drawer is more or less true. It’s an information-intensive (and especially a writing-intensive) job and it’s hard to find the time and headspace for a personal project on the side. So over the years, a group of us all knew we had this mutual interest and eventually we decided to act on it by staring a writing group where we would all get together and share some personal writing once a month.

Getting feedback was definitely a benefit of this group, but the real value — one we explicitly talked about and sought out — was that the combination of peer encouragement and peer pressure (the fear of disappointing our respected peers by failing to produce) gave us the extra motivation to make room in our lives for something that we cared about but that could be difficult to prioritize when it conferred little tangible benefit (unlike working, cleaning your apartment, running errands, etc.).

If we can generalize a little bit from this case example, I think this can be an effective structure for keeping longer-term projects on track when you have good buy-in from your team but a lot of competing demands on your time.