Inspirational or Charismatic Leadership

Personal qualities for leadership

Transformational Leadership focuses on creating a compelling vision of the future and appealing to the higher ideals and the values of people to motivate them to make it a reality.

In recent years this focus on taking people to a new future has also given rise to the concept of Inspirational or Charismatic Leadership.

This approach is like the Traits approach based on the characteristics of the individual and their personal qualities.

The charismatic leader

Researchers like House identified three personal characteristics of a charismatic leader:

• High confidence
• Dominance
• Strong self belief

This approach takes the vision concept from transformational leadership theory and forms the view that:

• To achieve the vision the leader must create the conditions to allow people to travel a defined journey 
• People will make mistakes along the way that are acceptable and
• The leader is required to inspiring people to meet the new challenges and goals.

Successful leaders

Bennis found four common competencies from his research on effective and successful leaders:

• Compelling vision or sense of purpose
• Communicate the vision clearly to followers
• Consistency of effort
• Could assess their own strengths and weaknesses and utilise them

The later is consistent with findings in the traits approach where self-monitoring was found to be a consistent finding in leaders' traits.

Inspirational leaders

Researchers such as Adair see inspirational leaders touching the 'spirit within' us all and exhibiting trust in others.

It appears from research that this quality of inspiring others is sought by followers but is rarely found.

Teach charisma?

Writers such as Conger feel that charisma is important for a leader today and indeed that charisma can be taught.

Charisma always for good?

The debate on charisma still takes place as a highly inspirational leader can also deceive his or her followers and well as inspire them to better things.  So charisma and 'good' do not always go together.

In addition, a leader's followers look up to the leader and try to emulate them.

This creates a heavy dependence between the leader and followers that can be problematical when the leader leaves or does not live up to expectations.

Charisma can be particularly a problem if the leader gets things wrong and like lemmings the followers just follow.

A networked virtual world

As communication and networks change in the workplace and there is more and more cross-functional, remote and outsourced partner relationships to lead, a leader needs to manage in a more networked, consensus and developing manner.  As this develops, the charisma becomes less important and less of an influence on followers.

The links with organisational performance and charisma are not strong although inspiration as a concept is still sought by many followers.

Your style?

Examine your leadership style and those of leaders you know. 

Is charisma and inspiration part of the qualities they exhibit and is it helping performance?

What about your charisma and inspiration to others?