What is Charismatic Leadership? Definition, Characteristics, and Benefits!

Leaders follow various leadership styles to achieve success and maintain excellent company culture in their organizations. In this fast-paced corporate world, things are bound to evolve, and so do leadership qualities.

Good leaders play a pivotal role in ornamenting an organization’s success and inspire people with their highly influential personalities.

Out of multiple types of leadership, the charismatic leadership style is designed to inspire people and influence employees to do their best work possible. It helps employees improve their communication skills, enhance productivity, boost performance and foster team-bonding opportunities.

Steve Jobs, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr, We knew them as dynamic, and inspirational leaders. These leaders inspired people throughout their lives, and how? By being successful, charismatic leaders!

But do you know what it means exactly?

So, without further ado, let’s get to know about charismatic leadership and its benefits!

What is Charismatic Leadership?

Charismatic Leadership focuses on the leaders themselves. It’s the ability to communicate, influence, and be comfortable in their own skin. Charisma is a process, a quality that requires transforming visions into a reality. And this is precisely what you must follow as a leader or a manager.

It is further defined by leaders who use their powerful personality and excellent communication skills to persuade employees and keep them engaged during crises. If you are a charismatic leader, you will help your organization move forward while it is struggling to progress.

Leaders who apply charismatic leadership tend to have a clear vision in business or politics and the capability to address a large audience to influence them with a convincing speech. It is also incomplete if it does not focus on leaders personally. Compared to other leadership styles, this leadership style focuses on the leader’s personality and actions- not the process or structure.

This leadership practice is quite similar to others. Both it and transformational leadership rely on the leader’s ability to influence the people they lead and support their employees during a crisis by reducing attrition and burnout. While transformational leaders rely on a shared vision to make a change, charismatic leaders rely on their skill-set to move their employees to action. We can also match this with coaching leadership, the only difference being coaching leaders rely on 1:1 constructive criticism, and charismatic leaders persuade a mass altogether.

Pros and Cons of Charismatic Leadership

Like every other thing in this world, even charismatic leadership has its pros and cons; let’s have a look-

Pros:

• Charismatic leaders motivate and inspire the workforce.
• Encourages the importance of camaraderie, collaboration, and teamwork
• It involves good listening skills; hence employee queries do not go unheard.
• Creates a sense of positive change

Cons:

• Charismatic leaders might display narcissism and shift the focus from their people to themselves.
• Leaders might become self-serving.
• It is often viewed as shallow or disingenuous.

Characteristics of Charismatic Leadership

If democratic leadership points towards guiding a team, or volunteers, charismatic leaders deal with employees’ emotions to create a positive work environment and hold no toxicity.

So, here we have mentioned a few characteristics to follow charismatic leadership successfully-

Communication

These leaders hold extremely refined skills in communication. Helping employees through tough times and making them stay grounded during tough times is the motto of every charismatic leader.

If you want to apply this leadership style, you must also ensure you are equally good at one-to-one meetings and communicating in a group setting. You must hear everyone and your message should hold relevance, clarity, and understanding for your employees to follow and relate with it.

Maturity

Even though leaders have a strong and powerful personality, charismatic leaders also display maturity and character. They do not believe in making blanket statements, but they use their accumulated knowledge and business experience to help an organization grow. They welcome and respect every individual belonging to various cultures, ethnicities, races, sexuality, and are bereft of gender binaries.

A mature leader is not afraid of accepting their mistakes and refrains from taking everything at face value. They learn from their mistakes throughout, and they never miss out on an opportunity to learn from others. No matter what the occasion is, you must behave and act maturely at all times.

Humility

Having a sense of humility is exceptionally important for charismatic leaders. They need to treat every employee with equal respect and dignity to listen to their concerns patiently. Humility promotes diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

You must inspire great loyalty from the employees. If you apply charismatic leadership in your work style, you just let the employee know their value and show them how their contributions improve the company’s strategic interests.

Substance

Charisma indeed exists without substance but not for a long time. The glitzy and glamorous appearance will capture people’s attention, but gradually, employees will want something substantial beneath the facade.

As a highly charismatic leader, you must talk the talk and walk the walk. Your charm will get you the attention and face time while substance will close the deal. You must not make fake promises to your employees. Deliverance of promises is a must, and this garners employee’s trust in return.

Confidence

Without a doubt, every charismatic leader holds an enormous confidence level to influence and persuade a large audience. They know themselves in and out and do not try to become somebody else. They are original and comfortable being who they are.

A charismatic leader must have the ability to transfer this level of confidence to their workforce. A leader can find various opportunities to do this; one way is by implementing a successful reward and recognition program.

Body Langauge

One thing that you’d prominently notice in a charismatic leader is their positive body language. They are warm, open, and full of joy with their appearance. They are usually making eye contact while talking to people and always greet people with a smile.

These leaders have an endearing swagger and are authentic by all means. Such leaders inspire people to be themselves and act as role models for employees to look upon. They are allowing people to perform at their very best level with their welcoming body language.

Good Listening Skills

Charismatic leaders are excellent listeners. We say this because you won’t find them fidgeting or fiddling when you have a word with them while interacting with such leaders.

They are fully engaged in the conversation and listen to each and everything carefully. You must show equal empathy and respect for every individual’s concern. Active listening is an acquired skill for leaders must have the patience to listen to their employee’s concerns with utter diligence without being vindictive.

Benefits of Charismatic Leadership

Before we end this blog post, we would like to enlist a few benefits of charismatic leaders and why an organization needs them:

• Charismatic leaders work towards a quality of life.
• They seem to make life better for every individual working in an organization.
• They build courage for conviction.
• They stand up for people who have different opinions about society and the organization.
• Charismatic leaders fill the communication gaps between the organization and the employees.
• They motivate employees and inspire people for better productivity.
• They help promote collaboration and team building.

Conclusion

If you are a leader who can communicate, persuade, and influence employees for increased work efficiency and employee job satisfaction, you are truly a charismatic leader.

If you believe you have the right charisma to apply this leadership style in your organization, please feel free to let us know if this information helped you get acquainted with charismatic leadership!

This article is written by Gautam Gayan. He works as a Content Marketer at Vantage Circle. Apart from being a passionate content creator for HR services and employee engagement, Gautam is a theatre enthusiast, an avid reader and an asipring poet. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com