The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism (33 page)
Read The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism Online
Authors: Olivia Fox Cabane
Stay in a calm, confident internal state so that your emotional contagion effect is positive.
Express high expectations of people, and communicate your complete confidence in their ability to rise to the occasion.
Articulate a bold vision, show your confidence in your ability to realize that vision, and act decisively to achieve it.
The Charismatic Life
Rising to the Challenge
WHEN THEY HEAR
what I do for a living, people often ask if I spend most of my time with brilliant nerds. I respond with, “Actually, many of my clients are highly successful, highly charismatic executives who come to me not just to raise their charisma level but to learn how to handle its consequences.” That, generally, is when they give me a blank look.
Yes, it’s great to have charisma. And yes, it will make you more influential, more persuasive, and more inspiring. People will like you, trust you, and want to be led by you. But charisma does have its downsides. All forms of charisma come at a cost; what the cost is depends on the charisma style you choose. In this final chapter you will learn a few potential side effects of charisma and how to best handle them.
You Become a Magnet for Praise
as Well as Envy
As you become increasingly magnetic, you may find yourself attracting praise, admiration, and envy. When the team succeeds, credit will naturally flow to you. It’s
your
name the higher-ups remember,
your
contribution, and
your
face they put on the success. And that’s all great. Until, that is, others start resenting you for it. At best, their envy will make them feel alienated. At worst, they will try to sabotage you.
You’re going to have to compensate for your charisma in order to limit the jealousy and resentment others may feel. You have three choices: you can refuse the glory, reflect the glory, or transfer the glory.
Refusing the glory means trying to self-efface—to minimize the praise you’re getting. You can try to bring yourself back down through self-deprecation, downplaying compliments and praise. But we’ve seen how this can backfire, as you’re essentially contradicting your admirers and making them feel wrong.
Reflecting the glory means highlighting others’ contributions. This works well, and has the additional bonus of making you look modest. Something as simple as “Thanks! We were really lucky to have Susan checking the financials and Bill doing his graphic magic.” But sometimes, no matter how much you reflect, some people will still become envious or resentful of your magnetism and your success. You may need to go a step further, which is to transfer the glory.
The CEO of a large multinational bank had asked me to coach his entire executive team. Nancy, one of the senior executives, was a highly charismatic rising star running the bank’s southwest region. In fact, she was so successful that the CEO asked one of Nancy’s peers—Kevin, a veteran with the bank—to send his team to learn how Nancy ran her group and adopt her best practices. Accordingly, Kevin’s team arrived for a one-week visit to Nancy’s headquarters. Nancy was honored, delighted, and determined to do a great job. Until, that is, she learned from one of her visitors that Kevin had
been bad-mouthing her to his team ever since the CEO’s request came in.
“How should I handle this?” she asked me. I asked Nancy to put herself in Kevin’s position and really try to experience the situation as he might be living it right now. “Imagine that you’re a veteran with the bank. And you’ve been told to send
your
team to go learn from a young whippersnapper with ten years’ less experience than you. How would that make you feel?”
Perhaps Kevin felt that he was no longer seen as successful, or at least not as successful as this less experienced “upstart.” He might well have been feeling insecure, no longer admired or respected, and he might have been focusing these negative feelings on Nancy’s success in the form of resentment.
I told Nancy that the only way her success wouldn’t make him feel envious or resentful was if he could see it as
his
success, too. I encouraged her to give Kevin this sense of ownership by finding some way he might have participated in her success. I asked Nancy to think of something she might have learned from him, or some way in which he could have inspired her. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Do I have to?” she grumbled. “It would really be worth it,” I answered.
It took Nancy a couple of minutes, but she eventually did come up with something: “Well, there was this one time in the management meeting where Alan started complaining about how cumbersome the new systems were. Kevin found a great, upbeat way of encouraging Alan to accept that as a known parameter and move on. The way he phrased it was just the right tone of humorous chiding. I’ll go with that.”
I also reminded Nancy of the Ben Franklin Effect. She could periodically ask Kevin for his thoughts and opinions to show him that she values his opinion, helping him to feel respected again. She could then go back to him later to tell him the impact of these thoughts or opinions.
Giving people a sense of ownership for your success is a great way to prevent resentment and engender good feelings, such as pride and loyalty, instead. This technique is, in fact, known as a Clinton classic. During his tenure in the White House, Bill Clinton was known to
go around asking everyone, from his chef to his janitor, for their opinion on foreign policy. He’d listen intently, and in subsequent conversations would refer back to the opinion they’d offered. When people feel that they’ve had a hand in “making” you, they feel a certain ownership of and identification with you, and therefore a certain responsibility for your success.
As you become increasingly successful and visible, it might be worth regularly launching a brief envy-prevention campaign. Warning: you
must
be sincere in whatever it is you choose to say. One of my clients, when learning the following sequence, exclaimed: “Great! A shortcut! From now on, I can give people the feeling I care about them without actually liking them in the least, right?” Wrong. First, as you now know, the vast majority of the time, if you don’t mean what you say, people will intuitively know. They’ll feel it on a gut level. Second, expressing something we don’t believe leads to cognitive dissonance, which uses up our focus, diverts our attention, and thus impairs our performance. Insincerity just isn’t worth the toll it takes.
With this said, think of a dozen people who could matter to your career. Then reach out to them by phone or e-mail with the following envy-prevention technique:
Justification.
Create an excuse for contacting the person; it can’t seem completely out of the blue: “I was talking to Sue and your name came up” or “Bob made me think of you and that time when…” When I’m coaching clients, I tell them to use our session as a justification. After all, I have indeed asked them to think of the people who matter to their career, so they can truthfully say, “I was working with my executive coach, and your name came up.”
Appreciation.
Thank the person for what they’ve done for you. You can thank someone for taking time to meet you, whether in person or by phone, especially if you spoke with them for the first time or for a long time. You can also acknowledge good advice or interesting information someone gave you.
Lay it all out.
Demonstrate exactly how the person helped you. Acknowledge their effort: “I know you didn’t have to do…” or “I know you went out of your way to do…”
Impact.
Let them know the positive impact they’ve had on you. What did they do or say or what example did they set that changed you for the better? What do you do or say differently because of what they did or said or because of the example they set for you? How is your life or your behavior different? Tell them the difference it made to you personally; make it dramatic. People love to feel important.
Responsibility.
The Justification-Appreciation-Laying-out-the-Impact sequence creates a feeling of Responsibility (JALIR). It gives people a feeling of vested interest in your success. Give them as much credit as you can. Make them feel that they own your success and they will feel driven to help you continue to succeed.
Envy and resentment are challenges mostly experienced by individuals with “high power” styles of charisma, such as authority and visionary. So if you want to emanate those styles, it’s worth doing the JALIR sequence regularly. Once a month put a reminder in your calendar to pick people to give the JALIR sequence to, or to ask for their opinions, or to follow up on those opinions and show the impact they had.
Here’s a JALIR e-mail that a client of mine recently sent out:
Dan—
I was just thinking about you the other day when someone asked me who were the people who’d had an impact on my career. I don’t know if I ever mentioned how much I learned from working with you on the finance project. I’ll always remember the way you handled that one hostile phone call—how calm you remained throughout. It taught me one could stay even-keeled no matter what the client was saying. These days, when I feel I’m losing patience on a call, I often remind
myself, “Hey, remember how Dan handled that hostile call?”
Oh, and the advice you gave me on strategic pricing? I’ve been following it ever since. In fact, it played a key role in the success of the department’s largest proposal this year.
All in all, I guess I just want to say thanks. Though you may not realize it, you had a big impact on me, so please take some credit for whatever success you see me have!
Best,
Jim
People Can Reveal Too Much
When I first started coaching business executives, I delivered value just by improving their communication skills. These were practical, targeted tools and techniques that they could practice, fine-tune, and make their own. During the process, a strong intellectual connection would form between us. This was comfortable for all involved and made the coaching process rewarding as well as highly successful.
But gradually, as I started experimenting with the internal skills you learned in the previous chapters, I found that in addition to the intellectual connection, a strong emotional connection would form during coaching sessions.
Sometimes, the emotional connection and the intellectual connection would combine into one superstrong connection. As one client described it, it was as if I were creating a force field around us, a cocoon, a container within which magic would often happen. And that’s when I started to notice a strange phenomenon.
In the moment, the experience would feel magical, a real “high” for both my clients and myself. They’d do extraordinarily deep work, gaining profound insights and revelatory epiphanies. I’d often be surprised by how much they would reveal but thrilled that they progressed so much further than either of us had expected.
And yet repeatedly, the very clients who’d spontaneously shared such personal revelations and expressed their awe and wonder in gaining such insights would then disappear from the face of the
earth. I couldn’t understand why. Having reached such extraordinary depth and having made so much progress in just one session, I imagined they’d be eager to return. It wasn’t until I described this situation to a veteran executive coach that I understood where my error lay.