The X factor?

(Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

NELSON MANDELA has it. Richard Branson has it. Aung San Suu Kyi has it in her own quiet way. Steve Jobs had it, although he used tricks to enhance it. Barack Obama has it - or at least he used to. Charisma is one of our most prized personal qualities. But what exactly is it? Are you born with it, or can you learn it? Why are we such suckers for it? And, most importantly - for US president Obama at least - can you lose it?

Modern-day psychologists cannot agree on a definition, but they are starting to understand what charisma is and just how far it can get you. The good news for anyone who aspires to revolutionise a nation or just hold dinner-party guests in thrall is that some aspects of charisma can be learned. Perhaps this should make us question the value we place on this most alluring of personal qualities.

In our media-saturated, globally connected, 24/7 world, charisma is more important than ever, particularly for anyone in the spotlight. Actors have to be charismatic or they will struggle to find roles, says

Being perceived as charismatic is crucial for leaders too, says

Michael Morris

of Columbia Business School in New York. And it is not just world leaders who benefit. Charisma is an important tool for uniting a group and raising expectations, so it can be invaluable for anyone who has to lead a team or convince others of a new idea. "It's not necessary to be charismatic to be a good manager, but it is very useful to be perceived as charismatic when trying to start an organisation or change one," says Morris.

So what makes some people charismatic and others not? Genes may play a part.

Nathan Fox

, a social development researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park, has studied social functioning in young children and found that some can be classed as socially outgoing from as early as 4 months old, interacting with adults and peers and being generally exuberant in their temperament (

). They may be more likely to grow into charismatic adults, but they need other qualities too. "I would imagine charisma is a function not only of social competence, but positive self-image as well," says Fox, pointing out that this tends to emerge in middle childhood as a product of innate temperament and a child's circumstances and environment.

Roach takes a different view. "The key is an enigmatic attractiveness that persuades others to subject themselves to the enigmatic person," he says. He believes that contradictions are vital. Obama, for example, is warm and tough, black and white, from tropical Hawaii and gritty Chicago. Likewise, he argues, the actor Julianne Moore is fascinating because she manages to convey both strength and vulnerability. Certain circumstances may cause charisma to emerge or develop. Roach points out that "Shy Di" at the time of her marriage to Prince Charles eventually became "The People's Princess". Princess Diana had to dig deep to find the charisma she had always carried inside, he says.

In Roach's view, charisma is a sort of X factor that some people are lucky enough to be born with. He likens it to perfect pitch: if you have it, it can be cultivated, if you don't, it's hard to improve and you will never fully attain it. Others, however, see it as a suite of characteristics that may come more or less naturally to different individuals - although not everyone agrees on what these characteristics are.

Based on more than three decades of research,

Ronald Riggio

, a psychologist at Claremont McKenna College in California, has identified six traits or skills that he believes are essential: emotional expressiveness, enthusiasm, eloquence, self-confidence, vision and responsiveness to others. To be perceived as charismatic, it is vital to have a balance between these components, he says. A surfeit of emotional expressiveness, for instance, can detract from personal charisma - think comic actors Robin Williams or Jim Carrey.

The idea that charisma comprises a combination of qualities is also reflected in the Conger-Kanungo scale of charismatic leadership, one of the most popular and strongly validated measures of charisma. It consists of 20 statements designed to assess strengths in five areas: vision; responsiveness to others; responsiveness to opportunities; risk-taking; and unconventionality.

The implication of this modular view of charisma is that aspects of it can be cultivated. Eloquence improves with practice. Enthusiasm can be faked. People can learn how to be more responsive to others. Even emotional expressiveness can be improved, says

Vision, or the appearance of being a visionary, can also be acquired or enhanced. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, spent up to 10 hours practising for apparently off-the-cuff 10 minute presentations that were central to his reputation as a visionary, charismatic leader, says Morris, who published a paper on the subject last year (

).

Visionary leaders

Obama has also sought to boost his "visionary" status. After the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al-Qaida, "Obama announced that the intelligence was only 50 per cent certain the site held bin Laden, but he had a feeling about it, so he rolled the dice", Morris says. "It seemed to me that the intelligence was more like 99 per cent certain. However, his version makes him look more visionary."

Leaders who can move an audience with their oratory, who are comfortable with theatrical events and who are willing to express a vision of the future can trigger our subconscious, in the way that shamans do in some traditional societies, says Morris. These are things he thinks can be taught: Morris runs courses at Columbia Business School that aim to improve performance in these areas.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also offers training programmes for business executives who want to enhance their charisma. Instead of teaching them to be more visionary, emotionally expressive or eloquent, however, Sandy Pentland and his colleagues take a different approach. Using gadgets including electronic badges that record information such as tone of voice, proximity to others and gesticulations, they have identified four types of non-verbal social signal that they believe underpin charisma.

First there's mimicry: interactions involving a charismatic individual tend to include more unconscious copying of body language such as back-and-forth of smiles and head nodding. Second, charismatic people display high levels of activity - for example, they seem bubbly rather than listless - signalling their interest and excitement. Third, their speech and movements show more consistency and fluidity. Finally, a person's influence can be gauged by the extent to which they cause others to unconsciously match their speech patterns.

By analysing these signs alone, Pentland can predict which executives will be most successful at selling their business plans to a group of their peers. "What counts may not be what you say, but rather how you say it," he says (

). These kinds of social signals are hard to fake, Pentland adds. Nevertheless, his team is currently working on a tool called the "meeting mediator", which collects audio and motion information from each member of a group and provides real-time feedback about their interaction patterns, with the aim of improving the social signals they display, and so the outcome of the meeting.

Aside from providing clues about how to enhance charisma, Pentland's findings could also shed light on its origins. If charisma's key components are pre-linguistic social signals, that suggests it is evolutionarily ancient, he says. In general, social signalling tends to encourage consensus between individuals, so it may have evolved to help create stable social groups. But human societies must not be too stable or they will never make the kinds of strides that have led to technological and social revolutions - and that's where charismatic individuals come in, says Pentland. It takes someone charismatic to change a culture.

Pentland is not alone in believing that charisma seeds revolution. Others argue that only leaders who generate radical change can be deemed truly charismatic. One proponent of this idea,

Takis Pappas

at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, says that Steve Jobs falls into this group, as do Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. As some of the names on this list attest, true charisma can be very powerful and its use can have highly divisive or even disastrous consequences. Democracy provides checks and balances to limit abuses of power by charismatic revolutionaries, but charisma can still be a malevolent force

(see "Cult of personality")

.

There is another reason we should be wary of charisma: it may not be backed up with real ability. Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School has found that US companies looking for a new leader seek charisma above all else, but the

results can be disappointing

. In uncertain market conditions, a charismatic CEO can boost a company's stock price, but this can be short-lived because that individual may be better at conveying an image than running a business, says Khurana. Although more able executives can learn to be more charismatic, the fact that charisma is now being taught in business schools could actually compound the problem.

Besides, if we put our faith in charismatic leaders there is always the chance their charisma will evaporate. It happened to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Both are generally thought to have great personal charisma, but while they were in office unpopular policies or personal weaknesses saw their leadership charisma slip. Obama may be suffering a similar fate. In the early day of his presidency, he was hailed as an icon of hope. More recently, he has been criticised as condescending, self-interested and detached. He is still the same man, of course, but perception is what matters. "Part of his charisma was in the eyes of his followers," Joseph Nye of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government said earlier this year (

bit.ly/NnjDe2

). "Hard economic times make it hard to maintain charisma," he added, noting that personal charisma also depends on the situation.

Even Roach accepts that a politician's charisma can diminish when he is linked with unpopular policies. "But I imagine if Barack Obama walked into the room right now you wouldn't say he had lost his charisma," he says. How he performs in the US presidential election in November will be a crucial test. "There has never been an incumbent re-elected in an economy this sour," says Roach. "If he is re-elected, it will be a tribute to his personal magnetism - to his charisma."

Janja Lalich was 30 when she joined what she now regards as a cult. The Democratic Workers Party was a radical Marxist-Leninist group established in San Francisco in 1974 by Marlene Dixon, a former sociology professor. "She could talk a blue streak and give these lectures that just seemed awesome. We all thought she was the new Lenin," says

Lalich

, a sociologist at California State University in Chico, who has written several books on cults.

Anyone starting a cult needs charisma to persuade others to join, says Lalich. Without it, "they're just a nut standing on a corner". What's more, a cult leader with charisma can wield huge influence with virtually no ongoing effort. Take the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rashneesh, who headed a popular spiritual retreat, or ashram, in Poona, India, in the 1970s before moving to the US and establishing an international community in Oregon (where he amassed a collection of Rolls Royces purchased for him by followers). "There were years when he didn't even speak," says Lalich. "All he did was sit in front of his followers, stoned."

Dixon was undoubtedly charismatic, but she also had a dark side. In fact, the most common personality trait of cult leaders is not charisma but psychopathy, says Lalich. "All of the things I did that I now think were horrible, I did because she demanded it, and I had a belief in her that she knew what was right."