The Components of Charisma
I really enjoy reading Rex Woodbury’s Digital Native newsletter. This week he wrote a reflective piece about the last two years building his new VC firm where he dug into the classic four quadrants of VC: sourcing, picking, winning, and partnering.
As part of that, he cited a Princeton study looking at charisma. Throughout the history of the Dent Conference, understanding charisma has been at the top of my list of fascinations! How could you have a conference inspired by Steve Jobs that doesn’t want to understand the “reality distortion field?”
It turns out that lots of researchers over time have been interested in understanding charisma, and there’s a fair body of academic work on the topic. A couple of years ago, I gave a talk at Dent summarizing the lessons around success that I had gathered over the last decade of hosting the conference, interviewing successful athletes, entrepreneurs, innovators, writers, and so forth.
I titled the talk “Attainable Greatness”, but that talk has since developed into a framework that I call the ARC Framework, as in “bend the arc of history.” It stand for Agency, Realism, and Capacity. In any case, I did spend a few minutes addressing charisma and what goes into it:
It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole on charisma, but the simplest way to think about it is that there are three components to whether people find you compelling. They’re commonly presented as Presence, Power, and Warmth — but I like to think of them as three questions that your companions are asking themselves while they’re with you:
Do you have the power to help me?
Are you here with me, in this moment?
Do you like me?
If the answer to those questions is “yes”, then they’ll find you charismatic. Olivia Fox Cabane’s book The Charisma Myth does a great job of summarizing the science and making it accessible, if you’d like to dig deeper.