We have been highlighting Leadership Charisma since April and will conclude the series next month with a summary of the key principles and behaviors that are fundamental to it. This month brings us to the last of the specific behaviors that make leaders charismatic – belief in people.
A critical factor in driving a leader’s charisma is the extent to which they believe that the people who work for them are capable of great things. Charismatic leaders always let their people know that they KNOW that each one of them is capable of great things – they let each of them know that they can see the greatness in them.
A leader’s expectations of their people have an enormous impact upon their performance. All modern research says that one of the critical factors shaping how people perform in real life is very directly and strongly affected by the expectations that their leaders have of them – if you set and communicate high expectations for each of your people they will generally raise their performance to meet these expectations.
People will tend to stretch themselves to meet the expectations that a respected leader has of them. This is why Dale Carnegie suggested that you could get the best from people by ‘Giving them a high reputation to live up to'.
This brief quotation from Leadership Charisma says it perfectly – “develop positive expectations of your people and everything you do or say, consciously and subconsciously, will reflect those expectations: raising the self-esteem of each and every one of them, and in turn their expectations of themselves – which is also critically important.”
This is because the research also shows that people’s expectations of themselves and their opinions of their own capabilities are amongst the greatest predictors of their actual performance.
When a leader cultivates a genuine belief in the ability of all of his or her people to achieve at a much higher level than they do now, or even at a higher level than they previously believed they could, then he or she automatically raises those people’s views of themselves – their self-esteem soars and this triggers higher performance than was previously possible.
As they begin to perform at a higher level, then their expectations of themselves are raised even more, driving their performance even higher again.
Bottom line: if you have positive expectations of all of your people then, consciously and unconsciously, you will continually transmit those expectations and support your people in raising their performance and self-esteem.
A leader who makes his or her people feel that they are capable of much more than anyone else has ever made them feel is irresistibly charismatic – and drives the engagement that results in the productivity and organizational success that only charismatic leaders enjoy.
