Can Charisma Be Taught? The Twelve Tactics That Made Managers and Students More Charismatic

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR Antonakis, Fenley and Liechti tested whether charisma can be taught, with managers in a Swiss company and with MBA students. Both groups were trained in twelve specific “charismatic leadership tactics”, nine about what to say and three about how to say it. Colleagues rated the trained managers as more charismatic three months later, and the MBA students’ second speeches were judged more leader-like by viewers who did not know which speech was which.

• Paper: Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. (2011). Can charisma be taught? Tests of two interventions. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(3), 374–396.
• Study 1: A field experiment. 34 middle managers of a large Swiss company, randomly assigned to training or to a waiting control group, rated by their subordinates, peers and bosses before and three months after (343 and 321 raters).
• Study 2: A within-person experiment. 41 MBA students filmed giving a four-minute speech, then trained, then filmed giving the same speech six weeks later; 135 viewers rated the speeches without knowing which were which.
• Training: Study 1: a five-hour workshop, a feedback report and a one-hour coaching call. Study 2: 20 hours over seven weeks, with video feedback on each person’s own speech.

Charisma is usually spoken of as a gift: some leaders have it, most do not. John Antonakis and colleagues at the University of Lausanne treated it instead as a set of behaviours, and asked two questions. Can people learn to use them? And if they do, are they seen differently as leaders?1

Twelve tactics

The training was built around twelve “charismatic leadership tactics” drawn from research on charismatic leaders: nine concern the words, three the delivery. An earlier study by Antonakis’s group had found that the nine verbal tactics, counted in American presidential nomination speeches from 1916 to 2008, predicted who won the election.

The twelve charismatic leadership tactics

Study 1: managers, three months later

The first study took place in a Swiss company with about 20,000 employees. Thirty-four middle managers volunteered, and were randomly assigned either to training now or to training after the study ended. Before and three months after the workshop, the colleagues who worked with them most, around ten per manager, rated their charisma anonymously. The raters were not told that anyone had been trained, and the managers were asked not to mention it.

The change mattered beyond the charisma rating itself. Using the random assignment to separate cause from correlation, the authors found that the managers’ charisma at the second rating strongly predicted how well they matched their colleagues’ idea of a leader, what the paper calls prototypicality (standardised β = .84), as well as their liking, trust and sense of the managers’ competence and influence.

Study 2: the same speech, six weeks apart

The second study removed a weakness of the first: trained managers might simply have felt more confident and acted more leader-like, without using any of the tactics. Here every student gave the same speech twice, about an unpopular decision their division had to make, once before the training and once after, in the same clothes and conditions. Two coders counted the tactics; two others rated general communication skills, which the course did not teach, to catch ordinary improvement from practice.

The 82 speeches were then shown in batches to 135 master’s students who did not know the purpose of the study or that each speaker appeared twice. They rated each speaker, and ranked the speakers in their batch from best to worst leader. Because every speaker had a before and an after version, each person served as their own control, and anything constant about them, their face, voice or accent, was held fixed.

How big is the effect?

The authors translated their results into two familiar yardsticks: Cohen’s d, and the proportion of people who would end up above the median with and without training.

An average effect of d = 0.62 is in line with what a meta-analysis the authors cite found for leadership interventions in general (d = 0.60). The larger effect in Study 2 may reflect the far longer training.

Has it held up?

The same research group later asked whether charisma changes behaviour, not just ratings. In a field experiment, workers who heard a charismatic motivational speech before a job increased their output by about 17% compared with workers who heard a standard speech, an effect comparable to that of high-powered financial incentives. In laboratory experiments, more charismatic elements in a speech raised contributions to a shared pot by up to 19%, though the effect depended on the social setting in which the speech was given.2

Both the 2011 studies and this later one come from the same research programme, so independent tests of the training carry particular weight when they appear.

What this study cannot tell you

• The samples are small. Thirty-four managers and 41 students, almost all men (three and four women respectively).
• Study 2 has no separate control group. Each speaker is their own comparison, and the authors control for general communication skill to strip out practice effects, but that correction is itself an estimate.
• The trainer was the first author, who designed the tactics and the study. A different trainer might get different results.
• Ratings are not results. Study 1 measured how colleagues saw the managers, not whether their teams performed better; the later field experiment is the stronger evidence on behaviour.
• The coding needed judgment. A tactic counted only if used well, so the count depends on the coders, who agreed substantially but not perfectly (kappa .67).

What a speaker can take from it

Charisma, in this research, is not a mystery but a list: metaphors and stories, a sense of what the group feels, high expectations and confidence they can be met, contrasts, three-part lists and rhetorical questions, all carried by an animated voice, an expressive face and purposeful gestures. The encouraging part is that people who were taught the list used it, and were judged better leaders for it.

The cautionary part is in the coding rules. A tactic only counted when it fitted. The authors’ example of a speech with every device and no judgment went viral for the wrong reasons. Use the tactics the way a good speaker does: a few, well chosen, because they serve the point.

This article summarises a published paper, read from the authors’ accepted manuscript in the University of Lausanne repository. Every mean, coefficient, effect size and sample size is the authors’ own, from the results of both studies, the discussion and Tables 1 to 4. The approximate intervals in the Study 2 chart are ours.

Measured

• Charisma and leadership outcomes as rated by colleagues (Study 1) or by viewers of filmed speeches (Study 2)
• The share of the twelve tactics each speech used appropriately, coded blind (Study 2)

Inferred, not measured

• That training caused the change: randomised in Study 1, within-person with a statistical correction for practice in Study 2
• That the tactics produce the leadership ratings: supported by Study 2’s design, which holds each speaker constant

References

1. Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. (2011). Can charisma be taught? Tests of two interventions. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(3), 374–396. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2010.0012
2. Antonakis, J., d’Adda, G., Weber, R. A., & Zehnder, C. (2022). “Just words? Just speeches?” On the economic value of charismatic leadership. Management Science, 68(9), 6355–6381. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4219