Charismatic Leadership is another type of leadership out of many leadership types available in the modern business world. It is a leadership style that combines interpersonal connections, and influential communication skills along with the person’s charm to motivate and encourage followers. The main quality of charismatic leadership is the ability to inspire and encourage the team towards achieving a specific goal by tapping into the peoples’ emotions, building trust, building and encouraging the passion and purpose of their lives.
Charismatic leadership is considered as a different leadership style from other commonly available leadership styles such as transactional leadership or laissez-faire leadership. Charismatic leadership highly focuses on building interpersonal relationships and interactions with the employees. Many leaders in the modern business world are charismatic leaders to a certain extent. This makes the employees want to follow the leader as a person, not just to achieve a business goal that they are assigned to accomplish.
However, Charismatic leadership requires multiple personality characteristics to bring out the expected behavior, shape employee growth, organizational improvement as well as achieve the expected outcome from the business activities.
Characteristics of Charismatic Leadership
1. Empathy
Charismatic leadership allows the employees to speak openly about their thoughts and concerns. It allows the leader to make good use of empathy and compassion towards the employees. By being open to the employee concerns and issues, the leader can understand their feelings and take necessary actions to minimize or eliminate the employee concerns and reduce the employee turnover rate. This can help the leader to become liked among the employees as a great listener.
2. Communication
A charismatic leader clearly communicates the job duties and responsibilities to the employees and what they are expected to achieve individual as well as a team. Openness and professionalism are maintained between the leader and the team members convey their thoughts among the team members openly. Charismatic leadership allows open communication between everyone allowing the employees to convey their ideas, concerns, and suggestions without any fear.
3. Self-Awareness
Leaders should have a thorough understanding of themselves and how others including employees react to them. This is one of the most commonly lacking characteristics for many leaders as they are not aware of the stress they put on the employees. However, charismatic leader focuses on understanding themselves and creating self-awareness in order to maintain a better relationship with the employees.
4. Confidence
Confidence is a necessary characteristic for any leader. Strong confidence in the business world can create many advantages. Maintaining a proper personal appearance and charisma can create a better image of a person. Since the leaders have to take on many challenges such as projects, it is necessary to have a strong reassurance that they are capable of finishing the project successfully. Confidence plays a bigger role in building this reassurance. A charismatic leader can confidently take control of the situations, communicate clearly with the necessary parties and obtain the expected outcome from the processes.
5. Humbleness
Another main characteristic of charismatic leaders is that they are aware that they are not perfect. Instead of being arrogant and hiding their weaknesses, they are willing to accept their mistakes and be accountable for the consequences. Apart from that, they are willing to accept the mistakes of the team as their own mistakes and take necessary actions to improve and strive to minimize the errors.
They are aware that they are also a part of the team, and the team should support each other in order to achieve a set goal. Charismatic leadership shows the employees that the leaders are also human and capable of being supportive of the team, yet their traits are what gave them the commands to achieve the business tasks.