Charisma on linkedin learning

Charisma on linkedin learning

understanding charisma

What is charisma

Two factor of Charisma:

  • warmth: This is how approachable people find you. Are you a good team player? Are you good at getting people to open up? Do you collaborate?
  • competence: This is how intelligent or capable people find you. Are you a good team leader? Are you influential? Are you powerful?

Charisma scale: warmth <- charisma -> competence

Just competent: If you’re just competent, people might see you as smart, but not approachable; as efficient, but not collaborative; as important, but not kind. Without warmth, competence alone can be seen as cold or intimidating. You know you’re high on the competence side if people have told you that you’re hard to talk to.

Just warm, people might see you as sweet, but not smart; as compassionate, but not competent; as relatable, but not impressive. Without competence, warmth alone can make you less memorable or impactful. You know you’re high on the warm side if people often interrupt you or don’t take you seriously when you speak.

Warmth

In fact, research has found that warmth judgments are made more quickly than competence judgments, and have a greater overall impact on people’s attitude towards you.

Warmth helps you in two main business areas.

  • First, warmth helps you make a great first impression. Warmth indicates friendliness, specifically if you show you’re warm in the first few moments of an interaction. It helps the other person see you as friend, not foe, and disengages that fight or flight response. During a first impression, where would you place yourself on the charisma scale? Are you more warm, or more competent?
  • Second, warmth helps you as a leader. The warmer you are, the more people will feel they can open up to you, approach you, and collaborate with you. How do you think you are as a leader? Are you higher in warmth or competence on the charisma scale?

How to add more warmth to your interactions:

  • Nod to people as you pass them in the halls.
  • Always greet people when they walk into a meeting.
  • Ask questions about the personal photos people have on their desk.
  • Share a personal story from your weekend on Mondays.
  • Ask people their weekend plans on Fridays.
  • Remember important details about people, and check in on them. Everyone wants to be remembered.

Try just one of these ideas in the next few days, and see how quickly it warms people up.

Competence

Your perceived competence is an important part of your charisma. Increasing your competence is the fastest way to be taken seriously and increasing your charisma. Competence is the key to never being overlooked, forgotten, or interrupted again.

Reasons:

  • First, highly competent people have more influence. When people see you as highly competent, they believe you’ll be more likely to follow through on your promises. They see you as more effective and efficient.
    • When it comes to your influence, how charismatic are you?
    • Do you influence using warmth or competence on the charisma scale?
  • Second, competence can help you be more persuasive.
    • We love listening to highly competent speakers. They know their message. They drill down on their points. They’re clear and capable.
    • Are you a persuasive speaker or pitcher?
    • Do you persuade using warmth or competence on the charisma scale?
    • Can you add more competence to your pitches and your communications?

How:

  • Keep notes in a meeting and give a verbal summary.
  • Support your ideas with facts, figures, or research.
  • Follow up with people on important projects they’re working on.
  • Set aside time each week to learn one new skill.
  • Think about becoming a mentor.
  • Think about getting a mentor.
  • Read one new book each month.
  • Read the news each morning and chat with people about current events.

Try just one of these this week and see how people listen more to your opinions and respect your ideas.

Charisma quiz

Choose one from each pair, A or B. Write down your answers to keep track.

  • Which one sounds more like you?
    • One A, I am known for my kindness.
    • One B, I am known for my skills.
    • Two A, I am considered a great team player.
    • Two B, I am considered a great team leader.
    • Three A, I am compassionate.
    • Three B, I am impressive.
    • Four A, I am patient.
    • Four B, I am efficient.
    • Five A, people consider me very friendly.
    • Five B, people consider me very smart.

If you got more As, you default to being more warm. If you got more Bs, you default to being more competent. Neither of these are right or wrong. You just want to make sure you’re purposeful with where you fall on the charisma scale.

Here’s what you need to know.

  • The most successful people are flexible with their charisma. This is the secret to really mastering charisma.

We just discovered where you default on the charisma scale, either highly warm, if you had more As, or highly competent if you had more Bs. Goal is for you to move up and down the scale based on the person, situation and your goals.

  • When thinking about people, typically warm folks like to be treated warmly. And competent folks like to be treated with more competence. You can mirror and match as you feel comfortable to make the people you’re with feel comfortable as well.
  • As for the situation
    • during your first impression it’s great to up your warmth to show you’re friendly and relatable.
    • if you’re leading people, it’s great to also increase your warmth to show you’re kind and approachable.
    • but if your goal is to increase your influence, say during an interview or negotiation, you would want to increase your competence to show you’re powerful and effective.
    • if you’re trying to be persuasive, say during a pitch or presentation, you want to increase your competence to show you’re capable and reliable.

Next time you’re in an interaction, think about what side of the charisma scale would be most useful to you. Should you be more warm or more competent? Flexibly moving between both makes you highly charismatic.

Charismatic Words and Body Language

Charismatic words

The words you use shape people’s perceptions of you. One of the best ways to be more charismatic is to use your words to match your goals. Let’s say you want to be seen as more warm on the charisma scale. You could use more warm words in your interactions, emails, texts, and even marketing materials. What are warm words? Warm words invoke feelings of trust, familiarity, empathy, and rapport.

For example, research from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that using more ingroup pronouns like we, our, and us, increased the positive feelings of people in a conversation. Want more ideas for positive words? Here are the most common ones for professional settings that you can use to come across as more warm.

  • Collaborate, excited, engaged, together, connect.
  • You can also make your emails warmer with warm openers and closers. My favorite warm openers are: Hi, team or Good morning, friend. My favorite warm closers are: best wishes, warmly, or cheers. These are also the words that others might use if they want to come across as more warm.

How about competence? If you want to be seen as more competent on the charisma scale, then you should use more competent words like these:

  • efficient, productive, strategize, effective, streamline, brainstorm.

As for openers and closers, highly competent people are direct and to the point. They might simply say: Dear Vanessa or Hello, Vanessa. And sign out: sincerely, or thank you. We have a full glossary of both warm and competent words in the exercise files.

Most professionals think they have to sterilize their communications and use almost no emotion words at all. This not only hurts your charisma, but it actually makes you less memorable.

Practice: Open up your Sent email folder and do a self-check. In the last 10 emails you sent, how many warm words did you use? How many competent words did you use? Count them up. I have worked with thousands of professionals and I have found that one of two things happens. Either you’ll be way high on one side of the scale or another or you will have no emotion words at all. In the next week, see if you can balance out your use of both warm and competent words to be more charismatic.

Make a charismatic first impression

Do you make a charismatic first impression? I hope so, because it sets you up for your entire interaction to be easier.

Researcher Frank Bernieri found that we decide if we want to hire someone within the first twenty seconds of an interview. This is good and bad news. The good news is, you only have to worry about twenty seconds. The bad news is, we tend to forget about leveraging that first impression, and aren’t even sure how to do it. Twenty seconds isn’t much time. You barely have time to say a brief greeting, so what matters more here is your body language.

You can use body language cues to help you both be warm and competent on the charisma scale. Here are my favorite warm body language cues:

  • a genuine smile
  • a firm handshake
  • a hug
  • or high five, if that feels comfortable for you
  • mutual gazing as you meet.

Competent body language cues:

  • angling your body towards the person you’re meeting
  • keeping your shoulders down and relaxed
  • keeping your torso open
  • keeping your hands free to gesture as you speak
  • or wave hello
  • not putting any barriers between you and the person you’re with.

If you want a balance of both warmth and competence, then pick your favorite, most natural body language cues from the lists above.

  • If you want to come across as more warm, say in a collaboration meeting, or happy hour with a colleague, use more warm cues.
  • If you want to come across as more competent, say in a negotiation or sales pitch, use more competent cues.

Remember, you are in control of your charisma cues. You can also spot these cues to figure out where someone else is on the charisma scale, and how they might like to be treated.

Make authentic eye contact

Always look someone in the eye. That was the first advice my dad ever told me about interacting with people. And so I did it. I made lots and lots and lots of eye contact. And that was good, but it wasn’t great. Then I discovered there is some interesting science about eye contact that affects your charisma.

  • First, researcher Paul Zak found that making eye contact is important for building connection, because it produces the chemical ocytocin. And this is essential for bonding.
  • Second, authors Barbara and Alan Pease found that not all eye contact is created equal. They found that we make different kinds of eye contact with different people. Specifically, they identified three types of eye contact.
    • The first type of eye contact is called Power Gazing. This is when someone’s eyes bounce between the eyes and forehead, the gaze stays very high on someone’s face, and never drops below the eye line. This is a way that highly competent, powerful and effective people signal their competence to you.
    • The second type of gaze is called Social Gazing. This warm gaze is when someone’s eye contact bounces between the eyes and the mouth and stays in the center part of the face. This is how friendly, empathetic, cooperative people signal their warmth to you.
    • The last type of gaze, we won’t go too far into here, because it’s called Intimate Gazing, and it’s when the eye contact goes between the eyes and drops down to the suprasternal notch, between the collar bones. It signals someone is interested in you romantically.

None of these types of gaze are right or wrong, but you do want to be purposeful with them.

  • If you want to be on the warm side of the charisma scale, you should Social Gaze.
  • If you want to be on the power side of the charisma scale, you should Power Gaze.
  • And in a professional setting, be sure to never accidentally Intimate Gaze.

You can use your gaze as a signal to others of how you want to be perceived on the charisma scale. You can also see what gaze signals someone is sending to you. Are they Social Gazing, they might want to collaborate, and get closer. Are they Power Gazing, they might want to have a strategic partnership with you. Gaze clues can be a great way to both be more charismatic and to code the charisma cues coming your way.

Use charismatic gestures

Do you talk with your hands? Well, you should. Your hand gestures are a great way to be more charismatic. In my human behavior research lab Science of People, we love to solve puzzles. One puzzle I was always curious about was why some TED Talks go viral, and others don’t, so we decided to embark on a large research experiment, where we analyzed hundreds of hours of TED Talks, looking for differences between the most popular TED Talks, and the least popular TED Talks. And we discovered a fascinating finding that was so interesting it even got me my own TED Talk. What was it?

Hand gestures. We counted every single hand gesture in TED Talks, and found that

  • the most popular TED talkers by view count used an average of 465 hand gestures
  • the least popular TED talkers used an average of 272. What was happening here? I realized that the most popular TED Talks all start the same way.

They all start that way, with very purposeful, and often active, hand gestures. The best, most charismatic speakers show you they know their content so well that they can speak to you on two tracks: their hands, and their words,

And we look to hand gestures for clues on comprehension. For example, if I were to say, “Today, I have a big idea,” but hold my fingers like this, you laugh, because it doesn’t make sense. You say, “Vanessa, it looks so small.” Or if I say, “I have three big ideas,” but hold up five fingers, you’re more likely to believe my hands, and that’s because we give more weight to gestures than words.

Think of your hands like a moving outline of your words. To be more charismatic, think about how you can add more gestures while you speak. Now don’t go crazy here. Hand gestures are great, but too many that are too big are just distracting. Think purposeful.

Three hand gestures you should be using.

  • Listing: any time you mention a number, show it. It helps people remember.
  • Sizing: is it a small problem, and no big deal, or a massive, big issue?
  • Personal: are you telling your story, sharing a personal opinion? Any time you gesture to the heart region, it signals something more personal.

If you’re interested in more, check out: top twenty favorite hand gestures

Bottom line: adding purposeful hand gestures will help people understand you, and make you more charismatic.

Conclusion

Warmth:

  • warm words
  • social gazing
  • meaningful gestures Competent
  • competent words
  • power gazing
  • impactful nonverbal

resources

  • Book: “Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People”
  • https://www.scienceofpeople.com/