First Published on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/character-versus-charisma-david-ducheyne/
In this newsletter, I discuss the “business dilemmas” I encounter as a strategic advisor working for multiple customers. The name of this newsletter is “the two Dragons”, because these dilemmas often lead to fierce debates, difficult decision processes, and often a feeling of failure of not being able to reconcile the criteria, objectives, or values that seem to be in conflict with one another.
If you have a business dilemma you’d like to discuss, get in touch with me through Linkedin or through david@otolith.be .
Ukraine
We are all devastated by the recent events in Ukraine, a sovereign nation that has been attacked by its neighbor. It is disappointing to see how war has returned to Europe, almost 80 years after the end of the atrocities of the second world war ended and which left the old continent in ruins. The question arises of how this is possible and why humanity does not seem to progress. War is of all times, and unlike what Mr. Harari suggests in his book Sapiens (1), we do not seem to get rid of it. Every time we think we have reached the next level of civilization, we seem to regress.
After World War II, people have created supranational bodies and institutes to solve conflicts and avoid bloodshed: the European Union, the council of Europe, the United Nations have as purpose to help humanity progress. But alas, for some reason, dictators emerge quite regularly. Even the United States was shaken by a populist president who seemed to despise the democratic fabric of his own country. They are on the rise, the leaders that are forceful.
Democracy is in Decline
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), democracy is in decline across the world (2). Let’s not forget that only 6,4% of the world population lives in a full democracy and almost 40% lives in a flawed democracy according to the EIU. Countries like Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Taiwan, Australia, and Switzerland head the list. The countries with the lowest level of democracy are Afghanistan, Myanmar, North Korea, Congo, Central African Republic, Syria, Tchad, Turkmenistan, Laos, and Equatorial Guinea. More than half of the world’s population lives under either autocratic leadership or in countries with hybrid regimes that combine democracy with autocracy.
What about Russia? Russia has a score of 3,24 out of 10 on democratic development and belongs to the group of authoritarian regimes. Ukraine is at 5,57 and belongs to the so-called hybrid regime group. My home country, Belgium, has the doubtful honor to be part of the group of the flawed democracies, together with the United States, France, and many other democracies.
Strong Leadership
The call for strong Leadership
As I said, the call for “strong leadership” is louder. When times are uncertain, people look for leaders who are charismatic and show confidence about how to solve the challenges. When Hitler came to power, the world had just gone through an unprecedented economic crisis, that ended the roaring twenties.
The memory of that Great War was still strong and some people in Germany had not digested the loss of honor. The allies had not been kind to Germany and had made the humiliation bigger than needed. With high unemployment, high inflation, high humiliation this dictator succeeded in convincing people of his ability to save Germany, which the Weimar Republic could not do.
But here’s the thing. Hitler’s charisma had been amplified by modern techniques of mass communication. His staged appearances were well prepared. He practiced his appearances and even had pictures made to see what he looked like when he gesticulated. Like Putin, he groomed his image meticulously.
Charisma
Where does charisma come from? Charismatic leaders often have an opinion or a vision when nobody else has one and they are able to voice it eloquently. Vision and voice, that is the secret recipe of charisma. In dire times, it is attractive. Having a voice and a vision is not a negative thing. In fact, it is very helpful for leaders to have both.
But if you combine vision and voice with a high levels of confidence, a lack of empathy, and a deep need for power, leadership can be based on a dangerous behavioral cocktail that damages the organization or the country and its people.
So, if leadership is based on charisma alone, it is not sustainable. Charisma is helpful to reach the top, it is not enough to stay there. More, too much charisma is detrimental and lowers a leader’s effectiveness. There seems to be a curvilinear relationship between charisma and leader effectiveness (3). Like many traits, the moderate level seems to be more supportive of effectiveness. Too much or not enough of it does not help.
Anecdotal Evidence
One of the first management books I read was the autobiography of Lee Iacocca, the former CEO of Chrysler. I was 18 when I had received it but I only read it a couple of years later. It had left me with a feeling of discomfort as it was more a hagiography, not a biography. Leaders who write their own stories, usually overestimate their contribution to a positive evolution. Lee Iacocca saved Chrysler; Jack Welch turned GE around; John Scully saved Apple (but it was saved again by Steve Jobs), … The latter leader did not write his own biography. The one that was written was not very flattering and showed an ambitious man with many behavioral flaws.
The managerial legends often depict the image of charismatic, heroic leaders. They are modern knights and kings. But these stories are anecdotal and not helpful when we want to isolate the active elements of leadership. In fact, I believe these stories are a symptom of the problematic behavior of some leaders who create linear and inflated stories about their success. In contrast, sustainable leaders have doubts about their contributions, are grateful for the support they got, recognize their limitations. They must have or develop a vision too, but above all, they have consistent values and they are able to build sustainable relationships with the people around them.
The Essence of leadership
The essence of leadership is helping people to go from A to B. For that, leaders need to engage in many different kinds of behaviors. They need to be supportive and directive. They need to focus on today’s results, but also lead people in change. It’s not an easy task. Using blunt charisma to bring people to a higher level of performance, will not suffice. And that is why dictatorship, in the end, is not sustainable.
As leaders use their arrogant self-confidence as an engine of their leadership, the truth erodes its very foundation. It is very difficult for self-confident leaders to admit they were wrong, to show doubts in public. The way some leaders craft the reality is both amazing and scary. But when the truth erupts, there is no answer for them. So at a certain time, the trustworthiness and benevolence of the charismatic leader evaporates and the only thing that is left is the brutal power they have built up.
The Origin of Dictatorship
A Vicious Mental Circle
Let’s go back to Mr Putin. Like many leaders, Mr. Putin is also anecdotal. He is “jus”t one dictator in a long and sad row of dictators. Like Stalin before him, he has the power to send 190,000 men to war, and nobody seems to be able to stop him. To many people in the West, he does not seem to be very charismatic. We just don’t trust him. And we wonder where his power comes from.
The initial answer to that question is hope. He presents himself as the savior of Russia, a strong man who knows what is good for the country and who is nostalgic about the lost status of Russia in the world after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. So he offers them hope. And he gets recognition in return.
But then a vicious circle starts. As his ego is fed by all the yay-sayers around him, the applause of an ignorant public, and the perks that his position gives him, the dark side of his personality gets stronger. His view on reality gets blurred and it becomes unthinkable that he might be wrong. In terms of derailment, tendencies to become bold, mischievous, and colorful become stronger. These are derailment factors described by the Hogan Development Survey.
Reports also describe how the Russian president has gathered only people around him who confirm his narrow views and he seems to be paranoid. The French president Macron left the room in a state of bewilderment, saying that Mr. Putin had changed. This must remind us of the last days of Hitler, who gave orders to phantom armies from his bunker in Berlin. Only, Mr. Putin holds the nuclear button in his pocket, making his mental state a threat to the entire world.
The protests against the war within Russia are just needle stings and won’t bother him. Like Ceaucescu before him, he does not realize that his popularity might be gone. And so, this war is the beginning of his end as a dictator.
The Making of a Dictator
Why do people follow a dictator? And how do dictatorships develop? And can we learn from this to increase the quality of leadership in organizations and institutions on all levels?
In 1934, a historian Hoover, described how Germany, Italy, and Russia became dictatorships. He described how the first world war contributed to the forming of dictatorships. But also in the fact that the governments that preceded it were feeble. He writes: “In Russia, in Italy, and in Germany the régimes which fell had lost confidence in themselves. They were susceptible to national and international public opinion. The leaders worried about whether their acts would be supported by popular approval.” (4)
Most dictators start with high approval rates, by giving the people what the people want. Hope. But then comes power. After a while, power becomes the target. And when that happens, power becomes violence.
Power becomes Violence
Hoover wrote: “Maybe the most striking resemblance between the régimes of the Roman Caesars and the modern totalitarian states lies in the complete disappearance of respect for personal dignity”. When he wrote this, Hitler was only one year in power and his party had changed Germany fundamentally in the first year of its rule. When you visit the Reichsparteigelände in Nürnberg you get a stifling insight into the mechanics of how the Nazi Party dehumanized Jewish citizens, crushed all opposition, and opened the first concentration camp of Dachau near Munich.
The 1934 article is still worthwhile to read. It described 90 years ago what is happening in Russia today (4).
The benefits of Strong Leadership
Strong leaders are “en vogue” again because they seem to provide people with the answers they are looking for. The list of so-called strong political leaders is getting longer: Orban, Erdogan, Trump, Bolsonara, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, … These men – there are few women dictators – are in power and they plan to stay in power. And they use violence to subjugate people. Can we trust China or Russia? I’d say we can’t. Can the people trust their dictator? No, they cannot.
The advantages of strong leadership are clear: fast decision-making, efficient governance at first, focus on the results, and quick responses to any behavior that deviates from the standard …
Democracy is in contrast a messy process of compromises and slow progress. When people call for strong leaders, it’s because they think that professional politicians are not to be trusted to solve their problems. Hitler got rid of the Weimar Republic. Stalin took care of a large part of the intellectuals. Trump wanted to drain the swamp of Washington, a mission that found a lot of sympathy amongst the white male unemployed voters. Every dictator fulminates against the wrongdoing of their predecessors. Funnily, people are willing to forgo their democratic rights to see the progress a strong leader brings.
And it’s similar in business life. Strong leaders have a high appeal. We just love charisma. Leaders who are extraverted, dominant, competitive, confident people hold the promise of swift progress, of higher share prices, of glory. But, We confuse confidence for competence, says Chamorro-Premuzic in his seminal book (3).
The Importance of Trust
There is a huge downside of confident, strong leadership: it does not build relationships based on trust. Why is that? These leaders put themselves in the center of things. They are not humble. They are mischievous, arrogant, condescending. They exhibit less empathy or kindness. They hold different rules for themselves than for others. And when all this occurs, trust goes down.
Let’s not forget that trustworthiness depends on showing competence, benevolence/loyalty, and integrity. The first thing that goes down due to “strong” leadership, is the experience of loyalty. Be careful, when leaders decide in crisis, people accept their strength. So the best time for a “strong” leader to emerge is in difficult times. They handle the crisis and they are applauded for it. But after that, they need to go. Winston Churchill did not get reelected immediately after the second world war and he sank into depression. The reason for his rebuttal is that he was seen as a great leader in times of crisis, but not in a post-war era when the nation had to be rebuilt.
Trump could not believe he did not get reelected in 2020 and that he had lost from Sleepy Joe Biden. He went to great lengths to stay in power, with the siege of the Capitol on January 6 2021 as a sad culmination. The echo of Hitler’s Bunker is near.
And so, strong leadership is crumbling when relationships matter. Strong leaders are often not very good at building those relationships, been though many of them are gifted with charm and superior manipulative skills. But after a while, people start to notice what is behind. They see behavior that gives them a funny feeling, an unsafe feeling.
Leaders who are willing to do anything to get results might see anyone who contradicts them as dissident and put them under pressure to comply. They might humiliate those who go against the grain. They lash out at anyone who hinders them. The final result is that only the ones who comply remain, the others leave. People often think that they cannot win the fight. And the ones who do stay become passive, or passive-aggressive. This worsens the situation because the leader will start to distrust the sheep in his meadow. When trust goes down, also cognitive diversity goes down. It’s a subtle and unstoppable process of decline.
Charismatic leadership in combination with the personality flaws described above has nothing to do with effective leadership. It is toxic.
The Dilemma, introducing the Dragons.
Organizations face a dilemma:
do we select strong, charismatic leaders who bring fast results, or do we go for leaders who build sustainable relationships to achieve progress?
The dilemma might be more about the tension between (sustainable) relationships versus (fast) results. There is not a contradiction between building sustainable relationships and getting results as long as there is a good balance.
So, Dragon 1 is fast results through charismatic, and sometimes toxic leadership.
And Dragon 2 is about sustainable development through building trusting relationships, based on character.
Solving the Dilemma
Extreme charisma makes trustworthy relationships impossible. Organizations that have a culture built on trust, cannot cope with extreme charisma. However, they need not be the total opposite of one another. The idea in dilemma thinking is to try and reconcile sometimes opposing values or positions.
There are 5 steps to think about dilemmas:
Step 1 is to consider the importance of each dragon. Charisma does work and can be instrumental in building value. Trusting relationships are important, but also relationships can get in the way of progress if they do not allow for courageous decision-making
Step 2 is to divide the continuum of each value into three (or more) levels: not enough, the right level, and too much. Can one be too charismatic? Of course (3). Can one be too trusting? Of course.
Step 3 is to put the conflicting values in conjunction. It helps to put them on two axes and discuss the various positions. What about high charisma and low trust? Are there circumstances where this is allowed? As said, in times of crises charisma might be a competitive advantage, but not when it destroys trust. Are there situations where we have both low charisma and low trust? These are situations in which people have lost their faith, maybe after having been disappointed about the shallowness of their leaders.
Step 4 is to look for a third value that could be overarching both values. In this case, it could be sustainable leadership or sustainable progress. It could also be organizational attractiveness or, once again, organizational health. One could speak about trust-building charisma or charismatic servitude to describe a level that fulfills the requirements of both dragons. Too much or not enough of either component of leadership makes leadership ineffective.
Step 5 is to find ways how both values can reinforce one another in order to become more effective. By increasing charisma to an appropriate level, a leader will fulfill some of the expectations. And by reducing the importance of charisma to that same appropriate level, damage will be avoided.
The thing is, the dilemma should be translated into a thorough leadership development approach.
Leadership Development Revisited
The time organizations think to win by hiring so-called strong leaders, they will have to clean up the mess they leave behind. The same is valid when strong leaders are elected for public office. They usually do not live up to their promises. And if they do, their successes prove to be ephemeral. That is why organizations should select and develop their leaders on character, not charisma. I have used the word character before (6) to point at the deeply engrained source of behavior that determines the motives, personality, biases and to make the connection with the moral aspect of leadership.
- Leaders should not be overly confident. A good dose of self-doubt, humility is a good thing. Self-confidence becomes a problem when it stops introspection. Organizational models of leadership should reflect this and subsequent selection processes should be adapted accordingly. This might be not so easy in cultures that hail charisma. Boards and executive teams should answer the question: what kind of leadership do we need?
- There are different levels of defense against abuse of power. Healthy organizations build these lines of defense. Good governance requires a balance of power. One way to do this is by installing peer reviews of decisions.
- Organizations should be open to welcoming introverted leaders as well and they should actively help them to succeed, especially in those ecstatic communicative cultures. Onboarding of all leaders to callibrate the expectations is important and often neglected on higher levels (7).
- Adopt a leadership team approach. Executive teams that are dominantly result-oriented, with a high number of charismatic leaders, without sufficient attention for relationships will probably fail in the long run. Boards should make sure executive teams are diverse and might need to avoid a dominant CEO at the helm.
- The reason why someone wants to take on leadership roles may reveal some information about their future behavior. It is not easy to detect implicit motives (8), but there is no reason not to try. If the motive to be a leader, is mainly to quench one’s thirst for power, organizations might want to reconsider or build lines of defense.
- Self-confident, power-driven extraverted leaders should receive feedback and counseling on how they can work with people and how to keep them motivated (or at least how not to demotivate them).
- Leaders should not be allowed to develop too much power. Like in certain political systems, leaders should be asked to rotate jobs and not stay too long in one position. If they do, they need to be challenged.
- Every leader can derail under stress. Organizations should be aware of how high levels of stress influence behavior and monitor changes in behavior. Leaders with high self-confidence might not derail that fast, but when they do they might not question it. Leaders with low self-confidence might derail faster but might notice more. In any case; a good dose of self-confidence is helpful, too much might be a problem. To handle derailment, changes in behavior should be monitored and when problematic behavior arises, swift action is required. A board of directors should anticipate this, based on a thorough understanding of the needs and the personality of incumbent leaders. An open debate about this is beneficial.
- Above all, do not tolerate leadership behavior that is not in line with the values and expectations of the company We are sometimes tempted to forgive the flaws because they seem to be part of the sacrifice an organization needs to make to get to their results. But once you accept bad leadership behavior, the value of values disappears and people lose trust. It is an immediate and almost unstoppable process. So when a leader derails, fast action is required. And when a leader is not capable of integrating into an organization (which is not the same as totally adapting to it), they should leave the organization before they cause damage.
The events in Ukraine provoked some thoughts about a topic I am passionate about. Let’s always invest in the quality of leadership to build better organizations and institutions.
My heart goes to the innocent people in Ukraine and Russia who suffer from the consequences of failing leadership
And at the same time, we should not be naive in thinking we will eradicate this kind of behavior. It is part of the human condition. But we must not accept it to happen and cause human suffering. To me, the quality of leadership is at the origin of human progress.
(1) Harari, Y. (2015) Sapiens. A brief History of Mankind.
(2) To find out more about democracies in the world, check https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2021/
(3) Vergauwe, J., Wille, B., Hofmans, J., Kaiser, R.B. & De Fruyt, F. (2018). The Double-Edged Sword of Leader Charisma: Understanding the Curvilinear Relationship Between Charismatic Personality and Leader Effectiveness, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(1), 110 –130. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000147)
(4) Hoover, C.B. (1934). Dictators and Democracies. The Virginia Quarterly Review, 10(2) – https://www.jstor.org/stable/26445499
(5) Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2019). Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? Harvard Business Review Press, 240 pp.
(6) Ducheyne, D. (2017). Sustainable Leadership. How to lead in a VUCA-World. Brugge, Die Keure.
(7) I am looking forward to the master’s thesis of Mareline De Schipper who is currently investigating this issue.
(8) Ducheyne, H. (2021). De machtsbehoefte van leidinggevenden: een zegen of een vloek? Een studie naar impliciete motieven, LMX, abusief leiderschap en narcisme. The need for power of leaders: a blessing or a curse. A study on implicit motives, LMX, abusive leadership and narcissism. Master’s Thesis, Ghent University.
