Charisma has a reputation problem. We tend to treat it as a private voltage: some people walk into a room with it, others do not, and the rest of us are left admiring or resenting the difference.
The research led by John Antonakis at the University of Lausanne points to a less mystical reading. In a 2011 paper in Academy of Management Learning & Education, Antonakis, Marika Fenley and Sue Liechti tested whether charisma could be taught through targeted training. The title was direct: Can Charisma Be Taught? Tests of Two Interventions.
The answer was not that personality can be rewritten in an afternoon. It was more precise than that. When people were trained in a set of observable communication behaviours, others rated them as more charismatic afterwards. The effect was medium in size, which is neither trivial nor miraculous. It is the kind of finding that should make managers a little less fatalistic about presence.
Charisma as behaviour, not aura
The useful shift is from charisma as essence to charisma as signal.
In ordinary workplace language, charisma is often treated as a quality someone possesses. That framing makes it sound almost biological. A founder has it. A sales lead has it. A political operator has it. A quiet engineer or finance director does not.
Antonakis and his co-authors approached it differently. They focused on charismatic leadership tactics: concrete verbal and non-verbal moves that can make a speaker seem more vivid, confident and worth following. These include devices such as metaphors, stories, contrasts, rhetorical questions, three-part lists, moral conviction, setting high goals, expressing confidence, using voice variation, facial expression and gestures.
That list is important because it demotes charisma from a foggy personality label to a craft problem. A person can learn to contrast one possible future with another. They can learn to explain a strategy through a metaphor. They can replace abstract corporate language with a story. They can make their conviction visible without becoming theatrical.
The study did not prove everyone can become magnetic
The finding needs a boundary around it. The study measured how charismatic people appeared to others after training. It did not prove that every person can become a rare public performer, nor that charisma is always desirable, nor that communication training solves deeper organisational problems.
That caution matters in work culture because charisma is easy to overvalue. A confident speaker can make an unfinished plan sound inevitable. A founder with a strong stage presence can draw attention away from weak numbers. A manager who speaks fluently can be mistaken for one who thinks clearly.
The better conclusion is narrower and more useful: some of what people call charisma is teachable because some of what people call charisma is behaviour. The training did not install a new soul. It strengthened visible tactics.
Why this matters inside companies
Work is full of moments where the best idea does not automatically win. It has to be carried.
A product lead has to explain why a roadmap should be narrowed. A founder has to make a painful strategic choice intelligible to employees. A technical team has to persuade non-technical colleagues that a quiet infrastructure problem deserves time. A manager has to make priorities feel real rather than merely documented.
In those moments, charisma is not only charm. It is the ability to make meaning portable. People need to understand what is at stake, remember the point, and feel that the speaker has enough conviction to be worth following into uncertainty.
This is where the Antonakis work is useful for Silicon Canals’ Mind beat. It suggests that communication presence is not only a reward for extroverts. It can be trained as a set of behaviours that help ideas travel inside organisations.
The tactics are old because people are old
There is nothing especially modern about many charismatic leadership tactics. Metaphor, contrast, rhythm and story sit near the roots of rhetoric. Aristotle would not be surprised that humans respond to vivid language, moral framing and emotional cadence.
The modern workplace, however, often drains those tools out of communication. People are trained to speak in abstractions: alignment, execution, capability, transformation, stakeholder value, strategic priorities. The words are defensible, but they rarely move anyone. They protect the speaker from being wrong more than they help the listener understand.
Charismatic communication does the opposite. It takes the risk of being concrete. It says what something is like. It names the contrast. It gives the listener a shape to hold.
That does not require performance in the artificial sense. The best version is not a leader pacing a stage as though every quarterly meeting were a campaign rally. It is the less glamorous discipline of making speech less dead.
Charisma has a dark side
A serious article about charisma cannot treat it as automatically good.
Charisma can clarify, but it can also blur. It can help a group understand a difficult strategy, or it can help a leader sell a bad one. It can build trust, or it can make people suspend judgement. The history of charismatic authority is not only a history of inspiring leaders. It is also a history of dependency, overconfidence and followership that moves too quickly.
Antonakis and colleagues addressed some of the measurement problems in the field in a later 2016 article, Charisma: An Ill-Defined and Ill-Measured Gift, in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. The title itself is a useful warning. If charisma is poorly defined, it becomes a flattering explanation for whatever outcome we already like.
For companies, the practical response is not to reject charisma. It is to separate communication skill from decision quality. A proposal should become clearer when communicated well, not immune from scrutiny.
Training presence without worshipping it
The workplace implication is modest but meaningful: teams can stop treating communication presence as a fixed trait.
This is especially important for people who have the substance but not the inherited style. Many capable operators, engineers, founders and analysts lose influence because they explain things in the order they discovered them, not in the order others need to hear them. They bury the contrast. They skip the story. They assume the evidence will carry itself.
Training charisma, in this sense, is not about becoming louder. It is about becoming more legible. It is learning how to give an idea structure, emotional weight and a memorable form.
A good metaphor can reduce cognitive load. A concrete story can make an abstract risk visible. A contrast can show why a choice matters. A three-part list can give listeners a map. A visible expression of confidence can help people understand that the speaker is not merely reporting a preference, but taking responsibility for a direction.
None of this makes truth optional. In fact, the more persuasive the speaker, the greater the obligation to stay honest. Charisma is not a substitute for evidence. It is a delivery system, and delivery systems can carry useful medicine or empty promises.
The quieter lesson
The Antonakis study is often summarised as evidence that charisma can be taught. That is true, as far as it goes. But the quieter lesson may be better for work: presence is not one thing.
It is a bundle of behaviours. Some are verbal. Some are physical. Some are structural. Some are ethical. A person can improve parts of that bundle without pretending to become someone else.
That is a humane finding. It gives less power to the myth of the born magnetic leader and more power to practice. Charisma may still feel effortless when we see it from the outside. The research suggests that some of that effortlessness can be built, one deliberate behaviour at a time.
