The Power of Charisma

We’ve long known that it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it and now scientists have proved it. The social signals people send out are more important in determining who will succeed, than the content of their message.

The more successful people are more energetic in building relationships. They do more - more listening and they talk more; they spend more face-to-face time with others. They pick up cues from others, draw people out and get them to be more participative. It’s not just what they exude, it’s also what they elicit. Charisma shows in their positive attitude, which is now proven to be infectious.

Previous studies have shown that we attribute positive, good-looking people with intelligence and success, and we can put that down to the hard-wiring of our brains – after all our species has communicated in groups long before we developed language. So it stands to reason that the signals from non-verbal behaviours are deeply rooted and significant to our interpretation of a message. This scientific research shows just how significant those gestures and signals are.

For example researchers were able to predict which candidates would win a business pitch, based only on their observation of the social signals they used at a party, without even reading or seeing the pitch they correctly forecast the winners.

This research shows how important face-to-face communication is and has interesting implications for the current trend to increasing digital contact. In another experiment the research showed that face-to-face communication affects productivity, generating as much as 2.5 times more than additional access to information.

This information is from a recent article in Harvard Business Review (HBR) featuring the research of Sandy Pentland of M.I.T Human Dynamics Lab.

Amanda Bouch works with people to improve the impact they make in their communications, contact amanda to discuss this further.