A Website that Sells

A Website that Sells

Well it’s been a busy time in business this week with two core activities going on. First I spent some one to one time with the guys from my Platinum Mentoring Group, putting some finishing touches to their launch plans. A common theme this week has been their digital marketing plans, which coincidently has been the other big activity for us this week.

We have been running some experiments and testing the response and value of various social media based advertising, along with a Google Adwords campaign. My Digital Marketing consultants over at Vie Digital, www.viedigital.com are keen exponents of Google Adwords, so we are conducting a major test with 15 different advert approaches to see what delivers, we using positive toward motivational messages, and some away motivation messages, focusing on peoples biggest concerns, so watch this space and I will keep you informed.

Last week in my blog, http://james-kneller.blogspot.com/ I talked about how I approached developing my new Website, and so this week I wanted to build on this with 3 killer tips for a website that sells. You see, all to often people forget that their website is about selling them and their product, not just about passing on information.

I have therefore turned to Australian website guru Vanessa Rothwell to give her top 3 killer tips.

3 Killer Tips for a Website that Sells

As a speaker, consultant, coach, or entrepreneur you will at some stage be looking to set up a website about your business. As a student of James I would also assume you want to set up a lifestyle business, part of which includes building a list and selling products online which means you can make money from anywhere in the world . . . even when you are asleep!

 Here are 3 killer tips to think about when setting up your online presence, in order to help your website make YOU money!

• Build trust
 Your website should build trust with your audience. One of the best ways to do this is to have a great About Us page.

• By giving people a sense of who you are and what you are about, people will start to feel they know you and that they can trust you to buy from online. 

I’ve been to websites before and all they have on the website is the company name. You have no idea who is the person behind that business, so it’s hard to know if you can trust them.

 You should also have your photo on your About page. A photo shows that you are a real person not some faceless company which helps even more with the trust factor.

 Some additional ways you can build trust with your audience are having a newsletter, a blog and/or giving them an opportunity to connect to you through social networking. These are great ways to share personal stories about yourself which builds trust with your audience and helps your sales!

• Keep the focus on one specific action
 When you get your website set up its tempting to just want to throw everything you can on there. Perhaps your product or service services more than one niche or perhaps you have many different products. Giving people too much choice is a dangerous thing as the most typical response of someone who has lots of choice is to do nothing.

• 

Instead, it’s best to have a “Laser-focused” website catering to one market and product/service. Once you have success with this one site, you can set up another site for another market. Once your business has some momentum, you can look at also having a main business showcase website that has a bit of everything.

 As well as this, on each page you want to keep the focus on one specific action. If it’s an opt-in page or landing page, you want people to enter their details. It’s a good idea that you don’t mention your other products or services, and it’s often best not to have any other menus or buttons on the page that people can be distracted by, and click on and move away before completing that action. On a sales page, give the choice of only one product. If you have multiple products you want to sell, why not look at packaging them up into a single product?

• Have a call to action on every page
 As well as tip #2 where you are keeping the focus on one action, you also need a clear “Call to Action” on every page. 

What do I mean by this?

• 

It may sound silly, but you need to spell it out on every page what you want people to do. If it’s an opt-in page, tell them to enter their details (and what they will get for doing that), don’t just have an opt-in box there assuming people will know what to do and will just do it. 

If you are selling something on that page, tell them to click on the buy now or add to cart button, or call this number to contact you. This will encourage them to take the action that you want them to take.


For help with your website and online strategy, contact Vanessa at Your Online Success for a FREE 20 minute consultation on your needs. 
www.YourOnlineSuccess.com.au

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Vanessa Rothwell

Vanessa Rothwell has worked as Shift Speaker Training’s in-house Web Developer and then later the Customer Experience Manager overseeing many aspects of Joanna Martin’s Shift Lifestyle Business for over 2 years. Nowadays, she runs her own business Your Online Success and is available to help you set up your website and software systems to support your speaking business. To contact Vanessa and her team, please go to: YourOnlineSuccess.com.au.

Need a Speaker?

If you have an event coming up and need a speaker, give the office a call on 0044 (0)1256 886454 and check out my availability

I am working in Europe until mid December then the USA until Mid January, before returning to the UK.

When You Can See James Speak

I’ll be on stage in February 2011, in London, explaining the 4 ½ Big Secrets for successfully transitioning your career and finding the work you love! So come and join me by visiting www.james-kneller.com and mouse over to my events page.

James Kneller International Plc

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Creating a new Website – DIY or Loads of Money?

I get a bit fed up with people telling me how easy it is to set up your own website, how you can easily do it your self, or just spend a couple of hundred pounds on Elance and its done. You see, with my extremely limited ability on all things technical, plus a perfectionist streak, which means I want it done properly, creating my website took longer, cost more, and was more complicated than I expected.

Now I am not going to reveal how much I spent, but I wanted a good professional site with a strong back office functionality which means I can track, monitor, and process customers, without too much hands on activity by me and the team, after all we are about making a difference to peoples lives, helping you quit your corporate job and find the work you love, not spending all our time on admin!

This of course is the challenge, because whilst we do not want to spend too much time on admin activities, it’s the customer experience, particularly when they make a booking to one of our live events, that helps differentiate your brand in a crowded, but poorly serviced market. It is the slickness of the way you follow up enquiries that reassures customers that firstly you care, and secondly that you are competent.

So creating the website myself was never an option, and therefore I had to choose between outsourcing it to a professional consultancy who could handle all the bells and whistles, or go in to the market, but project manage it myself, and therefore deliver a website at the lowest possible cost to me. On the basis that you don’t know what you don’t know, I chose the first option, and I went with the professionals.

I chose vie Digital, mainly because I liked the guy who ran it, and who would act as my interface with the various designers and programmers involved on the project. In hindsight, the thing I have enjoyed most about working with them, is that I can change my mind one hundred times about content and layout, and they never complain, or increase the charges! They have also tried to reduce my future costs by training me on some of the basic maintenance and updating facilities, but as teaching me is like herding cats, their future revenue is probably secure!

So am I happy with the final site? Was it worth the investment? Take a look at http://www.james-kneller.com and let me know your thoughts, and while you’re on the site, grab hold of my Free 7 step system to finding the work you love!

Customers Cost!

So a good friend of mine is opening a new restaurant this week, and it reminded me of some of the best advice I have ever been given, Customers Cost! It was Peter Thomson, one of the UK’s leading business growth specialist, who told me this, when I recently interviewed him for my 7 Step System for Finding the Work you Love. http://www.james-kneller.com

My last question to Peter was what was the one tip he would give someone starting their own business? He told me that it costs, either in time or money, to acquire customers. You see most of the talented people I get the chance to work with have had to face up to perhaps the biggest challenge for any new business, building a loyal customer base who want to buy your products or services. Despite the incredible growth in Internet marketing and social media, people are mistaken if they think a couple of tweets, a website, and a few Facebook friends will bring new customers flooding in.

In truth, the digital age has created an amazing opportunity to access new markets, but at the same time has created far greater competition from providers all over the globe trying to provide better, or cheaper, services. So whilst accessing potential customers has never been cheaper, the increased choice of channel means that your marketing focus becomes potentially more thinly spread. The good news is that digital marketing provides an incredible opportunity for low cost, targeted marketing, whilst more traditional methods of attraction should not be ruled out.

If you have the budget, invest in a marketing strategy that gives you the bang for your buck, target your niche, and offer your potential customers an offer they cannot say no to, free information or support is a great place to start! If you haven’t got the budget, all is not lost, just be prepared to put the hours in, and start blogging, tweeting, and contributing to the debates in the communities where your target market spend their time. Be seen as an expert, and your audience will want more. But be warned, don’t fall in to the trap of thinking your time is free, investing a small amount in professional help, whether that is using a digital marketing consultant, or going direct to the various resources available on sites such Elance, can free up your time to enable you to focus on those activities that will enable you to deliver the products and services that your customers demand.

So customers do cost, and if you are not prepared to make the investment, then don’t expect customers to be knocking on your door. It at this point my coaching clients who are making the move from their corporate or public sector career go very pale, because when its your business, its your money, and your risk! Welcome to the cloud surrounding the silver lining, that is the work you love!

The Implications of Ethics on Business

When Margaret Thatcher stated there was no such thing as society, it seemed to mark the commencement of 20 years of economic growth fuelled by the concept of high personal reward for success, and the drive for greater and greater returns for shareholders. As Atrill & McLaney (2009, p12) point out, businesses are created by their owners (Shareholders) with the intention of enhancing those owners wealth.

During this time of relative economic prosperity, we witnessed several “ethical” scandals where business leaders appeared to put personal gain above the security of the shareholder investment, leading to false accounting and company collapses, typified by WorldCom, Enron, and Parlamat. However these fraudulent business activities did not seem to deter the dash for growth and commercial prosperity, and it was until the global banking crisis and the collapse of banks such as Lehman Brothers, that the question of the ethical approach of business leadership seemed to return to the agenda, particularly for politicians.

But do ethical CEO’s really have a social responsibility outside their consumer base, and should they actively support a decision that reduces shareholder wealth in the name of Ethics?

Leadership Ethics – The Theory

It would seem to me that a theory that is based on the work of Aristotle or Plato may just be a little confused! What seems clear is that there is this thing called ethical leadership, the concept of which most of us would support, but there is no theory of ethical leadership that appears to be a “comfortable fit” in articulating a best practice model.

Indeed, Knights & O’Leary (2006) point out the failings of various ethical leadership theories yet perhaps fail themselves to bring anything substantially new to the table.

Northouse (2010, pp 386-393) proposes 5 principles of ethical leadership:

• Ethical leaders respect others
• Ethical leaders serve others
• Ethical leaders are just
• Ethical leaders are honest
• Ethical leaders build community

Within this definition I can think of some very ethical leaders I have worked for. The overriding feeling I had with each of them was that they would always do the right thing, even if it financially disadvantaged them or the company. The most common examples I can remember are simple decisions where the company could have “got away with” accounting for some operational expenditure as capital expenditure, thus artificially enhancing the profits. Whilst there were perfectly legal ways of doing this, the ethical leaders somehow new where the line they must not cross was. They knew the difference between legally right and morally right!

Ethics – Beyond the P & L

Business ethics is not just about the legalities or moral responsibilities of business accounting. More companies are recognising the need to represent their shareholders in an ethical way in the way they trade with communities, countries, and the environment.

I was reminded this week of the dreadful events of a gas leak in a chemical factory in Bhopal, India, 25 years ago. (BBC Online News, 2010). No longer is it acceptable for western companies to run substandard divisions in developing countries, neglecting the welfare of their employees or contractors. But then again, even if Nike claims to have stopped kids sewing footballs together in “sweat shops”, they will be doing it for someone else.

At Banco Santander they invest heavily in University sponsorship and grants as a way of giving something back to the community. So is this the cleansing of the corporate sole or good PR!

Can there be such a thing as an ethical tobacco company, whose products are smoked by millions of children, throughout the world, causing addiction and ill health, as well as exacerbating poverty, or is this simply about supporting the ethics of freedom of choice?
Was the deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, about the ethical exploitation of natural resources to free the American people from external energy supply dependency, or the unethical exploitation of natural resources without consideration for the environmental risks? If you subcontract the drilling have you subcontracted the ethical responsibility?

Can an Arms manufacturing business produce and sell weapons systems that will knowingly be used to wage war between nations, ethically?

Can the pursuit of profit by an investment bank, betting on, and often causing the failure of others to makes its money be ethical?

The CEO’s of BP, BAE and BAT could fit Hothouse’s 5 principles of ethical leadership yet still, perhaps unfairly, be seen as unethical in their approaches to business.
The behaviour of an organisation and its leaders can have a significant impact on all those stakeholders involved. In BP, a failure to use caution in the assessment of the risk of equipment failure in deep water drilling, meant a failure to respond appropriately when disaster struck.

The consequence to shareholders has been enormous, both in terms of share value, and future business potential, franchisees who merely use BP as a supplier of fuel have had their gas stations vandalised across America, and as for the employees, when the ethics of an organisation are questioned, so are those of every employee.

After all, if you work for a tobacco company, you are supporting the consumption of cigarettes by everyone who smokes them, no matter what their age and background!

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the ethics of leadership are key for an organisations future growth, and whilst Knights & O’Leary (2006) dismiss the impact of the trait approach to leadership, I would argue that a common feature of the leaders of those business involved in huge financial frauds, is the presence of narcissism and psychopathy. Whilst there is an argument for traits not predicting leadership capability, identifying traits, or even personality disorders that would make someone unsuitable for leadership, may be a more effective deployment of personality measurement tools that measure the “big five” personality factors. (Myers 2007, pp 618-619)

The need for further research on ethical leadership is clear but this aspect of the leadership debate surely demands more empirical evidence and measurement of ethical leadership and its effect on performance. For whilst many companies portray themselves as ethical businesses with an eye on the social needs of those around them, I do not see too much evidence of mainstream businesses sacrificing today’s profits for tomorrows social and environmental needs.

References

Atrill, P. & McLaney, E (2009) Management Accounting for Decision Makers. 6th Edition. Harlow, England: Financial Times prentice Hall.
BBC News (2010) ‘Bhopal recalls gas leak disaster’. BBC News [online] available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/business/2009/bhopal/default.stm Accessed 12th June 2010.
Knights, D., & O’Leary, M. (2006) ‘Leadership, ethics and responsibility to the other’, Journal of Business Ethics, 67 (2), pp. 125–137, SpringerLink [Online]. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-006-9008-6 (Accessed: 11th June 2010).
Myers, D (2007) Psychology, Eighth Edition. New York, NY. Worth Publishing.
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.

The Authenticity of a Leader

As an executive coach I am sometimes asked to work with executives to help them improve their authenticity. This often involves helping them develop certain behaviours that may reflect either on their own values and beliefs, or perhaps the organisation they are working for. One of the topics I discuss with them is the idea of “fake it until you make it”, which I guess is a form of inauthentic authenticity!
The concept of authentic management is still developing, but seems to be based around the concept of owning your own personal experiences, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, wants values, which form oneself, and then behaving in accordance to that model of who you are. (Gardner et al 2005).

Northouse (2010, chapter 10) reflects the concept that authenticity is developable and therefore is not fixed or rigid. This is further reflected by Erickson (1995) as quoted by Gardner et al (2005) who states that this is not an either or state and therefore leaders can grow by becoming more authentic.

Authenticity and Leadership

Gardner et al (2005) propose a conceptual framework for authentic leader and follower development, with the concept that the antecedents, or catalyst of authentic leadership starts from the personal history and key trigger life events. A large dose of self awareness, enlightening the self view of Values, Identity, Emotions, and Motives/Goals, balanced with Self Regulation, which includes the internalised processes, balancing processes, the transparency of relationships, and behaviour that matches the values, goals and identity, sets the authentic model of behaviour that is then reflected or modelled by authentic followership.

Having worked with a number of CEO’s and Chairman in my career I can understand the validity of the concept of authenticity, as having a leader who is “real” and follows what they truly believe and value, is attractive to potential followers. Simply put, if you know your Leader is real and authentic and walks the talk, you will model this behaviour creating an authentic contagion across the organisation.

It is normally at this stage of any discussion on Leadership for someone to use Nelson Mandela as their example, and Northouse (2010, p213) doesn’t let us down! He discusses the strong moral values and conscience, which he believes are essential in an authentic leader, and indeed it was Mandela’s authenticity that allowed him to cross from terrorist to prisoner to transformational leader of his country. But was Mandela a strong morally authentic man in his early days fighting with the ANC? In truth I have no idea but I raise the point to emphasise that authentic behaviour can be learnt.

I worked for a CEO, intellectually and academically brilliant, who had strong and perhaps moral values, and authentically followed these values in his honest leadership of the business. He was also transparent, partly driven by his challenging and vocal style, yet he lacked the connectedness and positive disposition argued for in many authenticity models. He was ferocious in the way he challenged performance, yet you always knew there was no easy ride or emotionally engaging relationship on offer. So was he authentic?

Gardner et al (2005) posits the idea of identity, through the self –identification of fixing and expressing one’s own identity both internally through reflection and externally through the way you present yourself. Whilst I agree that this is a way to help become aware of your identity, I don’t accept the concept that it is either a fixed state or even well formed state, and that identity is an evolving thing that changes due to life events and experience. My point of this argument is that your identity, particularly your working identity, is something that becomes clearer with age and experience and as discussed by Ibarra (2004, chapter 1) tends to become apparent as we enter the second stage of our working life.

Therefore, the model of authentic leadership demands such a level of self awareness and indeed self acceptance or contentment, I would argue most of us never reach this point and those that do, take many years to do so.

The Role of Ethics and Morality in Authentic Leadership

The academic literature on this subject emphasises the importance of such things as values, compassion of the heart, trust, and integrity as vital ingredients of authentic leadership. The idea of self awareness, self-discipline, passion of purpose, combined with integrity, trust etc, implies an importance of morality as well as ethics within this model of leadership.

Can you be an authentic immoral leader? I guess not when you consider the importance of trust. However, who defines what is moral or ethical? Is it ethical or morale to hunt whales of scientific research, whilst putting whale meat in the shops of Japan, many Japanese would say yes! Is it ethical or morale to sell arms to a country who you know will use them to oppress its own people or against a neighbouring state?
My point here is that I accept the view proposed by Gardner et al (2005) that a clear ethical and morale boundary should be transparent within an organisation, I am just not sure that those boundaries have to be particularly ethical or morale to allow authentic leadership. In other words, having boundaries and living by them is more important than what they are. After all, it is matching the behaviour consistently with the vision, values, and identity of the leader that is the real issue of authenticity.

Conclusions

I struggle with the idea of a leadership model that seems unattainable for most people. My argument is that Garner et al (2005) have proposed such an idealised model of leadership that it simply doesn’t happen very often in reality.

They argue that trigger events in life stimulate the drive for personal development, but I would argue that to achieve the required level of self insight, belief, strength of morality and ethics to transport these into your new leadership self, trigger events need to be significant, and potentially traumatic. I am not convinced by the authors view that positive trigger events are equally as effective, for in my experience, feeling good about a positive event is not as effective as the huge drive bought on by life changing tragedies or difficult events that happen to us through our lives.

We then come to the influences in a business environment that move you away from always being able to behave in a way that always reflects your values. In other words, in business we all have to do things that are unpleasant, difficult, or that we disagree with, particularly when serving a shareholder base who are investment return focused rather than organisational behaviourally focused.

I see authentic leadership sitting well with the idea of finding your passion in life and seeking out the work you love (Williams1999). But the realities of corporate business life are that the contradictory demands placed upon leaders makes a true model of authentic leadership difficult to achieve. The lack of empirical evidence to prove the benefits of such approach hinder this cause further.

References

Gardner, W.L., Avolio, B.J., Luthans, F., May, D.R., & Walumbwa, F. (2005) ‘“Can you see the real me?” A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development’, The Leadership Quarterly 16 (3), pp. 343–372, ScienceDirect [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.003 (Accessed: 4th June 2010).
Ibarra, H. (2004) Working Identity; Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Boston, MA. Harvard Business School Press.
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.
Williams, N (1999) The work we were born to do; find the work you love, love the work you do. London, England. Harper Collins Publishers

The Relationship between Personality and Leadership

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing most businesses today is how do you identify and select great leaders? I have always found it curious how businesses invest millions in the assessment and development of talent, only to appoint a new CEO or executive team member after nothing more than a couple of interviews and a bland reference.

So what do you look for when selecting a new leader? Northouse, (2010, pp 15-109) discusses four specific approaches/models of what makes a successful leader. They are the trait approach, the skills approach, the style approach, and the situational approach.

A key question in the identification of great leaders is the relationship between personality and leadership.

The Value of Personality

Hogan & Kaiser (2005) define leadership as being about the performance of groups / teams. They argue that measuring personality is a valid predictor of leadership capability, when looked at from two perspectives, firstly how you think about yourself, and secondly, how others think about you, (Reputation).

The two aspects of reputation they identify are the bright side, or when our social performance is at its best (In interview for example), and the dark side, which reflects the impression you make when you are off guard, or at your worst.

The behaviours or tendencies you display in the dark side tend to be concealed by well practiced social skills, but over a longer time period, for instance in a work/career scenario, the dark side will negatively impact relationships with others.
Many well practiced and refined candidates perform well in interview, using their social skills to mask their true behaviour as a leader.

The use of a trait model, where certain personality characteristics are seen as predictors or indicators of good leadership, are able to give a below the surface profile of a potential leader, and provider sign posts to potential problems.

Hogan & Kaiser (2005) make the important connection between personality and organisational performance through the importance of leadership style (Shaped by personality) shaping employee attitudes and the effective functioning of the team, which subsequently drives, or hinders, organisational effectiveness.

Where personality is shaped in are younger years, and therefore less developable during are adult years, the skills approach focuses on the skills and knowledge required by a leader to be successful. (Northouse 2010 chapter 3)

The skills approach uses 3 skill areas, technical, human and conceptual and postulates that leadership ability is trainable. That is not to say that the skills model completely excludes the importance of personality as one of the three components of the skills model involves personal attributes which includes personality, cognitive ability and motivation.

The style approach to leadership emphasises the importance of behaviour, which is different from the personal characteristics approach of personality based models such as the trait approach. A big question of course is can leaders behave in a way that contradicts their natural characteristics or personality? Perhaps in the short term, but on an ongoing basis?

Using a tool such as the leadership grid appears to me to oversimplify the behaviours of leadership and shows little connection between the model of style and business performance. What good is a model, if it lacks predictive capabilities? Likewise who is to say that there is a certain style of leadership most suited to a specific situation!

Situational leadership recognises that certain leaders are more successful in certain situations and espouses the need for leaders to flex and adapt their style to match the situation. Leadership style within a situational model of leadership focuses on the two spectrums of support and direction, and requires behaviour to be adapted across both.

Conclusion

When you look at some of the underpinning drivers of leadership approaches such as style, situation, and skill, I would argue that personality plays an important part.

My issue with all these models, including the trait model, is that for all the research and academic debate that has gone on over the last half century, why are we still so poor at predicting leadership success?

Perhaps leadership of more of an art than a science and therefore the factors of success are less definable than we may wish for.

I have spent many years using personality measurement within the context of picking current and future leaders and would argue that the trait approach can be a useful tool in identifying who will not be successful in a leadership role. However, using an endless list of traits, based on some theoretical model of leadership, is in my experience pointless.

Using the big five however, (Myers 2007, pp618 -620) and being clear regarding the consequences of an individual’s profile on the role you are looking to fill can be a valuable process to undertake.

For me, businesses spend too much time looking to select people into a role and not enough focus on selecting people out of a role. In other words, identify those key characteristics, such as emotional instability, low drive, and a lack of conscientiousness, that should exclude a candidate from a process, and then consider their skills, style, and ability to adapt to different situations to inform your choice.

I used to work for a privately owned business that used an external assessment company to conduct a personality, cognitive and situational leadership assessment on every managerial candidate for a leadership role. Occasionally the business would make an appointment against the advice of the assessment, and in every case 18 months down the line issues would have arisen directly in line with the concerns the assessment report suggested. The lesson for me from this was that personality, when measure along with intellect, skills, and situational capability, makes an invaluable contribution to selection decisions.

A final though on this subject is the difference between Abell’s (2006) approach to linking leadership with strategy, a forward looking approach, and the immobility of approaches such as the skills approach, which appear more focused on management tasks rather than the leadership of future success. I would argue that this gives more support to the idea of using a personality based approach, such as that proposed by Hogan & Kaiser (2005), looking for that magic ingredient of leader who can transform the organisation, and more importantly transform the hearts and minds of the workforce.

References

Abell, D.F. (2006) ‘The future of strategy is leadership’, Journal of Business Research 59 (3), pp. 310–314, Science Direct [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2005.09.003 (Accessed: 14th May 2010).
Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R.B. (2005) ‘What we know about leadership’, Review of General Psychology 9 (2), pp. 169–180, PsycArticles [Online]. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.169 (Accessed: 15th May 2010).
Myers, D (2007) Psychology, 8th Edition. New York, NY. Worth Publishing
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.

Charismatic Leadership and its impact on Performance

Would you class Nelson Mandela as a charismatic leader? He transformed his country and bought racially divided groups closer together, yet his political speeches lasted for hours and were often incoherent.

How about Winston Churchill? This was a man who was able to bring the British people together to fight Nazism, yet was hardly ever seen in public, every speech he gave was extensively rehearsed, and he spent most of the day intoxicated through the excessive consumption of champagne, claret and brandy!

How about Robert Mugabe, he bought two tribal factions together to oust white rule and has followed a policy of redistributing land and wealth to veterans of the war of independence, yet has seen his country become one of the most poverty stricken on earth?

So who is the charismatic leader and how has this impacted the performance of his team?

The attraction of a Charismatic Leader

The research into transformational and charismatic leadership suggests a high level of attraction to charismatic leaders through an appeal of common values and ideals. Transformational leadership consists of four distinct dimensions:

• Idealised Influence (Charisma)
• Inspirational Motivation
• Intellectual Stimulation
• Individualised consideration

In this model charisma is only a component of transformational leadership whilst we can argue that they are either one in the same, or that charismatic leadership is the primary driver of successful leadership.

House (1976) model of charismatic leadership was based around four personality characteristics

• Dominant
• Desire to Influence
• Self-Confident
• Strong Moral Values

Within charismatic leaders these personality characteristics lead on to certain behaviours which then have an effect on followers.

Key amongst these displayed behaviours are acting as a strong role model of the values and beliefs they want to see their follower adopt, an air of competence, they articulate morale goals, they communicate high expectations of followers and display confidence that they will be achieved, and finally they arouse a task level motivation amongst their followers.

I would argue that it is this arousal within followers of a desire to deliver that makes charismatic leaders sought after by their followers.

The affective influence processes followed by charismatic leaders are based on creating positive emotions within both themselves and their followers, and therefore it is this emotional engagement that connects followers with their leaders. Charismatic leaders use powerful emotions to arouse similar feelings in their followers.

Does Charismatic Leadership equal improved performance?

The argument for improving performance through charismatic leadership is based on the idea of building an emotional contract of engagement that uses positive emotions to motivate followers into conducting work based tasks more effectively. Having a clearly communicated vision is a key aspect of charismatic leadership and the importance of this is echoed by Abel (2006) who links effective leadership with Strategy, an important component of which is a clear vision.

However, an argument around charismatic leadership is the collective will being placed above individual gain to achieve a common vision built by a charismatic leader, leading to higher performance.

This argument appears to be a contradiction to the work of Houghton & Yoho (2005) whose contingent model of leadership is based around self-leadership through psychological empowerment. Can you have self leadership and charismatic leadership side by side?

With charismatic leadership drawing its roots from personality, where is the consideration of what Hogan & Kaiser (2005) would refer to as the dark side or the consequence of this personality based approach to leadership. Whilst Ilies et al (2006) may be happy to dismiss some of the most hated dictators in history as pseudo-charismatic leaders, in it for themselves rather than real charismatic leaders who have a powerful morale core, I don’t buy the concept of selfless leaders in the commercial business world.

Whether it be ego, greed, pride, vanity, or the call of a greater good, leadership that strives to focus followers on a perhaps unquestioned delivery of a goal or purpose are replacing individual ownership of self performance with a personality based follower process that often, in the commercial world leads eventually to the moral corruption of a business, such as WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Maxwell group, Northern Rock etc.

Conclusion

I have always enjoyed working for a charismatic leader who provides a compelling sense of purpose and rallies the troops to a common cause. But modern leadership is surely about the inclusion of a flexible contribution from a diverse and talented group of individuals.

The nature of the relationship between organisation and employee has also moved from a relationship based psychological contract to a transactional based psychological contract, which again in my view undermines the effectiveness of charismatic leadership.

A final thought that comes to mind is if charismatic leadership was the secret to organisational performance, why do shareholders not demand this in their leaders of businesses? Are there not more grey suited accountants running businesses in the FTSE 100 than there are charismatic leaders?

Mandela, Churchill & Mugabe were all, I would suggest, Charismatic leaders, at least in the eyes of their followers, for as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps charisma is in the eye of the follower!

References
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