Let's face it: charisma matters | John Antonakis | TEDxLausanne Video Lecture | Understanding the art of Public Speaking: Become a better speaker - Self Help Learning

Translator: Cecilia Hu
Reviewer: Samuel Lagier
Ok.
Take a look at this guy.
And by show of hands,
and everyone please participate,
who thinks he wanted to be
an economist when he grew up?
A lawyer?
Ok. One or two.
A heavy metal bassist?
Ok. Yeah!
We think a face tells a lot.
Does it?
It's not Bon Jovi in the picture.
I am.
(Laughter)
A misguided, indiscreet, 17 year old
who initially wanted to be
an economist.
But now I study psychology.
I also study faces,
you'll see why in a minute,
and, charisma.
I grew up in South Africa
which cultivated my interest in charisma.
I saw my dad as a community leader
running for about a dozen elections
and winning most of them.
I saw my mum managing her shop
and getting the most out of her staff.
I saw South Africa transition peacefully
from aparteid to democracy
mostly because of one great leader.
Nelson Mandela.
So, I have often wondered,
what is charisma?
Can it be measured?
Can it be developed?
I became a professor in the Faculty
of Business and Economics
at the university of Lausanne.
But at times,
I felt like a particle physicist
studying the Higgs field.
Charisma is hard to define,
hard to measure,
but its effects are evident to see.
Like the Higgs field charisma gives mass,
gravitas,
not to particles, but to social movements.
Just when I thought I was beginning
to make a bit of progress,
in 2005 my world was turned upside down.
A study published in the journal Science
by Alex Todorov's lab
at Princeton University,
showed that naive subjects
were able to predict
the results of congressional elections
merely by rating the faces
of the winner and runner up.
What? I thought when I heard it.
Impossible!
Only in America!
(Laughter)
Would this work in Europe?
So you can better understand what they did
take a look at these two guys.
By show of hands, who of the two
seems more competent?
More intelligent?
More leader-like?
Who thinks the guy on the right?
Ok. A couple of hands there.
The guy on the left?
Ok. Evident majority
and the majority got it right!
Now, you don't know them.
These two guys
ran for the Wisconsin senate seat.
On the right, is Timothy Michels,
a Republican.
On the left is Russell Feingold,
a Democrat.
Who actually went on to win.
Whether a pro- or anti- whatever,
pro-gun, anti-gun, pro-God, anti-God,
pro-gay, anti-gay -
in a couple of seconds,
a room of a couple of hundred people
predicted the voting outcomes
of a couple of million
who had a lot more information
than you did.
Is there something in politician's faces
that signals their competence,
or do we carry some evolutionary baggage
that biases our judgement
towards more beautiful, more symmetric
and healthy looking faces?
I repeated the experiments here.
Suprisingly, Swiss subjects
were able to predict the results
of French parliamentary run off elections.
(Laughter)
To entertain the evolutionary argument
I re-ran the experiments with young,
very young children from 5 to 13 years.
Now, such young children don't know
competence, intelligence or leadership,
but they do know what a boat captain is.
So we asked them to play a boat game
and they had to select the boat captain
from among the pairs of faces
of the French elections.
(Laughter)
The kids were as accurate as the adults.
A 71% hit rate at the individual level,
and 85% hit rate
when we averaged the results.
A kid of 5 or 65 "voted" in the same way.
Come, let's try it here
with some election races
from my experiments.
Who thinks the guy on the right
would make a better boat captain?
Evident majority.
I don't even need to go to the left.
Let's try the next one.
Who says the guy on the right?
Ok, 2 or 3 hands.
The guy on the left?
Ok you guys are doing amazing!
Two more to go.
This is a test to see how normal you are.
Ok, don't laugh!
(Laughter)
They haven't chosen their faces, ok.
Who says the guy on the right?
Ok, hardly anyone.
The guy on the left?
Alright, evident majority.
Last pair.
Who says the lady on the right?
Ok, majority already.
Fantastic! Well done.
You guys did excellent. 5 out of 5.
You are normal,
just like the 5 five year olds!
Give yourselves a round of applause.
Come on. Yeah, yeah you passed the test.
(Applause)
Ok.
That's how I felt when I actually
published these results
in the journal Science.
I was rocking. I was the man.
On top of the world!
But, in private, faced, yeah, faced
with this result, I wondered,
what am I suppose to teach?
(Laughter)
What am I supposed to teach
if one's ability to succeed as a leader
depends on one's face?
How could I justify my professorship?
Should I change career
and become a plastic surgeon?
(Laughter)
I have found similar "face effects"
in a variety of situations.
In politics, in academia
and the business world.
Some expert I was on leadership.
I knew nothing!
But one thing I knew for sure,
is that we have a tag around our necks.
People size us up on how we look;
our face, height, whatever
and put a price on the tag.
If we look like a million dollars,
they fill in the blanks
and assume we have
lots of positive characteristics.
If we don't look like a million dollars,
well, then we have a problem.
(Laughter)
So I set out on a mission.
How can we change the price
people put on our tag?
The answer - with charisma.
Charisma is symbolic influence
rooted in values and emotions.
By symbolic I mean, represents something.
Stands for something.
Something that can be seen,
touched and smelled.
Let me show you the results of six studies
my co-authors and I have undertaken
all focusing on that alchemic ability
to connect.
We narrowed charisma down to several
charismatic leadership tactics,
which I will describe in a bit.
In the first study we filmed EMBA students
giving a speech.
Then we trained them to use the tactics
and filmed them again.
Independent judges rated the speeches.
We found that the EMBA students were able
to double their use
of the charismatic leadership tactics.
Charisma could be taught
and the more charismatic
leadership tactics were in the talk,
the more the students were seen
as leader-like by others.
This study is important
because we controlled
for communication skills
and for the constant effects
due to the target person,
which includes their face,
what they look like.
The EMBA students were able to change
the price people put on their tags.
We found the same results
in a field experiment with managers.
We replicated this
using only women leaders.
The use of these tactics
is not the province of men.
With these tactics we can predict
who will become the President
of the United States of America
and this, controlling for incumbency
and for macro-economic effects.
Recently we've been interested to see
the impact of charisma
on worker performance.
We recruited 106 temporary workers,
to prepare postal mail
for a fundraising campaign
on behalf of a charity.
Unbeknown to the workers,
we randomised them
into one of three conditions.
In the first group, the baseline,
the workers had no bonuses and received
a standard motivational speech
given by an actor.
A rather normal looking kind of guy.
I guess you would agree.
We motivated the second group with bonuses
for good performance and they received
the same standard speech too.
The third group, had no bonuses
but received a charismatic
motivational speech.
(Laughter)
Relative to the baseline, both bonuses
and charisma, significantly increased
worker performance,
and their effects
were statistically indistinguishable.
This charisma result is crazy
because it's not well explained
by current economic theory.
We got increased performance,
basically for free.
(Laughter)
And, charisma significantly decreased
production costs.
We got increased performance
without paying economic incentives!
Finally, we know that charisma works
in the micro-blogosphere, Twitter,
where text is limited to 140 characters.
We tracked 30 politicians and 30 CEOs
for three months
and coded all their tweets,
about 3000 of them.
The more charismatic tactics tweets had,
the more they were retweeted
by the followers.
Going from zero to four tactics
increased retweets by over 450%.
I know you're wondering,
"What are these charismatic tactics?"
I'll let you in on a secret.
It's quite simple, really.
To connect, a leader must do three things.
First, frame to give the vision.
Paint a picture and focus attention
by using methaphor, stories
and other techniques.
I'll give you examples of these in a bit.
Second, provide substance
for the justification,
express the sentiments of the collective,
and give confidence in goals.
Third, deliver in an animated
and passionate way, using voice,
gestures and other tactics.
So let me show you an example
of how not to do it.
Cognitive psychology theory suggests
that when a target is described
on a configuration of traits,
whether clustered under an implicit
or explicit prototype,
perceivers speciously impute the target
with other traits that correlate
with the original traits
or with the prototype,
but which are not used
to describe the target.
What did I just say?
(Laughter)
Ok. Now maybe this kind of communication
is useful when speaking
to a cognitive psychologist,
or to Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory.
(Laughter)
Isn't it more engaging to hear -
and I'm going to say the same thing
I just said a few seconds ago -
We all have a tag around our necks.
People size us up on how we look,
our face, height, whatever
and put a price on the tag.
If we look like a million dollars,
they fill in the blanks
and assume we have
lots of positive characteristics.
Now that was an example of using metaphor.
Metaphors simplify, aid in recall
and provide a visual.
In fact, charisma is all about
being able to get a vision across,
that sticks.
There are a variety of ways to do this.
Let me give you another example.
So you may be wondering,
"Can I learn charisma?"
"If I use the tactics,
will people notice
that I am using them?"
"Would using them
make my team more effective?"
I used the following combination:
Rhetorical questions,
which create a puzzle,
an intrigue to be solved.
A list of three. Why three?
Well, three is indicative of a pattern,
suggests completeness and sounds nice.
Did you notice?
Three reasons!
I also expressed the sentiments
of the collective,
to close the psychological gap between us.
How about the following combination?
We're not here to talk about
academic mumbo jumbo.
We're here to talk about
the practical realities of leadership
and it is your duty to exercise it
in a morally responsible
and effective way. Is it not?
I focused your attention using a contrast,
"We're not here to do this, but that,"
capturing the sentiments
of the collective too.
Hands up, who here wants to listen
to academic mumbo jumbo?
Ok. No one. I thought so!
Sometimes we have one or two
Sheldons in the room.
(Laughter)
I turned the contrast
into a three-part list
and I finished it off
with a rhetorical question.
I also used moral conviction,
one of the key tactics,
which signals one's values
and makes a contract
on which one is to be judged.
Now there are other tactics,
like telling captivating stories
which creates identification
with the protagonists,
aids in seeing the vision
and really recounting the moral message.
Of course, delivery is very important too.
Now, there might be some of you
in the audience still thinking,
"Yeah right, are you kidding me?"
"Are you telling me
that metaphors and stories
will make a difference?"
Yes they can.
Remember the experiment I showed you
with the actor?
Where we found
that charisma and bonuses
got the same
increase in performance?
Well, when I first proposed
that we use metaphors and stories
to motivate the workers
in the charismatic condition,
my co-authors, who are economists,
were very skeptical
that metaphors and stories
would make workers work harder.
So, they tried their best to convince me
to take the stuff out,
but I held firm and we kept it in,
because I truly believed
in the power of words.
Let me tell you what finally happened.
In one part of the actor's speech,
he was urging the workers to prepare
as many letters as possible
for the fundraising drive.
In the standard speech condition,
whether without bonuses or with bonuses,
we asked him to say something like this
to the workers,
and I'm very briefly summarising.
He told the workers to see
how many people were in the room.
And all the other people
we had hired to do this task.
That every extra letter they prepared
could potentially make
a life changing change
to a child who had cancer or whatever.
But in the charisma condition,
we told him to say the following:
So you might think,
"Well, I'll just do what I have to.
Will my extra effort help?"
Yes it will!
This reminds me of a story of an old man
who, while walking along the seashore,
saw a young girl picking up starfish
and throwing them into the sea.
The old man approached her saying,
"What are you doing?"
She replied, "I'm picking up starfish
and throwing them into the sea,
because the sun's coming up
and the starfish will die."
"But," said the man,
"there are thousands of starfish
the sun's already high
and the tide is going out.
How can you possibly make a difference?"
The girl bent down, picked up a starfish
threw it into the sea and said,
"Well, I made a difference to that one."
Now when you have time,
go back and see what tactics
I used throughout my presentation.
I'm sure you'll have fun
trying out these tactics
in your everyday lives.
Put the price you want, on your tags.
Then, go out there and make a difference!
So, what are you going to do?
Thank you,
and a big thanks to my co-authors
and to my family too,
who have taught me
so much about leadership.
Thanks. Thank you!
(Applause)