How's your charisma ? Plus, a brief update.

Is charisma important to leadership and does it matter more than anything else?

I’ve been reading an FT article called The art of charisma. (2nd August 2025.) It makes some interesting claims, such as:

Who wins elections, whose ideas spread, whose companies attract attention - the answer is often less rational than we think. The messenger often matters more than the message.

Possibly the best rule in politics is that, in a genuine two-horse race, the more charismatic candidate will win. Barack Obama beat John McCain and Mitt Romney. Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton (and the second version of Biden.) Charisma helps explain the success of populists like Georgia Meloni…and progressives like Jacinda Arden.)

Dull candidates do win, but generally only when the fundamentals lean heavily in their favour. When Keir Starmer won the UK elections, some commentators wondered whether the public was ready for sobriety. Fat chance. A year later, Nigel Farage leads the polls.

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Is this generally true?

When I think back to my early days as a teacher, as an acting Head/Principal and then as a newbie Head, my memories of my colleagues in our area or school district are all of those people who stood out from the crowd in some way. I literally can’t remember any of those who stayed below the parapet, however good they might have been otherwise.

When I think back to the teachers with whom I worked in my schools and the hundreds of teachers and leaders I have worked with in the UK and around the world since then, the same thing happens. My memories are of those colleagues who somehow stood out a little, who weren’t always frightened of saying or doing something that wasn’t completely in line with the current orthodoxy.

When I think of all the children and students I have spoken with and asked them about who they think are the ‘best’ teachers in their schools, their answers are almost always those who a) helped them learn b) had a sense of humour c) who responded fairly to everyone and d) those who brought a certain quirkiness to their classes that caught the attention of the students and built their allegiance to their teacher.

It makes a kind of sense.

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But the article, rightly, goes on to say that ‘charisma often doesn’t overlap with competence. We pick charismatic leaders in the hope that they may turn out to be competent or, at least, be restrained by others.’

That makes sense to me, too. Some of those charismatic school leaders and teachers I remember were amazing across all fronts, but others were verging on incompetence in their schools or their classrooms. During my time as a school inspector for the UK government, I and my colleagues would frequently come across parents who loved their school Head but had no idea of the shambles that was happening in the school on a day to day basis.

The story is that in Donald Trump’s first term his charismatic influence on his base was tempered by the saner members of his cabinet who had long-time experience of governance. Now, in his second-term, his choices for his cabinet seem to include very few people who might be able to restrain him.

Charisma might matter but it isn’t the only thing that matters.

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Turning to learning, we can see that charisma and competence both matter.

If we want to make our schools learning-focused or even more learning-focused someone has to take our school’s stakeholders - other leadership colleagues, teachers, parents, board members, governors and many others with them. It requires a certain amount of charisma to enable people to believe that this is an action and a change worth investing in.

But if we want the systems and structures that underpin a learning-focused school to become sticky we need one or more colleagues who are more than competent enough to ensure that everything works smoothly on a day-to-day basis.

The fun-fair ride may look enthralling and exciting but when we pay to go on it we do so in the hope that someone somewhere is checking and monitoring its safety every day.

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I guess it would be easy to put charisma in the hands of the school leader and competence in the hands of the school’s or organisation’s management team. Superficially this makes sense. But, in many organisations, the real leaders emerge because they demonstrate a charisma that brings people toward them. These leaders aren’t always those who sit at the top of the organisation’s organogram.

What matters in learning-focused schools is that we have both charisma about learning and competence in organising learning. Where it is doesn’t matter that much but it does matter that it is there. As we get ready to start the 25/26 northern hemisphere school year or go back to school from the winter break in the southern hemisphere, we need to ask, as school leaders and class teachers, whether we have both, where they are located and, if we don’t have one or the other, where we are going to find them from. Together, scattered through our organisation, they can make learning fly.

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Finally, a brief update. My planning for the 25/26 series of Looking for Learning is going well right now. The big change of the past few weeks is that having launched the beta version of a possible podcast, a number of people got in touch to say they liked it (thanks!) and some to say that they would also like, for themselves and their colleagues, to have all of the Substacks so far as audio podcasts. I’m working on this to see whether it will be possible without taking too long. Hopefully, it will. Watch this space.

See you soon.

Martin