The Surprising Science Behind Charisma—and Why Compassion Comes First

Here’s the Leadership Trap No One Warns You About

As you rise in leadership, something curious, and dangerous, can happen.

The part of your brain responsible for perspective-taking, for understanding others’ viewpoints, can actually shrink.

It’s not because you’ve stopped caring. It’s because power, when left unchecked, can insulate. And in that insulation, your greatest leadership asset starts to dull: your ability to connect.

I opened my recent episode of The Enlightened Executive with this exact warning. Why? Because your influence doesn’t come from control or command. It comes from how you make others feel in your presence. And that starts with compassion.

My guest, Heather Hansen, a former trial attorney turned influence coach, calls this blend compassionate charisma. And she believes it’s not just a nice-to-have. It’s a must for leaders who want to inspire action, not just compliance.

Why Compassion Fuels Charisma

Most people think charisma is something you’re born with. Heather disagrees. She cites research from Dr. John Antonakis, a leadership scientist who identified 12 evidence-based behaviors that make leaders appear more charismatic, and more effective.

But here’s the catch: If these behaviors aren’t grounded in genuine care, people can feel the disconnect. Heather explained:

“Charisma without compassion is manipulation. Compassion without charisma is just kindness. But when you combine them? That’s when people follow you because they want to, not because they have to.”

In other words, true leadership influence starts with intention. Are you here to serve… or to be seen?

The Science Behind Charisma

Antonakis’ 12 charismatic behaviors fall into two categories: verbal and nonverbal. Here are a few standouts leaders can start practicing today:

• Metaphors and stories: Our brains are wired to remember stories over statistics. Use them to anchor your message.
• Moral conviction: Speak from your values. People follow clarity.
• Facial expressiveness and body movement: Yes, your posture and gestures matter, they amplify your energy and help people feel your message.
• Emotional connection: Acknowledge emotion, especially in high-stakes moments. That’s not weakness, it’s presence.

But before you race to memorize the list, remember behaviors alone won’t get you there. The mindset matters just as much as the method.

Action Steps You Can Take This Week

Here’s how to apply compassionate charisma in your leadership today:

1. Start your next meeting with intention. Ask: How do I want people to feel after this? Energized? Heard? Clear? Set the tone with presence, not performance.
2. Use the “mirror test.” After you speak, ask yourself: Would I follow me right now? If not, recalibrate your energy or delivery.
3. Practice perspective-taking. The neuroscience tells us this is a muscle, and it atrophies with power unless we train it. Slow down. Ask your team more questions. Listen fully before responding.
4. Check your “influence blind spot.” Are you leaning too much on authority and not enough on empathy? Tools like the Enneagram can help uncover where your style may be over-functioning.

Final Thought

Leadership isn’t about being the most polished in the room. It’s about being the most pattern aware. Compassionate charisma is the new edge because influence today requires connection, not control.

The good news? Charisma isn’t luck. It’s learnable.

And when you lead from both head and heart, you don’t just get results; you build trust, spark loyalty, and unlock something far more powerful: willing followership.

Episode Transcript

Susan Drumm: Here’s the leadership trap no one warned you about: as you gain power, the part of your brain that sees other people’s perspectives can actually shrink. Which means the higher you rise, the easier it is to miss what your team is trying to tell you. Today we get into compassionate charisma and how to rebuild that perspective muscle on purpose.

I’m Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership revolution. Each week we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs grow in leadership and in life.

My guest today is a former trial attorney, Heather Hansen, and she breaks down what charisma actually is, why compassion has to come first, and the small shifts that make people follow you because they want to.

Heather is a former trial attorney and seasoned business advisor who merges two decades of courtroom experience with her expertise in psychology, hypnosis, and dispute resolution. Heather is the CEO of BeliefBuilders and has shared her insights at venues like Harvard Business School, Google, and Stanford, and has appeared on platforms such as the Today Show, CNN, Fox Business, Dr. Phil, and Dr. Oz.

Heather, it’s so great to have you on the show. Welcome.

Heather Hansen: Susan, I’m so happy to be here.

Susan Drumm: So the interesting thing is we’re both former attorneys, although I never ended up practicing. I went to law school and took the bar in New York and could have practiced but decided not to, and went into consulting. Did you end up practicing? Tell us a little bit about your career journey.

Heather Hansen: I sure did practice. I went to Villanova Law — I had a psychology degree undergrad, and I went to law school knowing I wanted to be a trial attorney, and I tried cases. I started working at the firm where I stayed my entire career while I was in law school, and it happened to be a medical malpractice defense firm. So I defended doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers for twenty years and tried a lot of cases.

I loved it — loved it at the beginning, and then I got tired of it. I knew I never wanted to retire, so I started thinking about what else I could do, and I got certified to be a mediator, thinking I could help people resolve issues before they had to go to trial. That turned out to be kind of boring to me. Then I wrote my first book, The Elegant Warrior, in 2019, and that led to speaking opportunities and a lot of people asking me to coach them, so I started doing that work.

Then I gave some speeches, which led to a lot of work within organizations creating curriculum around communication skills — the things we use in the courtroom to win, and how they can be used outside the courtroom. So now my business is focused solely on communication skills, primarily for healthcare organizations, providers, and teams, but also leaders of all kinds. I’ve done work with Google, LVMH, Harvard Business School, and lots of financial advisors. I’ve run the gamut, but I really focus on healthcare providers, because I think they have to face such difficult conversations and they’re not trained on how to have those conversations. That feels like the next curve of my career.

Susan Drumm: So, helping people communicate better — in what format particularly? I’m thinking about your trial experience — tell us a little bit about that transition and what flavor you bring to that work.

Heather Hansen: When I first started, I talked about it on my first website, which was called Advocate to Win, and I talked about the difference between communicating and advocating. When you communicate, Susan, you share perspectives — you and I right now are communicating. There’s a slight difference when you’re advocating, because when you’re advocating you want to change someone’s perspective. Sometimes you do both, but sometimes it’s really a different endeavor, and I think a lot of people don’t recognize that.

But in the courtroom, that was the whole plan — you had to change a jury’s perspective. And I will say this: in my cases, every single juror was a patient. Everybody is a patient, including me and the doctor and everybody else. I never had a doctor on my jury — sometimes I’d have nurses, but never a doctor. So I really did have to change perspectives, because everyone had the perspective of a patient, the other side. There are specific skills you can use to do that, and that’s a lot of what I continue to teach today — using your body, building credibility, using compassion, which I know we’re going to talk about today, using charisma, in order to not only get people to see your perspective but then to also embrace it and take action because they have done so.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s one of the fundamental skills that leaders need to be good at, which is helping shift perspective. I talk about it in the form of patterns — helping people see patterns, helping them shift that pattern. But a lot of that is the default way people are doing things. It becomes the water you swim in, and it’s not necessarily obvious that there’s another way, another viewpoint to look at. So bringing some of these skills, I think, would be incredibly valuable.

Heather Hansen: I talk all the time — in fact, the compassion piece is a lot about seeing other people’s perspectives. My TEDx talk was on that, because I do think you’re right. I think it was the biggest gift, to be honest, of being a trial attorney, because I had to see the other side. I always say you can’t win unless you know how you can lose — you have to see the things they can use to win and why someone might find for them, and see the world from their perspective, and then you can address it and take it down and fight it and build your own.

But I think a lot of people, especially today, don’t want to — they want to put blinders on and say, “This is what I believe,” and that’s fine, but it’s going to make you far less effective as a communicator, an advocate, and a leader.

Susan Drumm: Yeah. Now, you’ve shared that what’s really fundamentally required is compassionate charisma. So let’s break that down — what do you mean by that, and how can we go a level underneath?

Heather Hansen: Charisma is this term that’s sort of thrown around, and when you ask people to define it, I think the way most people I work with think of it is something like, “When I leave the room, they’re going to talk about how good I was, how well-spoken I was, what a great speaker and presenter.” The way I like to define charisma is: it’s not what they say about you when you leave the room, it’s what they do. Do you compel them to take the action that you want them to take? That’s the charisma piece.

We can talk about what the research actually shows makes that happen, but first you need to have compassion. The way I look at compassion is you see things through the other person’s perspective, and then you act to help that perspective. If you ground yourself in compassion first, then the charisma — and the specific things you have to do to have charisma — can come out of that in a way that helps everyone and is far more effective.

Susan Drumm: And so I would imagine that working with a leader to ground themselves in compassion might look a couple of different ways. What mistakes do you often see leaders make? They say, “Oh yeah, I’m compassionate” — how are they actually showing up, and what do you do to help shift them?

Heather Hansen: Well, one of the things that’s hard for leaders — and I feel badly for them — is research shows, and it’s understandable, that the part of your brain that’s good at seeing other people’s perspectives gets smaller as you get more power. There are actually MRI studies that show this is true. And of course that makes sense — if you think about it, we came from gorillas and apes, and as gorillas and apes get more powerful, they don’t care what the less powerful ones think, because they don’t have to. The same is true for us as leaders — as we become more powerful, we forget what it’s like to need to look at what other people are thinking.

So it really is about building that skill back up. There are exercises you can do, but also just asking questions is a great way to build that skill back up — “What am I missing?” is a great question to ask, because then you start to see that you are missing the way a lot of people see it. You also have to have people in your life — John Quincy Adams is an example of this; his wife was really good at telling him, “You’re missing something, you’re not seeing this.” You need people who are willing to speak truth to power and say there’s a whole perspective you are missing, because that’s the biggest thing. I think most leaders want to do the right thing and want to serve their people and want to have compassion, but it’s almost impossible when you only see the world from one perspective.

Susan Drumm: Yes. And I think many times leaders don’t realize how difficult it is for someone to actually tell them what they’re seeing, and that it’s a different perspective. So you have to be extremely cautious about your response to that, because if it’s not invitational, if it’s not welcoming, you will not get it again.

Heather Hansen: That’s right, that’s right. And curiosity is a big thing that I talk about — it’s the willingness to be open to feedback and weigh it before you dismiss it, to think about what their experience would have to be for them to say that thing, even if it’s negative feedback about your leadership. What would they have to have felt and experienced to feel that way about you as a leader? At least considering it makes you a stronger leader. It doesn’t mean you have to always accept the feedback or think of it as true, but if you’re not willing to see that other people are seeing you that way, you can’t decide whether or not you want to change it.

Susan Drumm: Yes. And I think part of that is the skill of not giving immediate pushback when someone comes to say they see it differently. That is something — as leaders we think we need to set direction, but even if you think that person is way off base, take a beat. Say, “That’s interesting, let me see if I understand your perspective,” so they feel heard, they feel understood, and then you can say, “I see it differently, here’s what I see.” You’re shifting — but so many times, I see this particularly with Enneagram type-eight leaders: they’ll tell you they really want their team to give them feedback, and they don’t understand why the team won’t give them feedback. What they don’t understand is the energy of their response when they’re getting feedback, because they don’t shy away from conflict — they think their strength in communicating their perspective is well received, but the reality is it’s shutting people down.

Heather Hansen: Exactly, I see that. So there are skills that I’m sure you talk more about — like how you take that pause, how you really have people feel heard, and how you reframe it back to them. And it’s skills that you probably tap into too, Susan — the active listening. But I think your point is really a good one. I think we don’t talk enough about respect. When you dismiss someone’s feedback, they feel disrespected. It’s one of the things that in the courtroom, juries hate disrespect. They hate it. They will award huge amounts of money if they think a healthcare provider, for example, has disrespected a patient or a caregiver — so you see how important that is to human beings. The courtroom is such a great teacher.

And what you’re talking about, that dismissiveness of someone’s feedback to a leader — so much of this, especially today, has to do with efficiency, right? “I’m in a rush, I don’t have time.” But you’ve got to remember that respect is a basic human expectation, and if people aren’t feeling like they get it, it’s going to cause real upset in the organization.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, absolutely. So we have that piece. Is there more you want to discuss there, or do you want to move to the charisma part?

Heather Hansen: Well, no. I just think that people need to recognize — and this again comes from the medical research, but it applies everywhere — there’s a gentleman named Dr. Stephen Trzeciak who did some research on: okay, patients want to be treated compassionately, but what does that actually mean? What are the actions we have to take to show compassion? There are nine of them. We won’t go through all of them, but they’re important, because they’re the same things a leader can do.

Focus on me when I’m talking to you — don’t have distractions. Don’t put your computer between you and me; in the hospital, that’s putting the computer between you and the patient. Sit down. Sitting down is a huge one — sit down to talk to me, sit down to give me feedback, don’t stand at the door. Speak to me by name — also huge. Ask my opinion about the things we’re talking about, or the things you want me to do. These are specific actions. It’s not just “be compassionate,” this fluffy thing — there are specific actions you can take to show your compassion that other people feel as compassion, and it has so much value for the relationship.

Susan Drumm: What have you found for the healthcare providers who are able to do this, in terms of their outcomes?

Heather Hansen: It’s huge. There’s a book here — let me pull it up, because it’s sitting right here. It’s the Trzeciak book. It’s a big, fat book that is just filled with the ROI of compassion in medicine, and it applies to all leaders — anyone listening, if you’re not in medicine, it doesn’t matter. This book shows that when physicians and providers show compassion to their patients, the patients get better faster. They have better results, they have less pain. The hospitals make more money — so it’s about the bottom line as well. And also, very important for your leaders: they’re less likely to burn out.

Sometimes, especially in medicine, we worry about compassion fatigue, and it can be the same for leaders in any organization — financial services, with the economy going up and down the way it is right now, a lot of people feel as though, “Oh my gosh, I’m running out of compassion at the end of the day,” and they worry that if they put themselves too much in the shoes of their clients, their customers, their colleagues, they will have that fatigue. But this research shows that that’s just not true.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, absolutely, that is so fascinating. So when you think about the results that can get produced — until you do that compassion piece, it’s going to be very difficult to shift perspective. And I know we’re all under the gun, and we just want to say, “Just do it my way, just do it this way, just get it done,” right? But you’re actually not going to produce the result you want. You’ll probably need less handholding if you invest the time on the front end.

Heather Hansen: A hundred percent. And the thing you do is you turn everyone around you into your advocates. A good advocate turns the people around them into their advocates. So you don’t have to hold their hands, because the other people in the organization are so beholden to you — they respect you, they feel that you give compassion to them, and therefore they’re loyal to you, and they’re out there saying, “Let’s do this, let’s make this happen, let’s be of service, let’s do this thing.” You’ve really turned your team into a team of advocates.

Susan Drumm: Great. So the charisma piece — tell us a little bit more, because it’s always, “Gosh, it would be so great to have charisma,” right? Some call it executive presence, or gravitas — there are different flavors of it. How do you define it, and what moves the needle on it?

Heather Hansen: So, I am a big — again, the lawyer thing comes through — in the courtroom I can’t just talk about things, I have to have evidence to back it up. So I’m big on research and science, making sure we’re not just throwing these things around. There’s a gentleman named Dr. John Antonakis who is the premier researcher on charisma, and his studies are extremely well validated — he’s sort of obsessed with it, he wants to make sure he’s actually showing that these things move the needle.

One of his studies — he had a bunch of people who were temps, and they had to fill envelopes. One group was given more money as motivation to fill the envelopes, a second group was given a motivational speech, and a third group was given a charismatic speech. The people given the charismatic speech filled more envelopes than those given more money.

Susan Drumm: So they were more driven to make a change in their action, right? And that’s what we want as leaders — we want people to change their actions, more than money did.

Heather Hansen: And he’s done all kinds of research like this, and he breaks it down. There’s twelve things — I’m not going to remember all twelve, but there are twelve things he lays out that are the composite of a charismatic speech. For your leaders, they are things like — and this is an important one, because today there’s a huge trend toward storytelling. Storytelling is charismatic, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. In fact, a lot of times stories take longer to tell — they’re harder to remember.

One of the things that’s really amazing, and I’m obsessed with this too — there’s a book I’m reading on it over there — metaphor. We think in metaphor. Metaphors are things we carry with us, and now that I know about metaphor, I see them everywhere. The book I’m reading now, I think it’s called Metaphors We Live By — it talks about how we think “up” is good, and a lot of that has to do with height, and the fact that bigger people were able to overpower smaller people. So the economy is “up,” I’m feeling “up,” things are “looking up” — all of this stuff. We think in metaphor. So as a leader, rather than trying to come up with stories, try to think about metaphors for the thing you’re doing.

So that’s one. Lists of three are also very charismatic. Rhetorical questions are very charismatic. Tone of voice is a huge one — and I know you’ll love that, Susan, because you’re into music and tone. Tone of voice is so important because when people come to me and want to be more charismatic, they often want to focus on body language and facial expressions, but those can be faked. There’s a study out of Yale that shows you can’t fake your tone of voice, and that your tone of voice tells people more about your emotional state than your body language and facial expressions combined. So tone of voice is a huge one we can dive into.

And then there’s the ability to set a high goal and believe that the people you lead can reach that goal. Those are some of the twelve — actionable things leaders listening can do to be more charismatic.

Susan Drumm: So tell me a little bit more, because these are topics — let’s take tone of voice. What is the thing I need to do, or how do I even know if my tone of voice is charismatic or not?

Heather Hansen: The way you know whether you’re charismatic is: are people doing what you want them to do? Because charisma is the ability to change outcomes — the ability to persuade and influence in such a way that people want to do the things you want them to do. So that first piece, compassion, is seeing from their perspective, and then thinking about where your goal is in line with their goals, so that they do want to do what you want them to do.

But then, tone of voice — you can often tell your tone of voice is reflective of your energy. I always know when I’m getting on calls, if I’m in a bad mood, or right before the call I was struggling with something — which is what I’ve been struggling with lately, something in the Google Workspace — that my tone of voice can reflect that. So your job as a leader, the best way to change your tone of voice, is to change your belief in the moment, because your belief impacts your energy, and your energy impacts your tone of voice — they are one and the same.

So if you believe you’re never going to get this thing done, your energy is going to be discouraged, down, frustrated, angry, confused — and then you’re never going to get the thing done. But if you can get yourself to a belief — and you can’t gaslight yourself, so you’re not going to say, “Oh, this is a done deal” — but you can believe, “We’re going to figure out the first step today, or this week.” And if you can really believe that, then your energy might be enthusiasm, or hopeful, determined, resolved — all of those things. And that will reflect in your voice.

Susan Drumm: Yes.

Heather Hansen: So as leaders, if you want to change your tone of voice, you’ve got to change your belief.

Susan Drumm: Yeah. And also get real clear on what it is that you want them feeling. If you want them feeling, let’s say, energized by a new opportunity, then you’ve got to get yourself energized by that new opportunity. So you come with that vibrational stance — it will be sent out and received. But if you’re not, that’s the disingenuous behavior we see so much, where leaders are sort of pontificating one thing but everything about them is saying something different, and that authenticity is just not resonating.

Heather Hansen: A hundred percent. Again, with the courtroom, I always knew you can’t prove something you don’t believe. Jurors know — and that’s why, if there was a case where I felt the doctor or the hospital had made a mistake, we might argue it on causation. We might say, “Yes, a mistake was made here, but the damages are not what they want you to believe.” But I would never get up there and say the doctor did everything right, because the jury would know — people get it. So you’re a hundred percent right: your belief comes first, and then their belief will follow, because your energy and your actions will follow your belief.

Susan Drumm: Yes, absolutely. Well, let’s take another one of those — what is an action a leader could take to improve one of those components you’ve highlighted?

Heather Hansen: I think the metaphor thing is so important, and it sounds like — oh, you’re back in English class, like, “Oh God, I’ve got to come up with a metaphor.” One of the ways I love doing it — I had a doctor who I represented more than once. You might think he’s a bad doctor; he’s actually a phenomenal orthopedic surgeon, very famous in his field, but because of that he would take some of the high-risk cases. He also performed a lot of surgeries, so statistically he was more likely to be sued.

I tried more than one case with him, and we won every one. The jurors loved him. In retrospect, I think about the way he would testify — he would talk about the knee joint being like tires, and the tread wears down after a while and can no longer do its job. He was always talking in metaphor. So the question every leader should ask themselves is, “What’s this like?”

Susan Drumm: What’s it like?

Heather Hansen: And then just start brainstorming about it. What’s it like? You know, I use AI — honestly, you can describe what it is and ask AI for metaphor examples and start to think, “Oh yeah, this could work, this could really resonate.”

Susan Drumm: You can, although it’s funny, because AI — this is something it’s not as good at as humans are yet.

Heather Hansen: It will get better. But it’s funny, because I have a metaphor I’m using in some of my work with lawyers, and I put it into AI and it gave me a terrible one. I was like, “What are some other options?” And it gave me ones I was like, no one’s going to get those. So it’s something the human brain naturally does. But it’s worth it — just start paying attention to the metaphors in your life. Like, we think about time as money — because we do, how do you “spend” time, you “waste” time — there are all kinds of metaphors in the way we think about time. Some cultures don’t think about time as money, and they treat time differently. Same thing with that “up and down” idea.

So start looking around for metaphors, and then think about where you can create a metaphor for your team. A lot of people use sports metaphors — that’s a great way to start. But play with them, let it be playful. Life is hard, and if you look at this as another thing you have to do, it’s going to be harder. But if you think about ways to play with it — “This is like that thing on the TV show I watched last night” — it can be playful, and it can really be effective, because if you come up with a good one, the entire team will embrace it. They’ll repeat it, they’ll use it, they’ll repeat it to people outside the organization. It can really have legs.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, absolutely. I know you didn’t mention all twelve, but I’m curious — is being playful, or playfulness, part of that list?

Heather Hansen: You know, it’s not, but energy is — energy is part of the list. And a playful energy can certainly be helpful as a leader. I think a leader’s energy depends on the context. There are times when a leader has to be resolved and resolute, other times when a leader has to be serious. But it’s really important that a leader is willing to be playful, because work is a big part of our lives, and if there’s no fun there, people won’t stay for long.

Susan Drumm: Well, and people don’t see the link between fun and creativity — because if you want your team to be innovative, it’s got to feel like there’s an opportunity to play.

Heather Hansen: Completely, completely. It’s where that innovation happens — it’s when you are playing. Creativity doesn’t happen without play.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, absolutely. So what else have you seen that’s been transformational in a leader going from maybe not the most charismatic to charismatic? What did they do differently that made that shift possible?

Heather Hansen: I think so much of it — the way I talk about it is, you’ve got your outer jury. That’s the people you lead, your clients, your customers, your board, if you’re a leader. And then you’ve got your inner jury, which is the part of you that decides what to believe. I like to talk about it in terms of: your jury isn’t there to judge you or punish you, your jury is there to listen to both sides and choose what to believe. And you have got to feed your inner jury a positive story, because too often the only story your inner jury is hearing is the negative story.

So you’ve got to feed yourself: you are capable, you are worthy — and then collect and create evidence to support that story, so that you at least have a choice, because otherwise you’re just going to believe the negative time and time again, and it’s going to be really hard to motivate your team to make a change, take an action, if you are in a place of disbelief, or believing the negative. Collecting and creating the evidence is something I talk to people about a lot, because evidence is everything — you can’t prove something without evidence. We talk about collecting it, which is looking in your life, or googling someone who has done the thing you want to do, and then creating it by going out and actually taking steps to prove to yourself that you can do that thing.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, because where your attention goes, you will collect evidence that supports that. I’ve seen it so many times with so many leaders — think about that negative internal talk that’s going on, then you continue to collect evidence that supports that, but we’re not looking in the places that are the opposite.

Heather Hansen: One of the things — again, a major benefit of my work — I didn’t get to choose my cases. If I had been on the other side, people would come in and I’d say, “No, that’s not a case, this is a case, I don’t want to take that case.” On the defense side, the insurance companies would just send us cases. So I had to look at the case and figure out, okay, where can I make a case here? You’ve got to do the same thing. It might look like, “This is a loser” — this innovation I want to do, this change I want to make — but you’ve got to pretend like you’ve been given the case that it’s a winner. Go out there and collect and create evidence that it is. You may find that ultimately it’s not the road you want to follow, but you’ve got to at least try to make the case. A lot of times when you do, momentum will start to pick up, and you’ll start to really build that belief.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, that is something — even though I didn’t practice law, it was a foundation of how law school really teaches you to shift perspective, to take different perspectives, to see how one viewpoint has one set of facts, but a different viewpoint might have a different set of facts, and how fundamental that is to us as human beings.

Heather Hansen: It really is. So many people don’t want to do it these days, because we’re so divided, but it really makes you better all around.

Susan Drumm: Definitely, definitely. So what’s one thing leaders could do tomorrow that you think would be most important toward the shift to compassionate charisma?

Heather Hansen: This is really important, and I think it’s undervalued and under-talked-about. One of the twelve things is belief that your people, your followers, can do the thing you want them to do — belief that they can reach that high and mighty goal, and communicating that belief to them.

It reminds me — in the courtroom, a lot of times lawyers will come back after jury selection and say, “Oh my gosh, we got a terrible jury,” or “I hate our jury.” And the jury feels that. It’s just not an effective energy at all. Same thing with a leader — you’ve got to believe in your team, and you’ve got to communicate that belief.

I’m friendly with a leader who told me he used to say to his team, “This is a hard thing we’re going to do, but you guys are just the people to do it, and I’m not worried, because I know this team together will do it.” And I said, “Oh my god, you’re so charismatic.” And of course he is — in large part because he was naturally doing what Dr. Antonakis talks about, which is believing in your people and communicating that belief. It gets them so fired up to go and reach that high and mighty goal.

Susan Drumm: Yes. And as a leader, you might want to tap into — when you were in grade school, didn’t you have one teacher somewhere along the line, or maybe a mentor, who believed in you? Think about the messaging you got from that individual — hopefully you had one out there — and that’s the type of person you need to be for your people.

Heather Hansen: Such a good metaphor — it’s exactly right, it’s exactly right, that teacher metaphor, because everybody has one in their head, and that is who you want to be.

Susan Drumm: Exactly.

Heather Hansen: Exactly.

Susan Drumm: Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

Heather Hansen: Well, this is such a pleasure. I have a new website that’s really focused on the healthcare piece, but there’s a tab for my speaking and leadership work — it’s the Hansen Group, is the name of the website. Hansen with an “en,” Group — and you’ll find all of my offerings there.

Susan Drumm: Awesome, Heather, thank you. And if you liked this episode, you’re not going to want to miss my interview with Natalie Nixon, who helps us discover why creativity, not control, is the next frontier of leadership. Let’s lead the way.

Hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and I’d like to point you to the next important step: hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I’ll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.