A validated six-item measure to give you a before-and-after number — and an honest sort of the charisma-training evidence into what transfers to conversation and what is really public-speaking research wearing a disguise.
You asked for countable progress measures. Most of this curriculum counts behaviours — reps, exits, follow-up ratios — because those are what you control. This page adds the one thing those can't give you: a validated measure of the outcome itself, taken twice.
The General Charisma Inventory. Six items, two factors, developed from an initial pool of roughly 408 candidate items and validated across multiple samples. Reliability: Influence α = .77–.85, Affability α = .75–.82. Tskhay, Zhu, Zou & Rule 2018, JPSP 114(1), 131–152
Answer as you believe you are right now — not how you'd like to be, and not on your best day. The number is only useful if the first reading is honest, because everything later is measured against it.
Saves in this browser. Retake it at the end of Week 6 and the table will show both. Better still: the scale was designed to work as an other-rating too — if you have someone who'd answer it about you honestly, that reading is worth more than yours, given how reliably people misjudge their own social impact.
Influence — presence, leading, moving people. Affability — comfort, warmth, ease. My guess from what you've described is that your Influence score will come back respectable and your Affability lower, because the structured work register you're good at rewards the first and doesn't test the second. If that's what happens, it's a useful confirmation of the whole diagnosis. If it comes back the other way round, tell me — I'd want to rethink.
Two dimensions account for most of how people are perceived: warmth and competence. Warmth maps onto being liked and trusted; competence onto being respected and thought capable. Fiske, Cuddy & Glick 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(2)
The primacy of warmth: warmth is judged first and weighted more heavily. The proposed reason is evolutionary — working out someone's intent matters more urgently than working out their capability. Someone can tell whether you mean well before they've formed any view about whether you're impressive.
This has a direct implication for someone whose competence is not in question. In a work setting, competence is the currency and it's the thing you've optimised. Socially, it is the second thing anyone assesses, and often barely assessed at all. Effort spent seeming impressive to a stranger is spent on the dimension they weight less and evaluate later. Effort spent seeming warm is spent on the one that fires first.
Which is also why so much of this curriculum is receiving rather than performing — follow-up questions, specific listener reactions, active-constructive responses to good news. Those are all warmth signals, and warmth is what's being read.
There is genuine randomised evidence here, which is rare in this field. Two studies:
| Study 1 — field | Study 2 — lab | |
|---|---|---|
| Sample | 34 middle managers, ~20,000-person Swiss company | 41 MBA/EMBA students |
| Design | Randomised, control group, pre/post, 360° ratings | Within-subjects — same 4-min speech redelivered 6 weeks later |
| Raters | 343 then 321 raters (~10 per leader) | 135 independent raters; 4 blinded coders (κ=.67) |
| Dose | ~5-hr workshop + coaching call; ≈30 hrs over 12 weeks | 20 contact hours over 7 weeks; ≈80–90 hrs total |
| Effect on rated charisma | d ≈ .47 | d ≈ .75 |
Sample-weighted mean across both: d = .62 — comparable to the d = .60 meta-analytic figure for leadership training generally. Roughly 65% of the trained group ended above the sample median versus 35% of controls. Antonakis, Fenley & Liechti 2011, Academy of Management Learning & Education 10(3)
The training taught twelve Charismatic Leadership Tactics. Here they are, sorted by whether they survive contact with ordinary conversation. This sort is my judgement, not the authors' — they didn't make this distinction, because their subject was leaders addressing groups.
| Tactic | In conversation |
|---|---|
| Animated voice tone Facial expressions Body gestures |
All three nonverbal tactics. Context-free — they work regardless of what's being said, which makes them the best return on effort. Overlaps with Week 5. |
| Reflecting the sentiments of the collective | The most useful one on the list for you. In one-to-one form this is just naming what the other person seems to feel — "sounds like that was frustrating." It is a warmth signal, it requires no material, and it's the same move as the verbal reflections in the listening research. |
| Stories and anecdotes | Works anywhere. Pair with the novelty penalty — tell the familiar one. |
| Metaphors (similes, analogies) | Fine conversationally as long as it's "it's like…" rather than oratory. |
| Expressions of moral conviction | Works when genuine; reads as preachy when overused. Sparingly. |
| Tactic | Why not |
|---|---|
| Three-part lists Rhetorical questions Contrasts |
Rhetorical devices. In back-and-forth dialogue they read as performed, which is the opposite of the effect you want. Fine in a prepared talk. |
| Setting high goals Communicating confidence goals can be achieved |
Inherently about rallying a group around a shared mission — and notably, this pair maps almost exactly onto the structured work register you are already good at. Nothing here to train. |
Of twelve tactics, roughly four are new and useful to you, two you already do at work, and six are speech-delivery technique. That's why this is a reference page and not a module. The charisma-training literature is real evidence about a genuinely different activity — leaders addressing audiences — and most of what it teaches doesn't survive the move to a bar in Barcelona. The pieces that do transfer are already distributed through Weeks 5 and 6, where they belong.
They read intent before capability.
Warmth is judged first and weighted more heavily than competence.
Competence is the thing you've already optimised — and the thing they assess second.
Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. (2011). "Can Charisma Be Taught? Tests of Two Interventions." Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(3), 374–396. Free full PDF, University of Lausanne repository
Read the Study 1 method section for how carefully it was identified — randomisation, 2SLS to handle endogeneity, blinded coders, a non-equivalent dependent variable to net out general learning. It's a model of how to run this kind of trial, which is worth seeing even where you skip the content. The popular version is Learning Charisma, HBR June 2012 — same twelve tactics, friendlier prose, no methods.