“He’s got charisma, but not charm”

It seems like an innocuous statement, a throwaway line. Still, it stopped me in my tracks during a client meeting last week.

I had to ask myself the difference and whether I had mistakenly been using them interchangeably. Turns out, I had been inadvertently combining two ideas into one. Where charisma is the way we draw people to us, charm is how interested we are in others.

The conversation came about as we reflected on the impact a new CEO was having on an organisation we both knew well. It had undergone significant change since they arrived, and we were analysing why.

On the surface, it was a conversation about CEO transition.