Theories in Action #2 – AlphaSights
After finishing up my 10-week internship with AlphaSights, I observed the charismatic leadership of two important leaders at the company (in my experience): my manager and supervisor (Kimi) and the CEO (Max). Charismatic leadership focuses on personality characteristics such as having a desire to influence, strong moral values and self-confidence, and behaviors such as being a role model, articulating goals and high expectations, and expressing confidence. This in turn causes followers to trust the leader’s ideology, see similarity between the leader and follower, heighten their goals, and increase their confidence. Additionally, charismatic leaders transform followers’ self-concepts and link identity of followers to collective identity of the organization by offering intrinsic rewards.
My manager, Kimi, is a charismatic leader as she embodies a number of these characteristics and behaviors. As a manager, she communicates directly with the clients, so she constantly influences us to see that though the work we do can be repetitive and difficult, the bigger picture of aiding our clients in their successes makes it worth it. For example, I am not allowed to disclose a lot, but a project that one of my colleagues worked on made it into a news article about a large investment deal for one of our clients, and she immediately shared it with us as it is a positive end result of our work. She has a lot of confidence in her role having been at the company for about 5 years, and her confidence in herself and our team is instilled in us on a daily basis with her attitude and motivating words to our team. In our team board meetings, which occur three times a day, she iterates goals for each team member and her expectations of what we should accomplish by the end of the day. This motivates us to work hard and accomplish a ton in a day’s time. These personalities and behaviors cause us, as team members, to trust her ideology and see that our client’s success is not just her goal, but instead our collective goal as a team. It also establishes goals for us and increases our confidence because if she believes we can accomplish something, then it instills that mindset in ourselves. Lastly, she often offers intrinsic rewards; for example, if we receive a nice email complimenting our work from a client, she immediately will send that to us, or if we have worked really hard on certain days or complete a ton of calls in one day, she will encourage us to take off a bit early and go mingle with other interns and colleagues in the kitchen before we go home for the day as a reward for our hard work.
I have also seen Max, our CEO, as a charismatic leader in the times that I have interacted with him, even though that has not been a lot. For example, he has a strong desire to influence us as employees because he has seen what the company has achieved in the past years, and he has so much confidence in himself and the company that we can achieve and grow even more. He does this by showing our growth at the end of every month in a presentation to the whole company, and then he will follow that by articulating what we should strive to achieve in the next month (ex. Achieved 900 custom credits last month, so strive for 1,000 this month). He sets high expectations, but his confidence in us causes us to work hard and believe that each task we do throughout the day, even as an intern, is helping the company on our path to major success. Similar to Kimi, as a CEO, he also encourages us with intrinsic goals. For example, seeing statistics of our growth as either a team, segment or company is extremely motivating to see the results of your hard work. Also, he offers rewards such as “No Meeting Mondays” at the beginning of each month or declaring the week between Christmas and New Years as “off” as a result of our dedication and hard work. Both Kimi and Max do a great job of motivating us as confident role models who believe in us and set their goals and expectations to influence us to achieve greatness for the company.