Forget Charisma  You Need to Master Your #8216;Microskills#8217;

Forget Charisma You Need to Master Your 8216Microskills8217 When we picture leaders the real movers and shakers of the world, whether they be political figures, lauded innovators, or even a great teacher you had in school we tend to think of them as larger-than-life personageswhose charisma and sheer brilliance allowed them to make massive strides in their fields.But according to Samuel Bacharach, cofounder and director of program development at the SoHo-based leadership consultancy Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG), thats all bunk.You can haveall the talent in the world, all the charisma, whatever it wont do you any good if you cant actually move youragenda forward, Bacharach says. All the good ideas you have unless you have some of the fundamental micropolitical competencies you need to move the agenda, it doesnt matter.Bacharachs not just preaching to the next Steve Jobs orMartin Luther King, Jr., of the world. No matter who you are or what you do, you have an agenda to move if you want to be successful. Job seekers need jobs thats an agenda. Recruiters need talent yes, thats an agenda. No one is exempt from Bacharachs mandate to learn micropolitical competencies or microskills, as they are called in BLGs new book, The Agenda Mover When Your Good Idea Is Not Enough.As the title suggests, The Agenda Moveris an in-depth look at how to turn an idea into reality by taking a series of specificactions to mobilize support, get buy-in, and sustain the agendas success. These actions are not grounded in charisma or other such near-supernatural inherent traits. Rather, these are small skills that anyone can learn how to do.As Bacharach puts it, The book tells you how to get stuff done in spite of who you are, not because of who you are.The Charisma aufgabeWhile pop culture tends to celebrate charismatic individuals, Bacharach finds charisma to be a discriminatory and limiting notion, one that forecloses success for the vast majorit y of people.You cant simply rely on your charm. If you rely on your charm, most of us will not be allowed to play, Bacharach says. Most of us are not going to be given a chance. Well be dismissed because of how we look, how we speak. The whole idea of charisma it means a lot of people are being excluded from the game.In part, thats because our beliefs aboutwhat it means to be charismatic are largely shapedby media portrayals, whichsuggest that only people who lay claim to avery narrow set of characteristics are charismatic.Our notion of charismatic is very much dictated by what we see in the movies, Bacharach says. Its dictated by who gives the grandiose speech, how people dress, how they come off, who is cool, and who is not cool.Furthermore, our cultural focus on charisma means we often fail toaccurately assess how revered leaders actually arrived at their major successes. For example, Steve Jobs is regularlyportrayed as a visionary genius, but thats hardly the full story of his ascent. AsThe Agenda Mover points out, Jobs was successful because he was proactive and pragmatic in pushing his ideas. His charisma shaped who he was but was not essential to his program.Bacharach also says that charisma is problematic because it is very gender-specific. We tend to only think of male figures as being charismatic.If you ask your readers to name five charismatic people, theyre probably going to name four or five males and theyre going to name people who arent anything like most of us, Bacharach says.Eager to disabuse us of our cultural notions regarding the centrality of charisma, Bacharach says the time has come to say to people that leadership is about the capacity to get something done and getting something done can be done by people who have no charisma. They just need the capacity to build on their ideas and move their agendas.To Move Your Agenda, Become Politically CompetentAccording to Bacharach,one can acquire the capacity to move their agenda by learning h ow to be politically competent, and political competence is about acquiring certain microskills that aid in pursuing an agenda.In contrast to core skills the raw technical skills that many of us acquire through training, education, and job experience microskills are more oriented toward engaging with people in productive ways. The Agenda Movercovers an array of specific actions and techniques one should adopt in moving their agenda forward, but microskills in general largelythemainto four majorcategoriesAnticipating the agendas of othersMobilizing your campaignNegotiating supportSustaining your campaignThese microskills are not as difficult to acquire as they may seem. For example, anticipating the agendas of others may sound like a daunting task how can you possibly anticipate all possible objections to your own agenda? but Bacharach argues that, in fact, there are a limited number of ways in which people can challenge you.Were so obsessed by our own ideas, but we should really be anticipating what someone else is going to say, Bacharach explains. There are minimal things people can challenge you on. Its about doing your homework on those things.From anticipation to sustaining, the microskills one needs to be politically competent are all things we can methodically do, Bacharach says.I used to think everyone knew all this, Bacharach says. I used to think, Oh my God this is stuff I learned on a playground in Brooklyn.But through his years of working with organizations, students, universities, and individual professionals, Bacharach has realized that isnt the case.I think we spend an awful lot of time giving people raw abilities and core skills, but we dont spendenough time giving them these microskills, he says.In todays business world, where solid hierarchies have been supplanted by team- and project-based work, the ability to move an agenda has become more critical than ever for all of us, no matter our industry or station in life.Its not enough to simp ly have concrete ideas, Bacharach says. The people who achieve are the ones who have raw abilities and raw knowledge, but also have this talent to really move agendas. You have to know how to really pitch your ideas and anticipate what people have to say.Otherwise, we leave it all to the charismatic ones, and the rest of us are excluded.