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When we talk of charisma we tend to think of people like Obama, Mandela and even Gordon Brown whose charisma quotient seems to have gone AWOL.

No one doubts for example that Sir Alan Sugar has a sort of charisma but he probably succeeds despite it rather than because of it. 

Also not in doubt is that charisma usually tends to be widely treated as akin to a magic potion. Some people have it and others don’t and the rest is silence.

For years, behavioural experts like Maynard Leigh have argued that it is not what you say but how you say it that makes all the difference in how you come across, and how persuasive is your message.

In other words charisma, or as we often call it Personal Impact, is learnable and can be taught, acquired and consciously practiced.

Researchers at the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory in the US measured variables such as “how much you face the people you are talking to, how close you stand to them and how much you let them talk.”

Using portable technology they recorded social signals such as tone of voice, gesticulation, and proximity to others and so on to measure the “how you say it” element of communication. [i]

Their conclusion is that it is definitely the non-verbal cues that make the difference in affecting outcomes from communication. 

The non-verbal cues such as gestures, expressions and tone, actually cause changes in those on the receiving end. For example, if you are bubbly and enthusiastic in someone’s presence then they are more likely to move in the same direction and be bubbly and enthusiastic too.

Taking the MIT devices into call centres show that giving staff time to interact with their colleagues is at least 2.5 times more important in affecting their performance than just giving them more information.

What the research seems to be doing is uncovering some of the basic mechanisms of communication, rather than merely showing that “how you say” really does matter.

Another aspect of the research which adds something new is the resulting ability to predict which communications are most likely to succeed, for example which pitches for business are most likely to win the business.

In other words the actual content of the pitch or the quality of ideas usually prove far less important than the non-verbal signals given out during communication.

Much has been made recently about the validity or otherwise of earlier research comparing the relative importance of non-verbal communication against content and the actual words. Sceptics for example have railed against the claims that words alone represent only about 5-10% of an effective communication message.

The MIT research though seems to re-affirm the importance of the non verbal aspect of communication.

For example predictions about who would win a business plan competition proved 87% accurate using just the non-verbal cues and without even reading or hearing the actual presentations!

That social signalling has a direct impact on communication is hardly in dispute. The issue is how important is it and secondly how can people quickly learn ways to improve their social signalling.

As the MIT researchers argue: “you can tell when people are excited about something. You can tell when they are paying attention and when they’re on the same page. We all sense it.”

The latest research say the MIT people shows that “because we can measure it, social interaction is no longer magic; it’s now quantitative science.”

What then are the implications for those who provide communication services?  Have we all got to rush out and beg, borrow or steal one of the MIT portable machines? Is the future of teaching people how to improve their charisma effect bound up with little machines that measure it?

Probably not. The MIT studies are useful in simply reminding us that it is possible to improve one’s personal impact and the various ways in which this can most usefully occur.

Andrew Leigh is author of The Charisma Effect, published by Pearson Education 2008.