Charisma:
Set a Style
“Beauty is life, life, Beauty.”
—JOHN KEATS
What is your style? Do you dress to the nines every day and seek to project a calm, confident, in-control image? Or do you seek to stand out by “dressing down”? Do you decorate your office with antiques, or cultivate a spare, modernistic look?
No matter what you choose, you will have a style. “Style” is a muchmaligned word, usually juxtaposed with “substance,” as if the two are locked in eternal opposition. There's no reason, though, that style and substance can't complement each other. Leadership style means simply how you present yourself to others. Do you look and sound like someone others would like to follow? The answer to this question powerfully affects the rest of your leadership.
One reason for paying attention to style is that, quite simply, the rest of society does. Stroll along the streets of a major city (and even many smaller ones) and count the number of people wearing black, piercing their eyebrows, and donning narrow, European-style glasses. By now, we all rely on style to express identity. If you are going to stand out amid all this “clutter,”
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