Great leaders have it. Gen Z has a new word for it. Can the rest of us learn it?

Charisma—or rizz , as current teenage slang has anointed it—can feel like an ephemeral gift some are just born with. The chosen among us network and chitchat, exuding warmth as they effortlessly hold court. Then there’s everyone else, agonising over exclamation points in email drafts and internally replaying that joke they made in the meeting, wondering if it hit.

“Well, this is awkward,” Mike Rizzo, the head of a community for marketing operations professionals, says of rizz being crowned 2023 word of the year by the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s so close to his last name, but so far from how he sees himself. He sometimes gets sweaty palms before hosting webinars.

Who could blame us for obsessing over charisma, or lack thereof? It can lubricate social interactions, win us friends, and score promotions . It’s also possible to cultivate, assures Charles Duhigg, the author of a book about people he dubs super communicators.

At its heart, charisma isn’t about some grand performance. It’s a state we elicit in other people, Duhigg says. It’s about fostering connection and making our conversation partners feel they’re the charming—or interesting or funny—ones.

The key is to ask deeper, though not prying, questions that invite meaningful and revealing responses, Duhigg says. And match the other person’s vibes. Maybe they want to talk about emotions, the joy they felt watching their kid graduate from high school last weekend. Or maybe they’re just after straight-up logistics and want you to quickly tell them exactly how the team is going to turn around that presentation by tomorrow.

You might be hired into a company for your skill set, Duhigg says, but your ability to communicate and earn people’s trust propels you up the ladder: “That is leadership.”

Approachable and relatable

In reporting this column, I was surprised to hear many executives and professionals I find breezily confident and pleasantly chatty confess it wasn’t something that came naturally. They had to work on it.

Dave MacLennan , who served as chief executive of agricultural giant Cargill for nearly a decade, started by leaning into a nickname: DMac, first bestowed upon him in a C-suite meeting where half the executives were named Dave.

He liked the informality of it. The further he ascended up the corporate hierarchy, the more he strove to be approachable and relatable.

Employees “need a reason to follow you,” he says. “One of the reasons they’re going to follow you is that they feel they know you.”

He makes a point to remember the details and dates of people’s lives, such as colleagues’ birthdays. After making his acquaintance, in a meeting years ago at The Wall Street Journal’s offices, I was shocked to receive an email from his address months later. Subject line: You , a heading so compelling I still recall it. He went on to say he remembered I was due with my first child any day now and just wanted to say good luck.

“So many people say, ‘Oh, I don’t have a good memory for that,’” he says. Prioritise remembering, making notes on your phone if you need, he says.

Now a board member and an executive coach, MacLennan sent hundreds of handwritten notes during his tenure. He’d reach out to midlevel managers who’d just gotten a promotion, or engineers who showed him around meat-processing plants. He’d pen words of thanks or congratulations. And he’d address the envelopes himself.

“Your handwriting is a very personal thing about you,” he says. “Think about it. Twenty seconds. It makes such an impact.”

Everyone’s important

Doling out your charm selectively will backfire, says Carla Harris , a Morgan Stanley executive. She chats up the woman cleaning the office, the receptionist at her doctor’s, the guy waiting alongside her for the elevator.

“Don’t be confused,” she tells young bankers. Executive assistants are often the most powerful people in the building, and you never know how someone can help—or hurt—you down the line.

Harris once spent a year mentoring a junior worker in another department, not expecting anything in return. One day, Harris randomly mentioned she faced an uphill battle in meeting with a new client. Oh!, the 24-year-old said. Turns out, the client was her friend. She made the call right there, setting up Harris for a work win.

In the office, stop staring at your phone, Harris advises, and notice the people around you. Ask for their names. Push yourself to start a conversation with three random people every day.

Charisma for introverts

You can’t will yourself to be a bubbly extrovert, but you can find your own brand of charisma, says Vanessa Van Edwards, a communications trainer and author of a book about charismatic communication.

For introverted clients, she recommends using nonverbal cues. A slow triple nod shows people you’re listening. Placing your hands in the steeple position, together and facing up, denotes that you’re calm and present.

Try coming up with one question you’re known for. Not a canned, hokey ice-breaker, but something casual and simple that reflects your actual interests. One of her clients, a bookish executive struggling with uncomfortable, halting starts to his meetings, began kicking things off by asking “Reading anything good?”

Embracing your stumbles

Charisma starts with confidence. It’s not that captivating people don’t occasionally mispronounce a word or spill their coffee, says Henna Pryor, who wrote a book about embracing awkwardness at work. They just have a faster comeback rate than the rest of us. They call out the stumble instead of trying to hide it, make a small joke, and move on.

Being perfectly polished all the time is not only exhausting, it’s impossible. We know this, which is why appearing flawless can come off as fake. We like people who seem human, Pryor says.

Our most admired colleagues are often the ones who are good at their jobs and can laugh at themselves too, who occasionally trip or flub just like us.

“It creates this little moment of warmth,” she says, “that we actually find almost like a relief.”

Many of us can barely keep up with our jobs, never mind hobbies. Yet some top executives run marathons, wineries or music-recording studios on the side. How can they have bigger responsibilities and more fun than we do?

It can seem like ultrahigh achievers find extra hours in the day. They say they’ve just figured out how to manage their 24 better than the rest of us.

They also admit they take full advantage of the privileges of being a boss—the power to delegate and the means to do things like jetting to Denmark for a long weekend of windsurfing.

Dan Streetman trains as many as 20 hours a week for Ironman triathlons in addition to his job as CEO of cybersecurity firm Tanium. It’s a big commitment for anyone, never mind a corporate leader who travels to meet with customers every week. He pulls it off by sleeping fewer than seven hours a night and waking around 5 a.m., planning his exercise sessions months in advance, and switching his brain from work mode to sport mode almost as fast as he transitions from swimming to cycling during a competition.

“I tend to work right up until the day of the race,” says Streetman, 56 years old. “I remember being on a board call on a Friday night, and Saturday morning was an Ironman. That’s just part of it.”

Ahead of business trips, he maps running routes in unfamiliar cities and scouts nearby pools, often at YMCAs. He rides stationary bikes in hotel gyms and, if they’re subpar, makes a note to book somewhere else next time he’s in town.

Leaders who eat, breathe and sleep business can appear out of touch at a time when employees crave work-life balance and expect their bosses to model it. Today’s prototypical CEO has a full life outside of work, or at least the appearance of one.

Their tactics include waking up early, multitasking and scheduling fun as if it were any other appointment. When you’re a top executive, hobbies tend to disappear unless they’re on the calendar. One CEO told me he disguises “me time” as important meetings. Only his assistant knows which calendar blocks are fake.

Ben Betts calls himself a “spreadsheet guy,” which is a bit like saying Michelangelo was a paint guy. With Excel as his canvas, Betts creates cell-by-cell checklists for just about everything he does, from cooking Christmas dinner to building a coop for newly hatched ducklings.

Betts, 41, is CEO of Learning Pool, a professional-development software maker. The duck home is part of his ambitious effort to restore an 18th-century farmhouse in England. He’s been renovating for about five years and aims to finish this fall.

On a recent Saturday, Betts’s spreadsheet called for stripping overhead beams by 5 p.m. so he could refinish them. Otherwise, the task would have to wait until the following weekend, throwing off his whole timeline. His vision of the home as a cozy enclave—completed in time for the holidays—can only come true if he sticks to a precise plan.

“Sometimes I stand in the doorway, and my wife probably wonders what I’m staring at,” he says. “I’m picturing us on a corner sofa with our two kids and the dog, watching a film in front of the fireplace I installed.”

Back in the swing

John Sicard , president and CEO of supply-chain manager Kinaxis , got back into drumming many years after he let go of his dream to become a professional musician. He practices almost every day, but his sessions sometimes last only 20 minutes. He rehearses with bandmates two or three times a month. That’s enough to prepare Sicard, 61, to play Foo Fighters and Led Zeppelin covers at occasional charity gigs.

He also built a studio in his house, where he records up-and-coming artists. He finds time by sticking to this management philosophy: “The most successful CEOs do the least amount of work.”

For Sicard, that means letting his lieutenants take charge of—and responsibility for—their divisions. Many corporate leaders work harder than they need to because they micromanage or hire poorly and pick up the slack, he says.

Thomas Hansen , president of software maker Amplitude, is back to windsurfing, a sport he competed in as a teenager. He lives near the ocean in California but gets out on the water only about once a month, when the waves are just right. Hobbies don’t need to be daily activities to be fulfilling, he says, especially if they require training regimens.

To stay in shape for windsurfing, he rises at 4:30 a.m., seven days a week, for an hour of exercise. Hansen, 54, also guards his Saturdays and Sundays like the crown jewels of Denmark, his native country, limiting himself to two working weekends a year. Things that feel urgent can almost always wait till Monday, he contends.

‘Like a badass’

When Christine Yen isn’t calling the shots at work, she’s circling a racetrack at 80 mph on her Honda CB300F motorcycle. The co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb, which helps engineers diagnose problems in their software, took up racing a few years ago.

Prepandemic, her motorcycle was strictly for commuting in San Francisco—and making an impression. She loved pulling up to investor meetings in her hornet-yellow helmet and leather riding suit.

“It fits me like a glove, and it makes me feel like a badass,” says Yen, 36.

The keys to spending full days at the track are planning and being willing to work at odd hours, Yen discovered. Her favorite track publishes racing schedules in 10-week batches. As soon as a slate is released, she circles the dates when she expects her workload will be lightest, aiming to participate in roughly half of the events.

“I have also been known to bring my laptop to the motel and get some work done in the evenings,” she says. “It sounds boring to say hobbies can be scheduled, but that’s how I protect my time.”

Forget about household chores and budgets. The biggest source of tension for some couples starts with a plane ticket.

You like to get to the airport early , they like to come in hot. You insist on checking a bag, they preach carry-on only. And then there’s the vacation to-do list: You need down time, they have FOMO if they don’t see everything.

What’s a conflicted couple to do? Instead of complaining about, or showing contempt for, your partner’s travel habits, learn to love each other’s quirks, tastes and temperaments. After all, you could both be right. Getting that advance ticket for a hot museum may be the only way to see it, and you may be surprised how nicely that afternoon nap hits you.

Short of separate vacations , the best way to address travel differences, a therapist and travelers who have (mostly) figured it out told me, is communication and compromise. You don’t have to be in a relationship to benefit from their lessons. The advice also applies to traveling with friends and family.

Learning to do less

When planning his honeymoon a dozen years ago, Chris McEwen drew up a long list of must-sees in Italy. His wife-to-be, who prefers leisurely mornings and wandering, wasn’t having it.

She told him, “Yo, pump the brakes dude. We are not doing all that,” McEwen, a 49-year-old IT professional in North Carolina, says.

In the end, he relented. And today, one of his favorite memories from the trip is spending hours walking around Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood at the end of their trip. He finally understood the joys of not doing much.

In the years since, they have continued to compromise. He still darts out of bed on vacation, but heads out for a walk and brings back coffee.

On a spring break trip to Arizona with their children, ages 5 and 9, this year, she agreed to his bucket-list slot canyon tour in Page, Ariz., despite also planning to see Scottsdale, the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park.

For an upcoming trip to New York City, he’ll go to a Broadway show with her (but not two).

Some travelers find middle ground. Others discover that the opposite approach that their significant other takes can work for them.

Valerie Paxton, a 61-year-old business adviser who lives near Phoenix, rarely takes a trip without creating a spreadsheet or Word document with every little detail. For an upcoming trip to Italy to celebrate her brother’s 60th birthday, the entries include the types of wine that will be served during a nearly $400 wine-pairing luncheon at Antinori winery in Tuscany.

She has travel-planning documents dating back to 2008 and says she will defend her meticulous planning “to my dying day.”

Her engineer husband isn’t convinced all the stressful planning work is necessary. “He’s like, ‘Why don’t you just not do it and we’ll just wing it?’ ” Paxton says. “And that’s where the tension is.”

He likes nothing more than seeing where the day takes them by talking to locals. She used to consider it a waste of time. On a trip to Napa for his 55th birthday last month, they had not a single plan. She didn’t even know the location of the vacation rental. They went on a 24-mile bike ride and then stopped into a local bar the shop owner recommended. At the bar, they got their recommendation for dinner.

“I may be a convert,” she says.

Travel as therapy

Psychologist Joshua Coleman counsels couples in his San Francisco-area practice and says travel issues are no different than many other conflicts in a relationship. Resolving them comes down to mutual, thoughtful conversation, he says.

“If people really feel understood and they emerge feeling like, OK, that person really gets me, they’re just in a much better position to want to compromise,” he says.

No good comes from simply giving in about, say, that weeklong vacation you’re dreading and then stewing about it. The other person will pay a price later, he says.

Coleman and his wife have been married for 35 years and found a workaround to their different vacation tastes. He loves activity and she loves relaxing at the pool or beach with a book. On a recent family trip to Hawaii they made time for lounging and a snorkeling excursion.

“If every vacation was a beach-read vacation, she would be completely happy and I would be completely insane,” he says.

Veteran Wall Street airline analyst Jamie Baker and his wife are travel pros who eloped nearly 30 years ago to take immediate advantage of his flight benefits at Northwest Airlines.

They decided early on to stay in their own lanes, he says. He handles all flight arrangements and his wife, a former chef, handles accommodations and dining reservations.

Baker is the stereotypical airport dad—on steroids. He insists his wife and adult sons are packed 24 hours before the flight in case their flight is significantly delayed or canceled and there’s an opportunity to jump on an earlier flight.

He’s gone so far to book a “chase car” in addition to his regular car service. This second car trails his travel party by about 5 miles, just in case.

The backup ride saved a trip to Japan several years ago after a tractor trailer accident brought traffic to a standstill. That car picked them up on the other side of the freeway and they dashed across the median with their rollaboards.

Baker says his preflight neurosis has gotten worse over the years because he can check air-traffic control, flight status, road conditions and more from his phone. His family has come to accept his flight prep as gospel, he says, and knows not to talk to him until they are at the airport.

“Once we’re at the curb, it’s all smiles and relief,” he says.