The key indicators of charisma included the following behaviors:

• Inspires employees, communicates, and implements the vision well

• Acts as a role model and walks the talk

• Is sensitive to the cultural norms of the organizations

• Recognizes employees for their accomplishments, giving credit where it is due

• Uses emotional communication effectively

• Is good at identifying and nurturing employees’ potential

• In addition, the leaders also completed assessments of their own social and emotional skills.

You ask the members of the organization how close they are to others, where they go for advice, and who they regard as a source of knowledge and expertise. Alternatively, you can use passive measures, such as contextual email data: how many people you regularly connect with, how often, and how interconnected they are.

Although these [psychometric] tests may often seem too abstract to relate to everyday work problems, they are without doubt the best single predictor of job performance, and they remain a useful indicator of leadership potential even when other tools and data are taken into account.

Personality assessments in leader selection have a pragmatic purpose: to predict leadership performance, not to solve the metaphysical question of whether candidates truly mean what they say, or whether scores reflect a leader’s “true self.” As long as the test predicts performance, the question of honesty has less relevance.

Humanyze, an MIT spin off led by Ben Waber, who coined the term people analytics, tags employees and leaders with sensors that capture their movements, communications, and even physiological responses (e.g., stress, excitement, and boredom). Just by analyzing anonymous group-level data, the firm can help organizations identify invisible elements of work relations, such as the hidden power dynamics, in a firm.

For example, in a recent study reported in Harvard Business Review, Waber and his team set out to decode the behavioral differences between men and women in a large multinational firm and explore whether such differences could partly explain the underrepresentation of women in the senior leadership ranks (where they accounted for just 20 percent). The researchers gathered email data, meeting schedule data, and location data for hundreds of employees, across all seniority levels, over four months. Of particular relevance was the data collected with sensors some employees wore. The sensors recorded who talked with whom; where, when, and for how long people communicated with each other; and who dominated each conversation. Waber’s team expected to find behavioral differences between men and women pertaining to people’s drive and networking habits: ‘Perhaps women had fewer mentors, less face time with managers, or weren’t as proactive as men in talking to senior leadership.’ However, the results showed no significant differences between what women and men did at work: ‘Women had the same number of contacts as men, they spent as much time with senior leadership, and they allocated their time similarly to men in the same role. We couldn’t see the types of projects they were working on, but we found that men and women had indistinguishable work patterns in the amount of time they spent online, in concentrated work, and in face-to-face conversation. And in performance evaluations men and women received statistically identical scores. This held true for women at each level of seniority. Yet women weren’t advancing and men were.