How the Pro is built

The construct logic, the four readings the tool produces, the scoring spec, the validation work, and the published research the instrument draws on. Written for the reader who wants to know what is under the bonnet before they put their people through it.

The model: two dimensions, four quadrants

The Open-Source Charisma model rests on a simple proposition. Charisma in working life is not a single trait. It is the product of two things: how you feel about yourself and how you behave with others. Confidence and Social Skills.

Either one without the other is incomplete. High confidence with low social skill produces the Occasionally Overconfident. The person who walks into the room well but leaves it badly. High social skill with low confidence produces the Unknowingly Influential. Liked, trusted, listened to, but consistently overlooked when the credit is being handed out. Low on both is the Incidentally Invisible. Talented, often, but invisible to the people who matter to their progress.

Higher on both is the Courteously Charismatic. This is the person who manages to combine presence and warmth, who is competent and connected. The challenge for them is keeping it real. Making sure the version their team sees is the version their peripheral colleagues, their clients, and the people they only meet occasionally also see.

From four subscales to ten

The free Indicator uses eight subscales: four under Confidence, four under Social Skills. The Pro version adds two: A5 Situational Self-Awareness under Confidence, and B5 Authentic vs Performed Social Behaviour under Social Skills.

These two were added because the validation work on the free tool revealed three recurring patterns the existing items could not see:

• People whose self-perception did not match their impact on others. The free tool read them as confident and socially skilled because they reported themselves that way. People in the room read them as polished but not present.
• People whose social behaviour was uneven across contexts. Warm and engaged with the people who matter to them. Functional and distant with those who did not.
• People whose charisma was heavily dependent on state. Excellent at 9am and disengaged by 4pm, with their colleagues remembering whichever version happened to be in the meeting.

A5 measures the internal signal (your reading of your own state and the room). B5 measures the external signal (whether your social behaviour is the same person across audiences). Together they pick up the gap between intent and impact that a four-subscale instrument cannot reach.

The ten subscales

Confidence (A):

• A1 Self-Esteem & Self-Worth
• A2 Resilience & Composure
• A3 Assertiveness & Accountability
• A4 Growth & Adaptability
• A5 Situational Self-Awareness

Social Skills (B):

• B1 Empathy & Listening
• B2 Warmth & Social Courtesy
• B3 Conversational Skills
• B4 Emotional Control & Humility
• B5 Authentic vs Performed Social Behaviour

Three-tier scoring

The free Indicator uses a fixed sixty-point midpoint on each dimension: above is higher, below is lower. The Pro replaces the binary with three bands: Lower, Developing, Higher.

A binary midpoint produces clean labels, which is the right choice for a free tool whose primary job is to introduce the model. It is the wrong choice for a tool whose primary job is development. On a binary, a respondent scoring 61 and one scoring 95 are both placed in the same higher band. The development conversation is identical for both. That is wrong. The 61 is on the cusp; the 95 is consolidated.

The Developing band runs from 65 to 78 on Confidence and 65 to 77 on Social Skills. It is where most paying users sit, because most people who actively seek out a development tool are not at the extremes. The Developing band is also where the work is most actionable: close enough to the higher tier that the gap is genuinely closeable, far enough from it that there is something to close.

The Authenticity Index

The Authenticity Index is the first of two readings that sit alongside the Confidence and Social Skills scores. It is a separate scoring stream, not a subscale. It is built from eight items distributed across the Social Skills dimension (one in B2, one in B3, one in B4, and all five items in B5). These items are scored toward their parent subscale and also pulled into the Index.

The Index measures consistency across audiences, not virtue. It is high when warmth, attention and courtesy are reliably available regardless of who is in the room. It is lower when they are visibly conditional on stakes, status, or usefulness. A high score does not mean a person is identical across audiences. It means the principle underneath their behaviour is stable, even where the surface adapts.

The four bands of the Index are described in the report in plain language: Consistently available, Broadly consistent, Selectively deployed, Significantly instrumental. The Index is the part of the Pro the free tool cannot do. Two people with identical Confidence and Social Skills scores can have meaningfully different Authenticity Index bands, and the Index is usually the more useful number to act on.

Personal Impact

Personal Impact is the second separate reading. It is the foundational social skill the other subscales do not measure: whether what the person says actually lands with the people they say it to. It is built from ten dedicated items (Q51–60) and reported as one score with two component readings.

Message Craft. How the message is built. Whether it is relevant to the person hearing it, memorable enough to survive the meeting, and actionable enough to change what they do next. This is composition, and it happens before the person speaks.

Voice and Presence. How the message is delivered. Pace, pause, the weight placed on the words that matter, the silence held instead of filled. This is performance, and it happens live.

Message Craft without Voice and Presence is the good idea nobody remembers. Voice and Presence without Message Craft is the confident delivery of nothing. The stream is strongest when both are present.

The reason Personal Impact is reported as a separate stream, and not folded into the subscales, is that it behaves like a multiplier. The same delivery skill produces opposite results depending on what sits underneath it. Strong delivery on top of genuine social skill is what makes a good communicator compelling. Strong delivery on top of thin social skill is the polished speaker the room does not trust. The skill is identical. The substance underneath it is not. The Pro report reads Personal Impact against the Social Skills score for this reason, and flags the gap when impact runs ahead of substance.

The four bands are described in the report in plain language: Lands reliably, Lands in most rooms, Inconsistent, Not yet landing.

The 60-item bank

The Pro uses sixty items. Fifty across the ten subscales (five per subscale, two reverse-scored), and ten dedicated to Personal Impact (five for Message Craft, five for Voice and Presence). Items are rated on a five-point Likert scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree.

Items have been deliberately written to read like specific behaviours rather than vague traits. "I let the other person finish before I respond, even when I think I know what to say" is more honest than "I am a good listener". Generic agreement items get generic agreement answers. Specific behavioural items get more discriminating responses.

Validation

The current Pro instrument has been calibrated against ten validation cases drawn from Jim's coaching practice. Quadrant placement matched independent expert assessment in every case. The three-band cut points (Lower below 65, Higher above 77 on Social Skills and above 78 on Confidence) are the best available estimate from that calibration set. The Personal Impact bands are calibrated against the same set, and will be reviewed alongside the dimension cuts at the next recalibration.

The recalibration trigger is thirty completed cases with full data. Until that threshold is reached, the existing cut points hold. The Pro is published openly about this. Anyone using the instrument at scale will be told where the validation evidence currently stands and when the next recalibration is due.

What the Pro draws on

The Pro is built on the working set of research below, not invented from scratch. The companion book carries a fuller bibliography.

• Eurich, T. (2018). What self-awareness really is (and how to cultivate it). Harvard Business Review, January 2018.
• Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.
• Grandey, A. A. (2000). Emotional regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95–110.
• Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.
• Kernis, M. H., & Goldman, B. M. (2006). A multicomponent conceptualization of authenticity: Theory and research. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 283–357.
• Mehling, W. E., et al. (2012). The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). PLoS ONE, 7(11), e48230.
• Wood, A. M., Linley, P. A., Maltby, J., Baliousis, M., & Joseph, S. (2008). The authentic personality: A theoretical and empirical conceptualization and the development of the Authenticity Scale. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55(3), 385–399.