It always takes some time to catch up on my reading after a long holiday weekend, but here’s something from The New York Times that grabbed me: a Q&A with Wendy Kopp, founder and chief executive of Teach for America.

I normally might have gone right by this article, but it was the headline that gave me pause and pulled me in. It said, simply, “Charisma? To Her, It’s Overrated.”

Wendy Kopp was talking about hiring teachers, but her quote about charisma was particularly insightful. When asked “What are you looking for in the teachers you recruit?” she said that she looked for: “The ability to influence and motivate others in a sophisticated way—but not necessarily charisma. And that’s an interesting one, right? Because people think of teachers who are born to teach, and you think of all these charismatic folks. Some of the most successful teachers are some of the least charismatic, interestingly. But they have a gift of figuring out what motivates people.”

Kopp’s comments snagged me on two levels: One, as a part-time educator who teaches writing to college seniors at night, I’m interested in what it takes to be a good teacher. But her thoughts also grabbed me in my primary career role as a longtime manager, editor and executive who frequently grapples with the issue of leadership and how much charisma or presence plays into the ability to lead people and get them to perform better.

And, Kopp’s insight into hiring teachers holds just as true for managers and executives, because in my experience charisma in leadership is just as overrated as it is in teaching.

This is an issue I’ve battled over my entire career.

I’ve had to fight the perception that just because I wasn’t a jump-on-the-desk-and-shout-at-the-troops type of person that I really wasn’t a leader. In fact, I remember telling one boss of mine that he was wrong because yes, I was a leader, but just not the type he was familiar with.

Leadership is about consistently motivating your workforce to push harder, to stretch farther and to think smarter about how to better accomplish their goal. It also doesn’t fade when things go badly (as we saw recently with LeBron James) or fail to take the blame when the operation goes bad (as we saw with Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers).

Sometimes, great leaders CAN be charismatic (Southwest Airlines’ legendary Herb Kelleher is one of those guys), but I find that to be the exception, not the rule. In fact, I worked for one company that really gravitated to people who had charisma and presence.

It hired a lot of executives and managers based on these qualities, but usually, what they ended up getting were people who were glib and good at talking to a crowd, but terribly shallow, shortsighted and unaccomplished when it came to actually leading anyone.

The late, great management guru Peter Drucker knew this, and that’s why the father of modern management didn’t say anything about charisma when he was discussing what it takes to be a leader. “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations,” Drucker wrote. “[In short,] management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Yes, Wendy Kopp is right; charisma IS overrated, because it is a surface quality in most people that has little to do with teaching, leadership or actually getting people to perform. I hope we’ll finally get people to realize this, but I fear we won’t, because it is far easier to get mesmerized by charisma than it is to dig into what it REALLY takes to lead people to another level.

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