A recent article in the Washington Post described a new service from a company called Predictim that claims to help people find the perfect babysitter. The service scans the would-be sitter’s entire Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram history, then uses recent advances in personality and data analytics to assess four “personality features” -- propensity toward Bullying / Harassment, Disrespectfulness / Bad Attitude, Explicit Content, and Drug Abuse.
At face value, this type of service has merit. There is a plethora of recent research demonstrating that social media profiles and word use on Twitter reflect the personalities of their users. Thus, it is sensible to think you could combine social media profiles and behavior to predict how a person might behave on the job.
However, these services ignore a long history of research showing that people strongly respond to incentives and will modify or even falsify their responses to succeed. This is a major problem, not just for Predictim, but for any service offering to evaluate someone’s work potential on the basis of their social media pages. Let me explain.
Read More »
Nicole Neubauer, metaBeratung Featured at Rethink! HR Tech Europe
Nicole Neubauer, CEO of metaBeratung, an official Hogan distributor in Europe, was recently featured at Rethink! HR Tech Europe in Berlin along with members of her team. Neubauer presented on the importance of valid assessments during the conference.
The event, attended by more than 150 CHROs and HR decision-makers from renowned European companies such as Siemens, Daimler, and SAP, is considered one of Europe’s leading HR summits.
Presenting alongside Neubauer was Lidija Sljeric, senior talent manager at Mondi AG. Over the past two years, metaBeratung has worked alongside Mondi to implement new, cutting-edge processes for employee selection and development by integrating Hogan’s assessments. The project’s success was directly responsible for the selection of Neubauer and Sljeric as featured presenters at the event.
Read More »
RELEVANT Management Consulting and ICF Germany Present Inaugural Prism Award to CMS Law Tax
RELEVANT Management Consulting, an official Hogan distributor in Germany, and the German chapter of the International Coach Federation presented the inaugural German Prism Award to CMS Law Tax, an international law firm with 74 offices worldwide.
The award, modeled after the ICF’s International Prism Award, is given to organizations with programs that make a difference in the coaching community through professionalism, quality, and sustainability.
“We are very proud to be supported by an extraordinary jury of several well-known experts in the coaching industry in Germany,” said Dr. Geertje Tutschka, ACC, president of ICF Germany.
Dr. René Kusch, owner of RELEVANT, explained why CMS was chosen as the winner of this prestigious award.
Read More »
How Does Donald Trump’s Humility Compare to the Rest of America?
Opinions on President Donald Trump run strong, to say the least. Whether you believe he will make America great again or single-handedly destroy it, there’s one aspect of Trump everyone can agree on – he knows how to dominate the news.
The days are few and far between that the top political news doesn’t revolve around Trump. He hasn’t been shy about denouncing his opponents, publicizing his successes, and hosting endless campaign rallies. Are Trump’s efforts simply honest attempts to advance his agenda? Or are they a reflection of his personal ego?
Hogan researchers have developed a new assessment we plan on making available soon -- the Hogan Humility Scale. It measures how well people spotlight others’ contributions, admit mistakes, show openness to feedback, see themselves as no better than others, and refrain from boasting and arrogant behaviors. We figured a fun way to put the Humility Scale through its paces would be for people to rate their own humility and Trump’s humility, then compare the two.
Read More »
VIDEO: Four Questions with Bob Hogan
Most of you probably know Hogan Assessments was founded by Bob Hogan, and he’s been our guiding force to this day. But how well do you really know him? Did you know his original background was in physics and engineering? Or that his interest in leadership came from leading a janitorial crew for properties owned by Hollywood elite, followed by finding a way to fix cannons for the U.S. Navy? What about his work as a probation officer, which lead to a study of how to solve the problem of crime?
In this video, you’ll get to hear more about Bob Hogan’s colorful life, as well as his thoughts on how psychology works to understand leadership, and his advice for undergraduate psychology majors.
.codegena{position:relative;width:100%;height:0;padding-bottom:56.27198%;}.codegena iframe{position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;}/*Youtube Embed Code : Created with Codegena.com */
What’s Holding the Team Back from High Performance?
*This is a guest blog post authored by Melvyn Payne, Commercial Director at Advanced People Strategies.
I am privileged to work on a regular basis with leadership teams from a wide variety of backgrounds – both public and private sector. The big question that is usually being considered is “how do we become a high performing team?”
These teams are usually made up of talented and successful individuals, and, typically, those same individuals expect their stakeholders to see the team as effective at what they do.
When asked, team members can easily articulate what they would see as the characteristics of a high performing team and, equally, the key risks that cause a team to become dysfunctional, such as a breakdown of trust.
So why is it that these groups of smart, experienced individuals, who clearly understand what might take the team’s performance to a different level, not take action?
Read More »
How to Destroy a Commercial Icon
Leadership is one of the most important topics in human affairs. When good leaders are in place, institutions and their incumbents thrive; when bad leaders are in place, institutions fail and the incumbents suffer accordingly. The core task of leadership is to build high performing teams; leader behaviors that disrupt this process inevitably lead to failed enterprises. The data show that four leader behaviors are key to building a team or successful collective effort:
- Integrity: Leaders must be trustworthy. Subordinates need to know that leaders keep their word, don’t exploit resources, don’t play favorites, and treat their staff with respect. The dark-side tendencies that lead to managerial derailment mostly concern leader unpredictability, which erodes trust.
- Competence: Leaders need to understand the business at the level of the shop floor. This is easy when leaders come up through the ranks (e.g., in the military). But beginning sometime in the 1970s, the idea took hold that there are formal principles of business (which can be learned in MBA programs) that apply universally, and that if one understands these principles, then one doesn’t need to master the details of the business at a more granular level. I believe this view is dangerously wrong, and it almost guarantees managerial failure.
- Judgment: Judgment has to do with the quality of a leader’s decision making, and that, in turn concerns being able to recognize when they have made bad decisions and then changing them. Bad leaders, when confronted with evidence that their decisions were wrong, tend to double down—e.g., send more troops to Iraq.
-Vision: Making a case for the importance of what the group is doing. As Peter Drucker noted, if the only reason you are in business is to make money, then you should quit. Greed is not an appealing vision for many people.
Read More »
What the Amazon Blunder Teaches Us About Big Data
In this era of Big Data, simply producing or collecting nearly unfathomable amounts of data isn’t enough. The best companies are able to sift through that data to find meaningful trends and, ultimately, specific information that sparks a plan of action.
In the rush to harness that data for job selection, numerous companies are turning to experimental AI and machine learning to discover new forms of data collection and new types of analysis human beings might not be capable of. But not all new methods of data collection are created equal. If set up incorrectly, AI data analysis can go horribly wrong – just ask Amazon.
The Internet giant decided to harness its computing power and expertise to create a job screening program that would scan an applicant’s resume and determine if an applicant is suitable. A person familiar with the effort told Reuters the goal was for the program to receive 100 resumes and spit out the top five.
In order to teach this program how to screen candidates, it was fed resumes submitted tothe company over the last decade. In theory, the program would learn what resume terms lead to successful candidates and which terms lead to rejection. In reality, the program learned to reject female candidates.
Read More »
In the Era of “Fake News,” It’s Hard to Know What, or Who, to Really Believe
Today, amateur and professional trolls work to stir up arguments and divisiveness. Casual social media discussions frequently devolve into arguments with all kinds of questionable bits of information casually thrown around like wadded-up paper balls. Did the Pope really endorse Donald Trump? Is Kid Rock really running for Senate? Time to run to a fact-checking website – but how many people will trust what they say?
It’s enough to turn anyone into a skeptic. And our research on global personality trends shows more people are becoming skeptical, largely due to this contentious atmosphere. As you can see on the graph, average skepticism scores from the Hogan Development Survey have steadily increased nearly every year since 2002. On the other side of the coin, our research team noted skepticism was much lower in 2001 and 2002, potentially due to recent events such as the 9-11 terrorist attack that had an impact on people around the globe. It is possible that, on average, the trauma of the event caused people to become more supportive of their government, at least temporarily.
Read More »
What Can a Rugby Team Teach Us About Humility?
*This post was authored by Hogan's Michael Tapia, Dena Rhodes, and Ryne Sherman.
The New Zealand All Blacks is one of the most successful sports organizations of all time. For over a century they dominated the world stage as a premier member of the international rugby union, competing with such foes as the South Africa Springboks and Australia Wallabies. In 2015, the All Blacks became the repeat champions of the quadrennial Rugby World Cup (2011 and 2015). Even more astonishing, the success of New Zealand Rugby persists across squads. New Zealand’s women’s (Black Ferns) and men’s (All Blacks) Rugby Sevens teams both won the 2018 Rugby Sevens World Cup held in San Francisco.
The achievements of the All Blacks have yielded global recognition and a collection of media projects exploring the methods behind their success. This includes the documentary All or Nothing and James Kerr’s book, Legacy. Kerr spent time with the team and learned about their unique culture, which he believed was essential to their dominance. According to Kerr, the key to this team’s culture is dedication to character, and “character begins with Humility.”
Read More »