It’s Time to Stop Vilifying Ambition

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The concept of ambition has a bad reputation in popular culture. The textbook definition – a strong desire to achieve something, typically through determination and hard work – seems innocuous, but the word is often associated with destructive consequences. Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler were ambitious, and that cost the world millions of lives. On a smaller scale, it’s easy to picture ambitious businesspeople who put their careers ahead of the wellbeing of their employees or family. But at Hogan, we think about ambition in more positive terms, and believe that to ignore ambition is to miss a crucial component of human personality.

For many years, psychological science has ignored, and even vilified ambition. Freud decreed ambitious people to be neurotic and potential father murderers, and Jung felt that ambitious people suffer from a “regressive restoration of the persona” which blocks their potential for personal growth. Even during the development of modern personality assessment, ambition has been ignored. Neither the well-known Five-Factor Model nor the six-factor HEXACO personality inventory assess ambition, and both of these models claim to be comprehensive.

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Agility Today, Something Else Tomorrow

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PeopleMatters

*This article was originally published on November 2 by People Matters.

Agility in leadership is about the ability to effectively balance factors that drive organizational performance at a rapid pace. But does moving quickly, integrating data, and engaging staff really require a different type of leadership?

The leadership consulting industry loves catchphrases. Popular ones include transformational leadership, servant leadership, boundless bravery, coherent confidence, learning agility, grit, and now agile leadership. These are all superfluous words consultants use to keep their work current in the eyes of consumers.

The challenge with all these phrases is the majority are just a repackaging of what we have known for a long time: personality predicts leadership performance. The lens through which personality is viewed – and the buzzwords – can change; but in the end, personality is just that: personality.  

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Hogan to Expand Global Learning Program in 2019

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Certification ImageHogan will expand its Global Learning offerings in 2019 with the new Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop.

The one-day workshop will focus on how to analyze themes and connect personality scales across Hogan’s core assessments, allowing attendees to gain a deeper understanding of how to extract maximum interpretive value from Hogan scales and subscales. Jackie Sahm, Hogan’s Director of Global Learning, said the new program was developed based on two years of participant feedback.

“In early 2017 we launched the Hogan Level 2 Certification Workshop, which focused more on advanced feedback delivery of Hogan profiles,” said Sahm. “What we discovered in post-workshop surveys was there was also a popular demand to take a deeper dive into Hogan scale interpretation. So, we decided to expand our program offerings accordingly as part of our commitment to create the best user experience possible.”

Beginning in January 2019, Hogan will offer the following workshops in the United States: Read More »

Awair Hosts Italian Hogan Certified Community in Milan

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Awair LogoAwair, an authorized Hogan distributor in Italy, Spain, and France, hosted an event on November 14 in Milan attended by nearly 50 members of the Italian community of Hogan Certified talent management experts. The lively session allowed participants to network, expand their knowledge of Hogan competencies, and to share experiences. 

Over the years, the community of certified people has been growing significantly, and many of the participants have shown interest in meeting and exchanging ideas. With facilitation by Andrea Facchini, Awair Partner and Hogan expert, Awair launched the first Italian Hogan Certified Community, with a remarkable turnout of people ready to share their Hogan knowledge at the November 14 event.

During the meeting, Andrea introduced three main topics requested by participants via survey (Report Selection: How to choose the most appropriate Hogan product. Feedback & delivery: Sharing success and stories and lessons learned, as well as tips for more creative and efficient feedback. Report interpretation: How to handle critical profiles and to look at interdimensional conflicts from a different angle) and then opened the floor to the participants for continued interaction and discussion.

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Don’t Tell Mom, the Babysitter’s a Fake

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Fake iStockA 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.

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Nicole Neubauer, metaBeratung Featured at Rethink! HR Tech Europe

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Meta RethinkNicole 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.

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RELEVANT Management Consulting and ICF Germany Present Inaugural Prism Award to CMS Law Tax

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RELEVANTRELEVANT 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.

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How Does Donald Trump’s Humility Compare to the Rest of America?

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TrumpOpinions 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.

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VIDEO: Four Questions with Bob Hogan

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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.

What’s Holding the Team Back from High Performance?

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rawpixel-1062951-unsplash*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? 

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