Assessing the Assessor—Evaluating Personality Assessment Tools Posted June 11, 2018 by Hogan Assessments *This article was first written by Abhijit Bhaduri for People Matters Magazine, June 2018 issue. Today, many organizations use personality assessment tools to assess their employees. But before deciding to use a personality tool, should organizations create their own thermometer test? Imagine someone walking up to a doctor with a new kind of device that claims to measure the body temperature. What if the manufacturer requested the doctor to endorse the new product? The doctor is the head of a hospital and her endorsement could mean opening up a new market for the manufacturer. How should the doctor go about taking that decision? The doctor would check it for the safety and reliability of the readings, and calibrate it against thermometers used by the hospital. The doctor could check her own temperature a few times over the hour to check if the reading is consistent. In short, one would take all measures to check the reliability and validity of a product or a tool against the accepted standards. Read More »
Humility, Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness Posted June 5, 2018 by Ryne Sherman *This article was originally published by Training Industry on May 1, 2018. One of the best studies ever conducted on organizational effectiveness was done by Jim Collins and described in his book “Good to Great.” Collins identified 11 firms from the Fortune 1000 that had 15 years of below-average performance in their industry followed by 15 years of above-average performance. The key question of the investigation is, what took these 11 firms from “good” to “great”? Collins ultimately concluded (somewhat reluctantly) that the key driver of change in organizational performance was a change in leadership. However, simply changing the leadership was not enough. Collins found that these 11 high-performing firms chose leaders with an almost paradoxical blend of characteristics: They were fiercely competitive, yet personally humble. It is easy to understand why leaders who are fiercely competitive are more effective: They want to beat the competition. What is less clear is why humility – as opposed to confidence, charm and charisma – was characteristic of the most effective leaders. This article draws on recent research in personality science to offer three generalizations about humility, leadership and organizational effectiveness. Read More »
Change Management — How Are We Helping Leaders Change? Posted June 5, 2018 by Hogan Assessments *This is a guest post authored by Rob Field, Learning and Development Director at Advanced People Strategies. We all heard it and probably all rolled our eyes to it…’The only constant is change’. With organisations needing to constantly adapt and evolve due to competitive forces, global challenges or political decisions how are leaders meant to keep up? Development programmes can provide frameworks and information to help create knowledge. We often see comprehensive change programmes with teams of people lead by programme managers. Effective at reviewing processes and creating the project plan and driving timelines to enable delivery. New systems, processes and products emerge. There are the usual statistics that over 80% of change programmes fail. Kotter would say that we need to attend to eight areas with the final of these being anchoring changes firmly in the corporate culture. Read More »
Hogan to Speak at 2018 E-ATP Conference Posted May 29, 2018 by Hogan Assessments Hogan Assessments Managing Director Ryan Ross, Manager of Client Research Kimberly Nei, and Managing Director of Europe Zsolt Feher will be featured speakers at the European Association of Test Publishers Conference on September 26-28 in Athens, Greece. In addition, Hogan will serve as a Gold Sponsor for the event. The three will speak on three different topics at the conference. Feher, Ross, and Nei will speak during an Ignite Session that will focus on the “State of Affairs in HR Data Analytics – Let’s Not Get Overshadowed by Digital Disruption and Rising Stars.” Ross will speak at a Breakout Session on “Noncognitive Assessment – Applications and Opportunities to Transform Testing.” The third and final session by Nei and Ross is a Breakout Session titled “Mythbusters – Fact or Fake News?” All Breakout Sessions provide a rounded perspective on a topic, and include multiple presenters from a single organization, across multiple organizations, or panel sessions specifically where the end users of tests and assessments are involved. Read More »
What Goldilocks Can Teach Us About Charisma Posted May 23, 2018 by Ryne Sherman “This porridge is too hot!” “This porridge is too cold.” “Ahhh, this porridge is just right.” –Goldilocks At Hogan, we’ve been talking a lot about Humility lately. We’ve spent much less time talking about its antonym – Charisma. However, colleagues have used the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) to study charisma and recently published their findings in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This post highlights their key findings, relates it to our own thinking about humility, and calls out some practical implications for coaching and leadership development. In their paper, Jasmine Vergauwe, Bart Wille, Joeri Hofmans, Rob Kaiser, and Filip De Fruyt show that the HDS contains a “Charisma Cluster” of scales. Specifically, the Bold, Mischievous, Colorful, and Imaginative scales together form a measure of charisma that reflects a combination of confidence, risk-taking, social presence, and strong vision. Read More »
Can You Handle Failure? Posted May 22, 2018 by Hogan Assessments *This article, authored by Ben Dattner and Robert Hogan, was originally published in Harvard Business Review in 2011. It has been republished in the HBR 2018 Summer Issue. In his brilliant 1950 film, Rashomon, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa depicts the story of a rape and murder four times, from the perspectives of four characters. The message is clear: Different people can see the same events in dramatically different ways. In the workplace this phenomenon is particularly evident when it comes to underperformance and failure. An outcome that an employee regards as satisfactory may be seen by his boss as entirely unacceptable. When a project is an unequivocal flop, colleagues disagree over the reasons why. These reactions, and their effect on workplace relationships, often become more problematic than the original event. As a result, how people respond to negative feedback is of great importance to managers and organizations and is a major determinant of career success. Consider the case of a pharmaceutical company seeking FDA approval for a new use of an existing drug. (Some details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.) Wendy, a talented researcher, was put in charge of the large-scale data analysis required to file an appli Read More »
The Dark Side of Personality: A Cross-Cultural Perspective Posted May 15, 2018 by Michael Sanger Everyone around the world derails, or shows their dark side, at some point(s) in a career. That is, people from all walks of life inevitably demonstrate behaviors and reactions that end up getting in the way of leadership, relationships, and/or performance at one time or another. But why do self-aware, educated professionals who know their stress-induced conduct is counterproductive act in such ways across the globe? Freud summed it up with his “life sucks, deal with [your neuroses]” perspective, postulating that the conditioning for our nerve wracked outlook starts from birth. You never see a newborn come out laughing, do you? It’s cold, it’s bright, it’s foreign; and Sigmund believed that experience sticks with you, leaving residual trauma lodged somewhere in your subconscious. And even if you don’t buy into his unproven hypotheses, think about that baby’s likely favorite word a couple of years later: “No”. Why do they say that all the time? They’re testing boundaries; they’re testing limits; they’re making sense of their world; and all the while, they’re being instructed how to act. Many times, these instructions counter their natural inclinations. They adapt and experiment with ways to get their way. This two-year-old eventually grows and enters primary school. There she or he faces new authority figures (teachers), peers (classmates), and a more complex “society”. The child continues her or his attempts to resolve feelings of inadequacy caused by humiliation, injury, and other traumas. This continues to evolve in middle school, high school, and beyond. Every child gets injured, gets called on by the instructor when they don’t know the answer, has to face a bully in the schoolyard; not to mention the fears of rejection that crop up when one becomes a teenager. Read More »
A&D Resources to Host Event on Dealing with Poor Leadership Posted May 8, 2018 by Blake Loepp *This press release originally appeared on Business Wire on May 8, 2018. A&D Resources, an international consultancy company, operating with 15 years’ experience with assessment and development of individuals, teams and organisations, and an authorized Hogan Assessments distributor, will host an event featuring Dr. Robert Hogan, well known authority on personality and business psychology, at 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 30 at Hotel Sofitel Legend the Grand in Amsterdam. The event is about “Dealing with Poor Leadership,” and Dr. Hogan will address “Absentee Leadership,” a current topic of concern in the HR and talent management circles, even though, it has plagued organisations for centuries. “Absentee leadership is a real factor that slowly unhinges otherwise well-run companies,” says Hogan. “Absentee leaders are everywhere, they destroy employee engagement, and they are very hard to identify because they are invisible.” Read More »
Distributor Spotlight: IAssessment Overcomes Adversity to Thrive in Spain Posted May 8, 2018 by Blake Loepp The phrase “Fortune favors the bold” is appealing on the surface, especially to those who watch others take extraordinary risks without anything to lose themselves. And, in reality, often times fortune does NOT favor the bold, particularly when starting a new business. However, that did not deter our friends at IAssessment from launching their business under extreme conditions of risk and uncertainty. And, even in the direst of circumstances, the company has thrived and grown Hogan’s presence exponentially in the Spanish market. In the latest edition of the Distributor Spotlight Series, IAssessment’s Managing Partner, Juan Antonio Calles, tells the story of how the company started and the work they’ve done to improve the Spanish workforce. When we signed our collaboration agreement with Hogan, we were at the dawn of the worst economic crisis in decades in Spain. Our friends and colleagues showed concern and surprise for the launching of a new venture in such uncertain and turbulent times. Now? Why not wait? Are you crazy? These were the words we most commonly heard in those days. Read More »
Leadership and Humility Posted May 2, 2018 by Hogan Assessments *This is a guest post authored by Rob Field, Learning and Development Director at Advanced People Strategies. Leadership… A pretty vast topic. The debates around effective leadership always evoke some pretty heated debate and numerous perspectives. We all have our stories of the successful and inspirational leaders we have worked for and with, the qualities they possess and how they have engaged those around them. In leadership it can be easy to become caught up in status, power and control, however, for leaders, focusing on those around them and within their teams is crucial to success. Cheryl Williamson wrote in Forbes ‘You cannot be an effective leader if you feel you are better than your subordinates’. Teams with these types of leaders tend to have higher turnover and experience lower productivity. Read More »
Contact us. Let's talk. +1.918.749.0632
Contact us. Let's talk. +1.918.749.0632
