*This interview was originally published in Business Class Magazin - this is the translation of the Hungarian text. The original version can be found here.
We met Dr. Robert Hogan at the Four Seasons Budapest. He is an American psychologist and the founder of Hogan Assessments who has institutionalized the use of personality assessments for the enhancement of work performance, and whose organization serves more than half of the Fortune 500 companies. He visited Budapest for the “Future of Coaching in Organisations” international conference organized in April, and he took some time to meet us for a glass of Chardonnay.
Please summarize briefly the principles and main elements of the personality test which you have developed, and which is used so widely in the business world.
People who have power make decisions every day that affect those who have less power. They hire, promote or fire them. These decisions are usually based on work interviews with them, but this is the worst possible way to make a decision that has such an effect on a person’s life. My aim was to make employee evaluations - firings, promotions, hiring interviews - that is, the whole decision-making process – rational and empirical. So, I based it on defensible, scientific foundations. Over the years, we have built up a serious database - based on this we can demonstrate that if business leaders listen to us, they will make better decisions regarding their employees. And why is this important? The keys to success in business are money and people. Managers generally make rational decisions when comes to money, so why wouldn’t they want to make rational decisions when it comes to people?
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What’s Worse Than a Tyrannical Leader? One Who Isn’t There
*This article was written by Danielle King and published in Human Resource Executive on June 1, 2018.
How to Recognize Absentee Leaders.
A high-performing salesperson knocks his sales goals out of the park every month and consistently brings in new clients while maintaining great internal and external relationships. When a new sales-leadership position opens, his boss suggests that this star performer fill the role. Following a stellar interview, the star performer is now a sales leader. Is this happily ever after?
Not always, says Scott Gregory, CEO of Hogan Assessments. Too often these top performers are promoted into leadership positions for which they aren’t suited, he says.
“What it takes to be a successful salesperson versus a successful sales leader is different,” says Gregory. “Companies fail to recognize that and fail to measure the characteristics required for leadership roles appropriately. These star contributors get promoted but not on the basis that they have talent for a leadership role.”
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New Study Lists Robert Hogan As One of the Greatest Living Psychologists
*This press release originally appeared on Business Wire.
In a new study published in Psychology, Dr. Robert Hogan, Chairman & President of Hogan Assessments, was nominated by his peers as a top psychologist in multiple categories.
The study, conducted by Adrian Furnham, Professor of Psychology at University College London and the Norwegian Business School, asked 101 qualified participants, all psychologists, to nominate the person they consider the “Greatest Living Psychologist.” Dr. Hogan was one of 10 psychologists to receive multiple nominations for this distinction.
The study aimed to determine how psychologists thought about their peers, asking each participant via an online survey to respond to open-ended questions such as “who is the greatest psychologist of all time?” and “who is the greatest living psychologist?” Participants were asked to rank psychologists across six different categories.
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THUOPER Developing Colombia’s Next Generation of Leaders
THUOPER, Hogan’s Colombian distributor, embodies one of Hogan’s core values: developing future leaders. Ineffective leadership has plagued the global workforce for centuries, mostly because the characteristics that help people emerge as leaders are quite different from those that make an effective leader.
Of course, when leadership potential has been measured incorrectly for so long, there is no simple solution to fix the issue overnight. That’s why it has never been more important to look to the future and start exposing younger generations to the most accurate and effective tools for identifying effective leaders.
In this edition of the Distributor Spotlight series, our friends at THUOPER provide us with an overview of an incredible program in which they are utilizing Hogan’s assessments for students who are selected to serve as CEO for a day.
One of the most common complaints against the education system of different countries is their apparent disconnection with the needs of companies. Generally, educational programs do not respond to organizational reality, and recent graduates find many difficulties when facing their first job. Read More »
Find, Grow, and Retain Top Talent: A 5-Step Plan
*This article was authored by Robert Hogan and Joan Jacobsen, and was originally published in The New Thinking Issue of Talent Quarterly. Visit their website to purchase the full issue as well as all previous issues.
Assembling a roster of all-stars isn’t easy—and keeping your squad together is even harder. Steal these five strategies and your team will be a perennial contender.
SUCCEEDING IN BUSINESS is a lot like succeeding in sports: The team with the most talent and best coach will almost always come out on top. But as any struggling squad will tell you, finding top talent isn’t exactly easy.
Let’s say, however, that you draft some homegrown stars and supplement your roster with a few big free agents. Even then you may not beat your competitors, because finding talent is one thing. Using it efficiently is some- thing entirely different.
But don’t throw in the towel. Here are five simple strategies you can use to sign franchise players, create a winning formula, and execute flawlessly.
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Self-Deception and Leadership
*This post was authored by Robert Hogan & Ryne Sherman.
There is a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated topics: self-deception and leadership. The two themes often come together in the lives of prominent politicians, for example, in the career of Barack Obama. Let us explain.
We are both fascinated by the idea that people often do things for reasons of which they are unaware. On the one hand, it is pretty obvious that people frequently act without knowing (or caring) why they behave as they do. On the other hand, why is that? For Freud, unconscious thoughts are created by what he called “repression:” one part of the mind (the Ego) recognizes that another part of the mind (the Id) prompts us to do things that will be great fun but which will get us in trouble. The Ego saves us from ourselves by repressing the impulses of the Id—most of the time. But from time to time, the Id escapes the Ego, and we do naughty things. Even then, however, the Ego protects us by “repressing” our awareness of what we have done and why. Freud goes on to say that maturity involves replacing repression with condemnation: immature people repress their socially inappropriate impulses; mature people acknowledge that they have socially inappropriate impulses but refuse to act on them. Read More »
Moral Character Matters, and It Matters Most of All at the Top of Organizations
*This is a guest post authored by Dr. Nicholas Emler, Professor of Psychology at University of Surrey.
Social organizations generate immense power and great benefits. Today, we rely on social organizations to support every facet of our lives—from food production and distribution to water supply and waste disposal to the provision of health care and national security. However, that power can also be a source of massive harm. It therefore matters whose hands control the levers of this power. And moral character matters immensely at this level because leaders have significant discretion to act, discretion denied to people lower in the organizational hierarchy.
There are some distinct moral challenges associated with the exercise of organizational leadership; unfortunately, some leaders are not up to these challenges. This essay identifies seven moral challenges of leadership, and concludes by suggesting that moral failure may be commonplace at the top of social organizations.
The first and most elementary moral challenge concerns the fact that leaders occupy positions of trust; they are entrusted with managing the material resources of the organization. As criminology clearly shows, theft depends on opportunity and most societies are arranged so as to minimize the opportunities available to known delinquents. But matters are very different at the top of organizations; the opportunities and temptations – of personal enrichment at collective expense -- can be huge and the strength of character to resist those temptations is often lacking. Read More »
We Don’t Build Bridges from Instinct: An Interview with Dr. Robert Hogan
*This Q&A was originally published by HRPWR.com.
Dr. Robert Hogan is an international authority in the fields of personality assessment, the assessment of management skills and organisational efficiency. He is the author of more than 300 articles, book chapters and books in total; the founder of Hogan Assessments and eponym of the Hogan test. Dr. Hogan is a determining personality of 21st century applied business psychology, who is widely acclaimed internationally in scientific and business circles alike. We recently spoke with Dr. Hogan when he was in Budapest to speak at the Future of Coaching in Organisations conference.
May I start with a personal question? Have you always been interested in organisational psychology, or had you previously tried your hand at other fields of psychology?
I’m a retired naval officer. After leaving the navy, I worked with youthful offenders for one and a half years - my interest in psychology derives from these times. I was completely enchanted by the task of understanding how these young people had arrived at this point, many of whom were really smart and good at sports - how did they become youthful offenders? I wanted to find out what could be done to reverse the process which had led them to that point. After this, I decided to pursue a PhD in psychology, and I spent the first 11-13 years of my post-navy career studying crime.
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Humility, Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness
*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?
*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 »