What if you had been the head of a company your junior or senior year of college? Do you think it would have changed your career trajectory or given you more insight into leadership? That’s the idea behind Odgers Berndtson’s CEO X 1 Day. This month, the leading global executive Canadian search firm launched its program that places third and fourth year university students in the shoes of CEOs at leading Canadian organizations for one day.

By shadowing some of the biggest decision makers in Canada, CEO X 1 Day gives students “a tremendous opportunity to observe a talented CEO in action - providing them with inspiration, role modeling and a road map for their careers," said Carl Lovas, Canadian Chair at Odgers Berndtson, in a recent press release. It is “designed to uncover Canada's most promising future talent, while giving CEOs an opportunity to connect and better understand what drives this next generation of leaders,” he continued.

As part of the application process, applicants are given the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) to assess their leadership aptitude. Characteristics factored into this aptitude include confidence, ambition, effective stress management, political savvy, values and the ability to develop new skills – all characteristics of a successful senior leader.

Throughout their one day, finalists will spend valuable one-on-one time with CEOs learning about their background, career path, and how they create value in their organization. The objective is to create a meaningful experience for both students – who will learn what it takes to be the leader – and CEOs – who will benefit from the students’ nubile and fresh perspectives as well as get a glimpse of Canada’s next generation’s up and comers.

Participating Canadian CEOs include: Elyse Allan, GE; Nitin Kawale, Cisco; Jim Gabel, adidas; Patrick Nangle, Purolator; Ellis Jacob, Cineplex; Ian Troop, Toronto 2015 Pan Am; Kirstine Stewart, Twitter; Marc Bertrand, MEGA Brands; Manon Brouillette, Videotron; Yannis Mallat, Ubisoft; and Thierry Vandal, Hydro Quebec. Performance Programs Inc., a Hogan partner, is working in conjunction with Odgers Berndtson during the applicants’ selection process.

The Hogan Personality Inventory is measure of personality assessment that provides leaders the strategic self-awareness they need to get along and get ahead. Raw scores on HPI subscales, available in many of Hogan’s reports, allow interpretation above and beyond main scale scores.

The HPI subscales are valuable tools for coaches and feedback providers. They provide an abundance of nuance for interpreting results. Subscales allow the interpreter to find distinctions among average scores and identify differences among individual with similar scale scores. Although main scale score interpretation is valuable alone, users will find that supplementing that interpretation with subscales increases the power of the instrument across applications.

For assistance interpreting the HPI subscales, download our white paper.

Our comprehensive approach to personality assessment provides the depth and detail
you need to understand your people.

Is there such a thing as being too creative? Although creativity is largely associated with positive work outcomes, our research shows that, in excess, creativity can be a powerful roadblock to career success.

To understand how creativity can harm an individual’s career, we must look at personality from two perspectives: bright-side personality and dark-side personality.

Bright-side personality describes the strengths and weaknesses people display when they are at their best. Dark-side personality describes personality characteristics that are strengths under normal circumstances. Under the increased stress, pressure, or boredom of most work environments, people tend to overuse those strengths, and they can become powerful career derailers.

Creative people often have parents who emphasize their uniqueness and favor creative expression over convention. As adults, their ability to comfortably work outside of societal norms makes creative individuals valuable sources of potentially important ideas. However, highly creative individuals also tend to focus too much on thinking outside the box, often at the cost of their ability to clearly explain their ideas or follow through.

For more on performance implications and recommendations for coaching highly creative individuals, download our white paper, Way Outside the Box.

This axiom is all too relevant for entrepreneurs today. Companies like Google and Pixar embrace a collaborative and innovative culture with unconventional work hours and offices. Why do they go through such great lengths to foster their employees’ creativity? Because that’s what a creative employee’s personality demands.

A creative employee’s personality profile indicates that they’re idealistic, nonconforming, and tend to be unconcerned about money. Conversely, good managers tend to be stable, practical, and concerned with maintaining order and controlling costs.

Although they are psychological opposites, managers and creative people badly need one another.
Find out what 5 steps organizations can take to ensure they are properly managing their creative employees and driving innovation by downloading our complimentary ebook.

When it comes to understanding your employees, there are three things that matter.

1. What do they want?
2. How will they get what they want?
3. What will get in their way?

Our assessments provide insight you can leverage to get the most out of your people and help them get the most from their careers.

After analyzing the personality profiles of Homer’s Greek heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon, Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, asked the question, “In which occupations, organizations or environments would these heroes prosper today?”

Career counselling for these two ancient heroes starts with their motivation (Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory). Achilles feels fulfilled by helping others, developing them and generally working for a prosperous society. He values material success, profit, ROI, trade and money, as well as traditional social values and virtues, morale, history and principled attitude towards life and work. His motives indicate that Achilles would be satisfied in a well-established organization with a clear mission, values and business purpose. The company should also be commercially oriented, such as a financial institution, and care about the satisfaction of its employees or customers. A good example would be a private bank with a long tradition of customer care and elaborate employee program.

Valuing commerce, finance and material success, Agamemnon, unlike Achilles, feels motivated by social status – the desire to stand out and get recognition – and desires influence and power. Self-sacrifice for others and helping society doesn’t really work for him. He is more likely to feel satisfied in environments that enable him to work on his individual career, achieve an important position, and gain credit as well as high financial remuneration. He would be happiest working in financial and insurance companies or private firms focused on profit and beating the competition.

The two share Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) scores that are like those of successful entrepreneurs. Achilles and Agamemnon would be successful in launching companies and organizations (though probably not together as per the last blog in this series). Both have traits of leadership, though their disposition could be more suited for crisis management which involves time restrictions and often requires making unpopular decisions. It is important to note that their definitive success or failure would also be shaped by their ability to cope with their potential risky behavior indicated in the Hogan Development Survey (HDS). High scores in these assessments mean a raised flag for entrepreneurs and managers – “Beware! You have certain exceptional characteristics; however, if you don’t learn to handle them and use them constructively, they may contribute to your fall later.” Which, in the case of Achilles and Agamemnon, they did.

Is it possible to know how two people will interact with each other based solely on their personality? In the article “Homer and Big 5,” Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, analyzed the personality profiles of the two heroes – Achilles and Agamemnon – from the first song of Homer’s Iliad to find out whether the two Greeks were predisposed for mutual conflict.

The authors considered both characters’ potential for behavioral conflict and value conflict. When looking at Achilles and Agamemnon’s Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and Hogan Development Survey (HDS) profiles, Duriš and Porubjak found that both men were very goal-oriented, competitive and ambitious. They were also self-critical, dissatisfied, sensitive to threats, and communicated in a straightforward manner without the tendency to build or maintain relationships with others.

Duriš and Porubjak predicted the possibility of conflict between the warrior and his king. For example, lower to average Prudence in both heroes indicates that they may attempt to use non-standard means in order to achieve goals or break rules. In some situations, Achilles as well as Agamemnon will be short-tempered and hot-headed, which will add an element of unpredictability as well as strong emotional and black-and-white perception to their interactions (e.g. mutual denigration). Achilles will only minimally respect the authority of Agamemnon and will be quite independent. On the other hand, if confronted, Agamemnon may perceive Achilles’ actions as especially negative, hostile, threatening or deceitful. While under stress, he may even attack Achilles by means of non-critical self-confirmation and misinterpretation or fabulation of events.

Duriš and Porubjak also found that the two also had potential towards mutual antipathy due to differing motivations. By analyzing their Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) profiles, they found that, while Achilles is interested in the prosperity of a wider community and welfare of others in general, Agamemnon is a relationship pragmatist and materialist who is predominantly interested in his own agenda.

While Agamemnon probably won’t get the world’s best boss award, his management of Achilles fails disastrously due to their conflicting personalities and motivations. And to think, all of this might have been avoided had the two been self-aware of their differences and motivational tendencies beforehand.

Ever wonder how your personality assessment results compare to well-known figures in history? What about ancient Greek heroes? In their article “Homer and Big 5,” Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, explore the socio-psychological aspects of Homer’s famous war epic, the Iliad, by putting the head-butting heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon, to the Hogan test.

Hellenic thinkers and orators, like Homer, dealt with subjects of the human condition and broached many topics which subsequently manifested as modern-day psychology. Ancient Greece is the cradle of one of the earliest personality typologies – Hippocrates’ division of people into sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic types. Although personality research has advanced since then, it is illuminating (not to mention fun) to retrospectively apply it to ancient Greek history. By applying current psychological models of personality to a close reading of the first song of the Iliad, uriš and Porubjak were able to make assumptions based on content analysis about the Greek heroes’ inner motivators and derailers.

When analyzed using the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) scales, Achilles, the Achaean warrior who flew off the handle and dragged his Trojan opponent’s lifeless body around for days after his best friend was killed in battle, is (not surprisingly) high on the Excitable scale. His moodiness and irritability are coupled with a low Adjustment score on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) to make one pretty emotionally volatile and unpredictable Greek guy. High scores in Ambition (HPI) and Tradition also explain his competitive nature and intense loyalty to his friend’s memory.

Agamemnon, the Achaean king who stole the Trojan king’s daughter only to give her back and then steal Achilles’ girlfriend, has scores similar to those of Achilles. Add in low Prudence (HPI) and high Bold (HDS) scores and you’ve got a stubborn king who thinks he’s the bee’s knees. His values? Power and Recognition. All this coupled with high Skeptical and Mischievous scores (HDS) creates the potential for a power hungry, mistrusting ruler who would quickly kick his army to the curb and flee the scene as soon as the going got tough – which he almost did (a couple of times).

Developed in partnership by Denison Consulting and Hogan, the Denison Leadership Potential Report (DLPR) is a new product that provides a statistically valid prediction of leadership potential. This is accomplished by aligning an individual’s inherent leader attributes—as measured by Hogan assessment tools—to the twelve leadership competencies defined by the Denison Leadershhip Development Model.

The DLPR is generated from responses to the Hogan Personality Inventory, the Hogan Development Survey, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory and depicts an individual’s potential to exhibit each of the twelve Denison leadership competencies based on his/her personality and values. Competencies are scored as either excellent, high, moderate or low potential and are grouped into the four traits of the Denison Model.

Read more and view a sample report