I worked with an organization several years ago to develop a leadership coaching program. When I asked my client what the problem was, he said, “It is okay to be a jerk as long as you’re hitting your numbers.”

The organization’s sales leaders were operating in an alienating manner, but this behavior was excused because they were meeting their goals. When those sales dipped, they didn’t have trusted confidants to point out industry and competitive shifts that led to the decrease.

I liken this to the feedback some people receive regarding the things they say and the way they say them. It’s one thing to be right, and quite another to be rude about it. For a leader, being right is driving successful business results. Saying those things in the right way demonstrates the humility necessary to build relationships. Both factors must be present for individuals to attain leadership excellence.

Now consider NBA basketball star LeBron James. In the 2010 offseason, James signed as a free agent with the Miami Heat and faced a storm of criticism as the result. Why was he vilified when so many players in the sports world today opt to go the free agent route? It all goes back to what you say, and how you say it.

LeBron could have chosen a team to sign with and demonstrated professional courtesy to the other teams under consideration by informing them of this move in advance of holding a press conference. Instead, he strung teams along, including Cleveland, and announced his decision in a highly publicized and criticized ESPN live special entitled “The Decision.” LeBron and his Miami Heat teammates then hosted what appeared to be a post-championship celebration in their home arena before the season had even begun. Rather than a confident showman focused on the new goal ahead, many fans and media members saw arrogance and over-the-top flamboyance. The most notorious moment came when LeBron discussed his new team winning multiple championships as if it was a foregone conclusion.

LeBron was now firmly cast as a bad guy, yet even in this new role and on a new team he came up short yet again in the NBA championship series. The sports media criticized LeBron for not performing up to the level expected during crunch time moments of the 4th quarter. Unlike the last time he lost the big game, he was not given a pass.

This is the essence of leadership derailment. Derailing behaviors tend to emerge as coping mechanisms when we face stress or adversity. Over time these behaviors erode relationships. In the grand scheme of things, our positive achievements may outweigh our derailing moments in terms of sheer number. Regardless, the magnitude and weight of those derailing actions when we are at our worst tend to overshadow much of the good work we have done. 
LeBron was likely coping with stress and adversity. He had always lived and played basketball in Ohio up to that point, and last season was clearly a time of stressful decisions and transitions. His charisma, showmanship, and confidence allowed him to harness his talents and become an MVP. These same characteristics became strengths overused and the negative moments are quickly becoming the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of LeBron. The 2012 season appeared to be the year of a humble King James until a recent altercation with a fan during a game has further perpetuated his bad guy image.

On my way to the airport this week, I heard a sports talk radio personality characterize LeBron as a good guy who tends to say or do things in big moments that rub people the wrong way or bring into question his ability to deliver in the clutch. These derailing moments will likely permeate his legacy and overshadow his multitude of great on-the-court achievements unless he is able to win multiple championships. Like those sales leaders I worked with years ago, it’s okay to be a jerk as long as you are hitting your numbers; however, true greatness is likely achieved through equal doses of driving results and demonstrating humility. 

I’m a big movie buff. Since I have young children I rarely get a chance to go the movie theaters anymore to see a film that doesn’t star Woody, Buzz, Lightning McQueen, or a princess of some type. In my 5+ years of fatherhood, Netflix has become a savior in terms of feeding my movie addiction. For me and 20 million other subscribers, seeing that a new movie is available for streaming online or getting that red envelope in the mail is one of life’s simple joys.

The joy of being a Netflix customer was mightily shaken last July when customers received a brisk, impersonal email informing them that the video subscription service pricing would be increased by as much as 60% per month unless subscribers decided to substantially limit the services they were receiving. In essence, customers were abruptly told that they would no longer be able to enjoy both the streaming movies and DVD-by-mail features. They would be required to choose one type of service otherwise incur the price hike to retain both options.

Netflix customers were outraged by this imposed price increase and/or elimination of service options. This outrage was not only communicated via blogs and Facebook posts. Many customers have truly put their money where their mouth is by canceling their subscriptions. The company’s stock price is now 42% lower than it was in July before the price hike announcement. An organization that by all accounts changed the video rental industry and was experiencing a fantastic upward trajectory envied by the business world has taken a serious turn for the worse. How did this happen?

The recent events at Netflix appear to be yet another unfortunate example of leadership derailment. The company’s decision to increase prices and the manner in which they communicated the changes to customers has been perceived by many as a bold and arrogant move. In September, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings issued a statement apologizing to customers. However, it is possible that some may view his apology as too little, too late. Even after the initial customer backlash, Netflix at first confidently defended their decision and even announced in August that they expected to gain 400,000 subscribers by the end of September. Recently, Netflix has projected that it will have actually lost 600,000 customers by the end of September. In other bad news, Starz, a key movie content partner for Netflix, ended its partnership with the organization. The company has decided to rebrand their DVD-by-mail service as a separate company called Qwikster. The effectiveness of this strategy is being questioned by many and could further stoke the flames of the fire started earlier this summer.

Two months after the initial controversy, Reed Hastings’ blog post apology stated that the July announcement “lacked respect and humility” and indicated that he should have personally communicated in more detail the reasons for the changes. He went on to say, “In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.” Hastings ends his statement by saying that he and his team will work hard to regain customers’ trust. Interestingly enough, his actions and choice of terminology strongly parallel the leadership derailment research findings of Hogan Assessment Systems.

High potential leaders assessed by Hogan tend to be seen as confident, assertive, ambitious, and visionary. Some of these very characteristics are likely present in the senior leadership team at Netflix and surely contributed significantly to the company’s hugely successful rise. However, during stress or heavy workloads, when leaders aren’t paying attention, or during times of change, this confident style may emerge as counterproductive behaviors viewed by others as arrogant, lacking humility, setting unrealistic expectations, and ignoring negative feedback. In his own words, Hastings acknowledged a very similar behavioral pattern. Furthermore, derailing behaviors related to arrogance often lead to the inability of leaders to be seen as trustworthy and sincere, hence Hastings’ comment that Netflix is now committed to regaining customer trust.

Leaders that allow their natural confidence to descend into arrogance rarely admit when they are wrong, learn from mistakes, or take responsibility when things go wrong. This recent statement by the CEO appears to potentially demonstrate a realization that a mistake was made and a willingness to take ownership of the misstep…however the pricing increase was not rescinded and only the poor communication of the policy change was addressed. Will the apology and Qwikster rebranding strategy be effective in retaining customers and attracting new subscribers? Can Netflix and its leaders get back on track after derailing so drastically? Stay tuned!
 

An acquaintance of mine was recently sharing her on boarding experiences for a job she just started. She was hired her based on her experiences with dynamic talent management projects and they assigned her the mission of driving progressive change in the organization’s candidate selection and leadership development programs. An early indication of the obstacles standing in her way became clear when a colleague said, “Before we brainwash you into doing business as usual around here, tell me your ideas.” At least they were self-aware of their problem!

I’ve been hearing about this same phenomenon across other organizations and industries. The organization’s leadership team has steered the company to a significant level of success due to a combination of certain strengths but given recent industry shifts, the future upward trajectory of the company appears limited due to a combination of certain weaknesses or a perceived lack of required capabilities. The leadership team then decides to drive strategic change by hiring a new leader that exhibits these complementary attributes. The next progression of events can be described as being very similar to the medical occurrence of transplant rejection.

Transplant rejection occurs when a transplanted organ is not accepted by the body of the transplant recipient. The immune system of the recipient attacks the transplanted organ because the purposed of the immune system is to distinguish foreign material within the body and attempt to destroy it. This is what seems to happen with some leadership teams. They ask for someone new to join the group to essentially offer a unique, dissenting voice. They must play resident devil’s advocate to stimulate diverse ways of thinking and ideas to enact change. However, these teams display a tendency to reject the new ideas in favor of their tried-and-true approaches. The initial strategy of incorporating a change agent into the mix is replaced by directly or indirectly motivating the new employee to conform. The new leader then typically elects one of two options: assimilation or attrition. In assimilation, the leader adopts the team’s prevailing methods and customs as a means for survival. In attrition, the leader recognizes that making a case for change is a losing battle and leaves the company. In either scenario, change is compromised.

In the medical world, doctors overcome transplant rejection by determining donor-recipient match. In the talent management realm, we must adopt a similar practice of ensuring leader-team match based on two critical components. First, we must ensure proper fit between the individual leader and the current team’s style and organizational culture. Second, we must ensure match between the candidate’s capabilities and the competencies required to drive change and elevate the business beyond current performance levels. Some leaders may be a great fit with the team, but do not bring the necessary behaviors to the table to help the company adapt to industry shifts and evolve. On the other hand, some leaders are potentially effective change agents yet, when hired into the wrong team, they could appear like a bull in a china shop and clash with others. Identifying and selecting leaders with both the mentality and tools to drive change AND attributes to connect with colleagues is a balancing act. We can break this balancing act down into the simple model of starts, stops, and continues.

Continue What Got You There
I’ll start with the “continues.” We must identify leaders who can continue (or at least respect and support) the traditions and strategies that have made the leadership team and organization successful. Some organizations refer to this as their DNA. When teams are self-aware and understand how the flipside (or dark side) of their strengths may actually be holding them back from further success, the immediate reaction is to assume that they need to overcorrect in the opposite direction. Operationally-sound leaders think they need to shed their current methods to become highly creative and innovative. Collaborative, enabling leaders see an opportunity to switch their mentality and adopt an entirely top-down, forceful behavioral style. These are ineffective shifts and likely not humanly possible. It is important to remember to retain and maintain the behaviors that led to success in the first place. Leaders that are hired to drive change must also display these core competencies in order to support a continuation of effective behaviors (or at least allow others who exhibit these skills to contribute to the team).

Stop Doing What Is Not Working 
There are two kinds of “stops.” First, we need to evaluate candidates and select leaders with low risk for the counterproductive behavioral styles that are holding back the success of the current team and leading to derailment. For one of my healthcare clients, the focus was on screening out leaders who were overly cautious on high stakes decisions and reacted to pressure by appearing as closed-door managers in a highly collaborative culture. They already had too many of those individuals. However, given that they were trying to hire more ambitious, big picture types, they needed to incorporate a second kind of “stop” in the candidate evaluation process. The goal here was to stop the potential problem of hiring leaders with too much a good thing. For this organization, it meant that targeting confident change agents must be tempered with reducing the likelihood that you will end up with arrogant risk takers who are not willing to partner with others on decisions. In some cases, we must put a figurative ceiling on these behaviors. Be careful what you ask for, you just may get too much of it.

Start Doing What Needs To Be Done
The “continues” and “stops” mitigate the risk of leader rejection from the team. Combined with that approach, selecting for the “starts” is what allows us to stack the deck in favor of not just leader retention, but also successful execution of strategic change. This new leader still needs to bring some unique ingredients to the overall team recipe to take things to the next level. We typically think of change as being linked to creativity, risk taking, the development of new products, etc. Yet the need for change could also be represented by a team that is highly innovative and cutting-edge and requires a new leader to the join the group to provide stability related to finances and operations. The behaviors that the leadership team needs to start demonstrating usually represent a balancing of the current preferences and capabilities of the incumbent leaders. The end result is not a 180 degree shift and likely resembles a more balanced, versatile team composition. 

The start-stop-continue model, with a focus on balance, is a matter of identifying leaders who display the “continue” behaviors, do not exhibit significant risk for “stop” behaviors, and show high potential for the required unique behaviors to enable the team to “start” moving in a new direction without losing their DNA. Keep in mind that selection of the right leaders with the requisite capabilities, fit factors, and low likelihood for derailment is really just the beginning. Ongoing leader and team development is critical to promote long-term success. Back to the transplant analogy, talent management professionals and executive coaches serve in the capacity of doctors who help the patient (i.e., leadership team) through the post transplant recovery process (i.e., ongoing leader and team development) so that the team can gel and overcome challenges.

When discussing the topic of selection assessment with human resources professionals, it can be rather easy to overwhelm a non-technical audience by carrying on about job analysis, criterion validation, correlations, legal defensibility, etc. A former colleague of mine who worked as a sales representative used to say I was getting “I/O-ish” (as in Industrial/Organizational psychology) when I started using such terminology. Keep in mind that I’m the first person to advocate the merits of assessment validation for ensuring effective talent management solutions. However, my colleague made an important point that sometimes, in an effort to provide the details behind the psychometrics of implementing an assessment for candidate selection, we may inadvertently add complexity to the conversation. 

In order to provide a simple structure to explain the process for implementing a selection assessment, I devised what I’ve coined the “which hunt.” That is not a typo. I’m not referring to a witch hunt as in the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, nor does what I’m proposing resemble the McCarthyism of the 1950s. My concept of a which hunt is a series of discovery questions that an organization must answer to create a solid foundation for a high-quality assessment strategy that will support the identification of high potential candidates during the pre-employment screening process. An effective which hunt will help a company to identify:
• WHICH characteristics should we measure?
• WHICH assessment(s) should we use?
• WHICH cut-score will increase our hit rate for identifying good candidates?

WHICH characteristics should we measure?
You cannot hope to measure the potential for a candidate to be successful until you define which characteristics lead to success in a specific job. The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is an online resource sponsored by the Department of Labor that reports profiles for over 800 occupations.  O*NET provides 277 data points for each occupation covering abilities, skills, knowledge, work styles, and other characteristics. Clearly, if O*NET is any indication, the process of defining a job profile of required characteristics can be a daunting proposition to an organization looking to implement an assessment program to measure such characteristics.
 
Rather than immediately getting into the details of job analysis or competency modeling, I find that a simple description of “can-do aptitudes” and “will-do attitudes” helps communicate the likely outcomes of this first step in the which hunt process. Can-do aptitudes refer to the mental horsepower of candidates such as cognitive abilities, demonstrated capability for job-specific skills, and mastery of specific areas of job knowledge. Put simply, having these aptitudes indicates that you can do the job, but we all know that not everyone lives up to their potential.

The will-do attitudes are often those characteristics that allow employees to meet their potential and can even lead an employee with less raw ability to actually succeed beyond those seemingly more talented colleagues. These work styles include conscientiousness, interpersonal savvy, stress tolerance, and achievement orientation, among others. Very smart, very talented employees often fall short of their full potential or fail because they do not work hard, do not play well with others (customers and/or teammates), and do not effectively manage pressures at work. 

Taken all together the required can-do and will-do characteristics form the success profile for that specific job.

WHICH assessment should I use?
The next step is to identify an assessment that measures these characteristics in candidates. As we do with most ventures in life, we might begin the search for an assessment provider by using our good friend Google. When you type “candidate selection assessment” into Google, the result includes over 1.5 million hits! Which one should you choose?

My message to human resource professionals is that the best assessment is one that measures the critical components of the success profile you identified in the first step of the which hunt. Your assessment strategy doesn’t have to measure the entire success profile (that’s why we conduct interviews, administer basic qualification questions, collect resumes, etc.), but there should be significant overlap. This may require the implementation of multiple assessments. For example at Hogan, we offer the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory to measure can-do characteristics, the Hogan Personality Inventory and Hogan Development Survey to measure will-do characteristics, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory to assess “will-fit” characteristics in terms of how a candidate might fit into the organization’s culture.

WHICH cut-score will increase our hit rate for identifying good candidates?
Now for the last leg of the which hunt – interpreting the assessment results. While this task seems easy enough – low scores fail and high scores pass –   the truth is that this can actually be quite challenging for multiple reasons. What do you do with scores in the middle? Is a 40 a good enough score or should I look for 50s and higher? If I have multiple scores for multiple characteristics, how do I know what scores are more important indicators of success? What if the candidate has high scores on some characteristics and low scores on others? It is a delicate process to draw the line in the sand and make appropriate sense of all the good information that assessments provide. 

This part of the which hunt gets a bit complicated despite my best efforts. The bottom line is that we must clearly understand the relationship between assessment scores and job performance. I find it helpful during this part of the conversation to use an analogy for the way a financial institution uses a credit score. If a bank is going to give someone a loan to purchase a house, they don’t just want to get a high level summary of age, income, salary, credit card debt, etc., and shoot from the hip on how to combine all of those data points into an estimation of investment risk for that person. Such an approach would be inconsistent, inaccurate, and not scalable. To make sound lending decisions over time, the bank leverages a proven, weighted equation to combine these data points into an easily interpretable credit score that is backed by research to increase the hit-rate for making profitable lending decisions (the recent housing market collapse aside). Standards have been set to categorize bad credit scores, good credit scores, and great credit scores. This is essentially how a validation study is used when implementing an assessment for candidate selection. We conduct research to give you overall low, moderate, or high evaluations of candidate potential that if used consistently will increase hit rates for selecting successful employees.

The which hunt guidelines break up the concepts of assessment implementation into concepts that are hopefully simple to grasp:  
• Before we can measure anything we must define a benchmark (i.e., success profile).
• We must use that benchmark to guide us to pick the right tool for the job (i.e., assessment).
• We have to know how to read the measurements the tool is giving us and do regular checkups to make sure the measurements are accurate (i.e., cut-scores).

I am the proud father of three children: a 4-year-old boy, a 4-year-old girl, and a 7-month-old baby girl. As you might assume, the 4-year-olds are twins. I have observed many things that have amazed me with the twins over the past 4 years. One observation was that a multitude of people, from strangers at the shopping mall to professionals with PhDs, would ask me if the boy and girl were identical. I would, of course, politely respond “no.” I wanted to say that not only did these children not result from the splitting of a single zygote, but there is a very fundamental difference between the anatomy of a boy and a girl that prevent them from being identical!

Another observation that I noticed very early on was how differently they behaved when they were upset. The children share the same family circus environment and around 50% of the same DNA, however their reactions under stress follow very consistent, yet distinctly unique, patterns. Through my work at Hogan as a consultant, I began to see clear parallels between the derailing behavior of leaders as assessed by the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) and the challenges I was facing at home as a father.

A derailer is a counterproductive tendency that, in normal circumstances, likely manifests as a strength. When we are tired, pressured, bored, or otherwise distracted, these behaviors can become overused strengths or risk factors that inhibit our effectiveness. The HDS measures 11 such risk factors. For example, leaders scoring in the high-risk zone on two of these HDS risk factors, Excitable and Diligent, are likely to struggle with a vicious cycle of behavior when under stress. They tend to be perfectionistic and typically impose high performance standards on their employees causing others to view them as demanding and nitpicky (Diligent). When employees do not meet these lofty expectations, the leader may react with emotional outbursts and become overly disappointed in others performance (Excitable). As a result, leaders might demoralize and disempower staff through moody overreactions and a refusal to delegate, which places additional pressure upon the leader to deliver results, and this increased stress level is likely to further trigger the Diligent/Excitable cycle of behaviors.

Now, I obviously cannot administer the HDS to my 4 year-old son. If I could, I would bet dollars to donuts that he would score in the high risk zone on both Excitable and Diligent. Like any leader, child, or human, my son has many wonderful aspects to his personality. He is very hardworking (loves to help his dad shovel snow, pull weeds) and his positive enthusiasm is contagious in our household. However, he has very specific and rigid expectations for his own and others behavior (Diligent) and he becomes overly upset when things don’t play out to his liking (Excitable) such that his negative emotions also set the tone for the house.

Another interesting combination of HDS factors occurs when a leader scores in the high risk zone on both Mischievous and Colorful. These leaders tend to get noticed and succeed early on through their ability to command the spotlight with outgoing and animated behavior (Colorful) and charm others with their impulsivity and excitement seeking (Mischievous). However, these behaviors can cross the line into the realm of derailment when leaders are too dramatic too often such that they manage by crisis in reaction to stress. Performance can also be inhibited when leaders invite negative attention by testing limits, taking risks, and favoring pleasure over commitments. On a smaller scale, Colorful and Mischievous are very accurate labels for my daughter. On the positive side, she is endlessly entertaining with her family room theatrical productions and already demonstrates a capability to use finesse to win others over. However, her dramatic antics are less entertaining when she reacts to a simple splinter extraction as if it were major surgery without proper anesthetic.

The real fun begins when one person’s derailers collide with the derailers of another individual. In my work life as a consultant, these derailers collide among members of work teams. In my personal life, they collide between my twins. What do you think happens when you pair one child who demands that everyone color inside the lines and gets upset when they don’t with another child who truly relishes coloring outside the lines and pushing other peoples’ buttons? Sometimes it resembles a mixed martial arts pay-per-view event. That being said, the twins also function like a little old married couple where neither individual could function without the other. I can’t wait to see what my 7-month-old eventually adds to this behavioral stew!

The Hogan leadership research tells us that most people will struggle with at least one or two derailers. So I guess that makes my children normal. The research also indicates exactly what I’ve observed in that we develop risk factors early in life while learning to deal with parents, peers, and relatives. This behavior that develops while we are young may become habitual and we may be unaware that we behave in certain ways because it’s simply the way we’ve always acted. These derailers can inhibit both individual and team performance both at work and at home. Strategic self-awareness of these potential risk factors is the critical first step for understanding our behavior and beginning to manage ourselves to get the most out of our strengths.

June 4th, 2010 marked the passing of basketball coaching legend John Wooden. As many people are aware, Wooden was known as the “Wizard of Westwood” for his unmatched success as coach of the UCLA men’s basketball team, leading them to a record 88 consecutive victories and 10 national championships among other accomplishments. What is less widely publicized is the strategy that Wooden designed and deployed in order to recruit, assess, select, develop, and mentor his players into successful individuals on and off the court. This aspect of the coach’s legend interestingly establishes him as not only an innovator in the sport of basketball, but also a pioneer in the realm of talent management.