All great human achievements, such as the Great Wall of China and the moon landings, are the result of coordinated group effort. In addition, every organization, no matter how successful, must innovate and adapt to survive. This is why innovation is an important concern for well-run organizations. Furthermore, as economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, innovation is at the heart of all economic progress.¹ This raises the question of how specifically to manage innovation or alternatively how to lead a creative team.

The established leadership literature primarily concerns leading teams that have defined objectives and indices of success—usually sports teams, military units, or industrial functions. With these teams, efficiency, precision, and repeatability are often the desired outcomes. But many types of business organizations depend heavily on creativity: TV and movie studios, architectural firms, opera troupes, corps de ballet, intelligence gathering and analysis organizations, marketing and advertising businesses, etc.

Before proceeding, we should answer two questions. First, what is creativity? Creativity concerns finding new solutions to existing problems and then implementing those new solutions. Second, who is likely to be on a creative team? Such teams would not contain creatives like Einstein, Freud, Rembrandt, and Beethoven—geniuses are unemployable. Rather, we are concerned with managing teams composed of employable adults whose jobs are to develop innovative products and solutions.

According to social psychologists,² the best way to lead a creative team is to create a culture that encourages creativity. But there is more to leading a creative team than fostering a culture of creativity. Social psychology ignores individual differences—not everyone has the skills needed to lead a creative team. So what are those skills?

Skills to Lead a Creative Team

Studying people who have successfully led creative teams can provide insight. One such person would be Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist, a cofounder of Pixar, and a former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Another would be J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, the director of the Manhattan Project (which developed the first atomic bomb), and the director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.^3,4 Reading about the performance of Catmull and Oppenheimer suggests that five “competencies” are needed to lead a creative team effectively.

Expertise

First, leadership should be a resource for the group (and not a source of privilege for the incumbent). This means that leaders need to be genuine experts in the field in which the team is working. Expertise is needed for a person to be credible and to be a resource for the group. Expertise can’t be faked or assumed; it must be demonstrated.

Conflict Resolution

Second, leaders must be good at conflict resolution because conflicts between talented team members inevitably arise. Persuading people to coexist, cooperate, and communicate is an essential leadership task; it is not an add-on or a distraction, even though it may seem to be at the time. As the very smart leader of an engineering team once told me, “You spend 90 percent of your time dealing with people problems and 10 percent of your time actually on task.” Catmull and Oppenheimer were known to be skilled at getting difficult people to cooperate. Oppenheimer had to work with the notoriously challenging Edward Teller, a gifted physicist and incorrigible troublemaker, whereas Catmull had to try to control Steve Jobs.

Drive for Results

Third, effective leaders want to win, be industry leaders, and beat the competition. This means pushing the team for results. Self-expression and self-actualization are the byproducts, not the central objectives, of real work. Considerable political skill is needed to push a team for results without alienating the team members. Catmull is and Oppenheimer was intensely driven and competitive.

Psychological Toughness

Fourth, effective leaders need real psychological toughness because they must deal with pressures from inside the team (e.g., Teller and Jobs) and demands from outside the team. Oppenheimer had to manage the legendary Major General Leslie Groves, US Army Corps of Engineers.

Kenneth D. Nichols, a civil engineer who worked for Groves on the Manhattan Project, described him as “[. . .] the biggest SOB I have ever worked for. He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. [. . .] He is extremely intelligent. [. . .] He is the most egotistical man I know. [. . .] Although he gave me great responsibility and adequate authority to carry out his mission-type orders, he constantly meddled with my subordinates.”⁵

Similarly, Catmull had to please “the suits” above him at Disney who were focused on cost control. The faceless Disney employees wouldn’t have been as terrifying as General Groves, but they were still capable of making Catmull’s life miserable. Skill and toughness are required to advocate effectively for the team’s agenda while managing internal disputes and fending off external, often politically motivated, challenges.

Ability to Recognize Talent

Finally, and as noted previously, social psychologists hold that effective leaders of creative teams need to foster a culture of creativity. But how do you do that? Consider the example of Deion Sanders, who became head coach of the hapless and winless University of Colorado football team in December 2022. He was phenomenally successful from the start. When Sanders was asked how he planned to change the culture of the University of Colorado football team, he said he didn’t care about the culture, he only cared about the talent of his players and their ability to perform to his standards. He meant that, if you have talented players and they are performing at their best, the culture will take care of itself. The same is true for leading a creative team: leaders need to recruit talented and creative people to the team, give them the resources they need, cut those who can’t perform, and the culture will take care of itself.

This blog post was authored by Hogan Founder and President Robert Hogan, PhD.

References

1. Schumpeter, J. (1942). Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Harper Brothers.
2. Amabile, T. (1996). Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity. Westview Press.
3. Catmull, E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House.
4. Bird, K., & Sherwin, M. J. (2005). American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Knopf.
5. Nichols, K. D. (1987). The Road to Trinity. William Morrow & Co.

Crises provide opportunity for women leaders to distinguish themselves as effective and decisive. Research about how women leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic has yielded six critical crisis leadership skills of powerful women.

Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Kelsey Medeiros, PhD, associate professor of management at the University of Nebraska Omaha, about her new book, Painted Wolves: A New Model of Leadership from Powerful Women. She provides an in-depth look at how women heads of state addressed the COVID-19 pandemic more effectively than their men counterparts.

An organizational psychologist whose research areas include gender-related issues in the workplace, Kelsey has published research about crisis response, ethics, and creativity. On the podcast, she discussed the origin of her book, leadership during crisis, and six skills in which women in leadership excel.

A New Model of Leadership from Powerful Women

The inspiration for Kelsey’s book title came from a South African safari, where she learned that lions are far less effective hunters than painted wolves. Whereas lions kill only 30% of the time, painted wolves, also called African wild dogs, kill 80% of the time because they use pack tactics. “Why are we telling people to like lions?” Kelsey mused. “We have a whole animal kingdom to choose from.”

Her interest in women in leadership intensified during the beginning of the pandemic while she researched the effectiveness of different leaders. She observed parallels in the leadership approaches of women heads of state and began writing.

The book references a Time article assessing 11 countries considered to have the best pandemic responses.¹ Although they constituted only 11 percent of the global heads of state at the time, women led six of the countries.

Two leadership skills stood out to Kelsey as she assessed the leaders listed: decisiveness and quick actions. A negative stereotype casts women as indecisive and risk averse. The women described in the article acted in the opposite way. They were able to assess the data pragmatically, identify acceptable risks, and implement clear, effective decisions with empathy.

Leadership During a Crisis

The skills that the leaders demonstrated accord with Hogan research into leadership during crises. One key competency that people look for in a leader during crisis is decisiveness, which entails evaluating data and sticking to decisions. Kelsey theorized that one of the reasons these women leaders were so effective was that they exceeded the extremely high performance standards imposed by society. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel holds a PhD in quantum chemistry, for example.

“Several stereotypes hold women back,” Kelsey observed. The tendency to think of leaders as male can be difficult to change. In a leadership class that Kelsey teaches, more than 90% of students choose a male leader as the subject for their semester-long project.

One contributing factor in the gender disparity among heads of state may come from stereotypes about agency and communality. People tend to associate men with agency and women with communality. People also tend to associate only agency—not communality—with leadership. These socially established concepts can influence our perception of who should lead.

Kelsey noted that when men show communality, they tend to be applauded. But when women show agency, they can be penalized for displaying ambition. “Those stereotypes infiltrate our decision-making and our thinking,” she said. “We don’t get to see the actual skills that the leaders or potential leaders bring to the table.”

Six Skills for Women Leaders

In Painted Wolves, Kelsey outlined six skills that made women leaders successful in managing a crisis such as a global pandemic:

1. Preparation – Women tend to have to be overprepared and overqualified to reach elite leadership roles. Instead of relying on charisma and improvisation, women in leadership have the advantage of thorough preparedness.
2. Issue-driven focus – Instead of viewing themselves as the solution to all problems, women in leadership want to help fix a specific problem or issue. In many cases, they want to find the pragmatic solution, not be the heroic solution.
3. Collective leadership – Painted wolves work as a pack, not lone hunters. Modern leadership, whether in politics or business, is based on achievement via collective effort. In Hogan terms, effective leaders build and maintain high-performing teams.
4. Willingness to learn – Countries that were effective in their pandemic responses had experienced similar crises before. Just as those leaders applied past knowledge to the present crisis, leaders must be willing to seek and apply accurate feedback about their performance.
5. Emotion management – Women leaders are not emotionless; rather, they use their emotions appropriately. High emotional intelligence allows them to manage their own and others’ emotions.
6. Risk taking – Leaders need to demonstrate confident risk taking. However, the risks women are willing to take can be different from those of men. During the initial stages of the pandemic, women were more likely to take economic risks by shutting down their countries, whereas men were more likely to risk lives by keeping their countries open.

“We can learn so many things from these women that are applicable for all of us. They just happen to be the ones who demonstrated them on a global scale,” Kelsey said.

More Opportunities for All

Rather than seeking to place women in leadership positions, Kelsey advocated for a more broadly inclusive approach to leadership. Gender is neither the only nor the main criteria for diversifying global leadership. She challenged people to ask this question: “How can we create more opportunities for everyone so we can have more effective leaders overall?”

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 85 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

Reference

1. Bremmer, I. (2021, February 23). The Best Global Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic, 1 Year Later. Time. https://time.com/5851633/best-global-responses-COVID-19/

Hogan is excited to announce Artisan Consultoria as the newest member of the Hogan International Distributors Network, covering the market for personality assessments in Brazil.

“Brazil holds immense potential and is a focal point for Hogan,” said Simon Castillo, Hogan’s practice manager for international distributors. “We are confident that Artisan will significantly contribute to our market presence and relevance in the country.”

Based in Rio de Janeiro, Artisan specializes in evidence-based people solutions aimed at enhancing organizational performance. Since its inception in 2006, Artisan has cultivated a skilled team deeply experienced in consulting, training and facilitation. Today, Artisan serves an array of local and multinational companies across Latin America.

“Having utilized Hogan assessments in executive development for over a decade, stepping up as a distributor feels like the next logical evolution,” said Felipe Paiva, founder of Artisan Consultoria. “The Brazilian market stands to gain from an expanded range of services.”

As an authorized distributor of Hogan personality assessments in Brazil, Artisan is positioned to be a comprehensive provider of talent management solutions for organizations to improve and accelerate growth, development, and effectiveness in every level of the workforce.

Hogan looks forward to a fruitful partnership with Artisan and continued growth in the Brazilian market.

Learn more about Artisan at artisanconsultoria.com.

Personality can affect our memory, which is not as reliable as we’d like to believe.

Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Ryan Rush, PhD, a consultant on the corporate solutions team at Hogan Assessments, about the science of memory.

A former professor of psychology, Ryan has conducted research on the social nature of memory, including false memories and the effect of emotion on memory.

“We cherish our memories. They make us who we are. It’s often hard for us to accept that they’re not always accurate,” Ryan said.

Keep reading to learn more about memory and personality, memory recall, and eyewitness memory.

Memory and Personality

Specific personality characteristics are likely to influence how we perceive the world. In turn, this influences what information we notice and how we encode that information in our memories. When we recall a memory, personality can also affect how we perceive the information.

Ryan used the Hogan Personality Inventory’s Adjustment scale as an example. This scale measures the degree to which a person appears calm and self-accepting or self-critical and tense. Someone with a high Adjustment score might tend to ignore critical feedback but remember positive feedback. In such situations, they might hear all the feedback but encode only the more positive feedback into memory. Another possibility is that they hear and encode all the feedback but shape it more positively during recall.

Conversely, someone with a low Adjustment score might hear moderately critical feedback as highly critical in the moment. Upon recall, they might focus on the critical feedback but ignore the more positive feedback.

Personality also can affect how likely someone is to claim to have a good memory. Most people who would say, “I have a good memory,” probably don’t have extraordinary memory abilities. What they probably do have is confidence in their ability to recall information. Having good capabilities in short-term retention is likely part of their identity, the narrative they have created about themselves.

Memory Recall: The Social Contagion of Memory

The social contagion of memory is the idea that memory can act like a virus. “The details that we share with one person can infect another person’s memory or contaminate it with incorrect details,” Ryan explained. Errors can be transferred into someone else’s memory. “Additionally, we sometimes get correct information from others,” he added. Both errors and accuracy can be transmitted across people’s memories.

An experiment of Ryan’s involved details in photos of everyday scenes, such as a kitchen or an office. The photos contained both stereotypical and unusual items for each setting, such as a lamp and a spatula together in a living room. Two people viewed the photos separately, had a conversation about what they recalled, and then recalled the photos again individually.

“We found that if you start out with a more accurate memory before you collaborate with someone, you are likely to spread that accurate information to your partner,” Ryan said. “If you start out as less accurate, you are likely to spread some incorrect details to your partner.”

This goes beyond merely regressing to the mean. It suggests that when you’re recalling details of a meeting or studying for an exam, you can improve your memory by recalling correct details with others. If false memories can contaminate good memories, accurate memories can also contaminate inaccurate ones.

“Be careful who you recall with,” Ryan quipped.

Memory Recall: Eyewitness Identification

The social contagion of memory has significant application in eyewitness accounts of crimes. Two witnesses who see the same crime might discuss their memories of details, and these memories can contaminate each other. Suppose Witness A saw a suspect wearing a blue baseball cap. If Witness B does not initially remember any headgear but also recalls a blue cap after talking with Witness A, is that detail an error?

Eyewitness identification in real life isn’t how it’s depicted on screen. One thing that television dramas get wrong is that lineups aren’t usually conducted live behind two-way glass. They are typically photographs on paper or a screen.

Another dramatization is the pace at which witness interviews take place. Instead of solving crimes within 24 hours, investigators might question a witness days or weeks after the event. The longer the interval between the crime and the lineup, the less detailed a witness’s memory is likely to be. The memory may even become less accurate, especially if it has met inaccurate information in the meantime.

How do we make a judgment about somebody else’s recollection? “Without corroborative evidence, it is basically impossible,” Ryan said.

Wrongful Convictions

Wrongful convictions happen for many different reasons, but eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause. The Innocence Project states that 69% of DNA exonerations involve a mistaken eyewitness. Many different variables influence eyewitness memory, including stress and exposure duration (how long the witness saw the suspect). Variables of this type, called estimator variables, are outside of anyone’s control.

In researching eyewitness memory, psychologists use two types of lineups: target present and target absent. A target-present lineup has a picture of the perpetrator in it. A target-absent lineup has a picture of an innocent suspect who resembles the perpetrator.

When memory conditions are worse, witnesses are worse at identifying perpetrators in a target-present lineup. However, they remain the same at identifying the innocent suspect. While they’re less likely to identify a guilty person, fortunately they aren’t more likely to provide false identification.

Identifications of an innocent suspect do increase when system variables are poor. System variables include lineup composition, police procedures, and administrator knowledge of the suspect. Whether consciously or not, a lineup administrator who asks, “Would you like to look at this photo again?” while using certain nonverbal signals might contaminate the eyewitness’s memory. In real investigations, of course, all lineups have a genuine suspect and are conducted with unbiased administrators.

Reducing the Risk of Inaccurate Memories

“Memory is not perfect by any means,” said Ryan, “but if we can identify the best practices when it comes to those police procedures or how to conduct those lineups, we can minimize the risk as much as possible.”

Implementing an intentional process to minimize memory errors is beneficial in the workplace too. If all three people in a meeting remember the outcome differently, the inaccuracy could cause serious organizational repercussions. Taking thorough notes or using recordings by agreement can help provide the corroborative evidence for what was decided and why.

Ryan said that memory research is important, especially when someone’s memory is evidence in a trial. “Witnesses don’t always get it wrong, but when that is the only piece of evidence, you have to be careful,” he said.

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 84 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

Reference

1. How Eyewitness Misidentification Can Send Innocent People to Prison. (2020, April 15). Innocence Project. https://innocenceproject.org/news/how-eyewitness-misidentification-can-send-innocent-people-to-prison/

Recent social and political trends in the United States have not been kind to assessments. For instance, the number of colleges requiring standardized test scores for admission continues to drop.¹ As another example, assessments can be collateral damage in the bipartisan movement to re-examine occupational licensing.² And a growing movement also looks to malign the use of assessments in the workplace, leading to thus far unsuccessful attempts to ban personality tests in the workplace.

Despite this misguided scrutiny, using assessments to inform organizational decisions is more important now more than ever. We had a discussion with some assessment experts at this year’s Annual Conference for the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), and we wanted to share these insights with you.

What is causing this scrutiny?

Although such skepticism is not new,³ it seems to have increased with more public awareness on the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Still, several factors play a role.

Unrealistic Expectations

People sometimes assume results based on assessments should be perfect and error-free. Unfortunately, this is an unrealistic expectation. Virtually all assessments are based upon statistics and probabilities, which have inherent uncertainty. Similarly, assessments measure human tendencies and phenomena, which are impossible to see directly. It’s not as simple as holding a ruler to an object to measure its length. To understand people, we must make inferences based on things we can see.

In other words, assessments can’t perfectly solve all the world’s problems. However, they are useful for facilitating more objective and accurate decisions in the workplace. So, when assessments don’t live up to these unwarranted expectations of perfection, users get disappointed easily and lose confidence in all assessment uses and applications. If the public applied this logic to their medical decisions, no one would take any medications because drugs are not effective for everyone all the time. In fact, many common medications are even less effective than proper applications of psychological assessments.

Misuse of Assessments

Speaking of statistics, designing and validating assessments requires complex analyses and computations. When assessments are used to understand people, who are even more complex, a proper understanding of assessment results requires familiarity with psychology and related behavioral sciences. It is human nature to fear what we don’t understand, and many people don’t understand assessments or how they are used. At Hogan, we do not fear assessments. Rather, our passion for socially responsible people solutions drives us to love assessments. We have decades of expertise designing, evaluating, maintaining, and implementing high-quality assessments. Unfortunately, however, many options that claim to be personality assessments lack the scientific foundation and socially responsible safeguards of Hogan’s assessments.

A lack of understanding can lead to improper assessment applications in organizations. For instance, many are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and too often organizations use such assessment for hiring. However, the MBTI is not designed for employee hiring.

Another improper use of workplace assessments stems from recent advances in artificial intelligence and large language models. That is, some assessment providers have used these new technologies to avoid offering human interaction in interpreting assessment scores and giving feedback. The problem is that this violates psychologists’ ethical guidelines, which require that only qualified people use psychological assessment techniques.

When personality or other psychological assessments are interpreted incorrectly, the test takers can experience stress and misdirection. When improper uses of assessments go wrong, it is easy to view all assessments as faulty based on these isolated “bad apples.”

What are the implications?

Some version of an assessment, whether a personality assessment or structured interview, is the main way to make more accurate decisions with less bias in an employment context. The scrutiny against assessments and related decision-making tools pushes people to favor more flawed and biased decision-making strategies, such as human judgment and intuition. Because organizations must attend to their brand image and public reputation to support customer relations and effective recruiting efforts, they may follow public opinion—no matter how misinformed—at some point and to some extent. As a result, talent professionals would be left to make decisions without the aid of assessments.

What would the world look like without assessments?

The only other alternatives to assessment-based decision-making are pure human judgment or random approaches. Although it is easy to see the superficial benefits of human judgment, human judgment is severely flawed. In fact, human judgment is problematic in so many ways, one could write an entire book on the topic. Many scholars have done just that (e.g., Kahneman, 2011). Human decisions are shaped by expectations, biases, experience, and heuristics that distort accuracy and fairness, even without the decision-maker knowing. This is precisely why experts started looking into better ways to make impactful decisions: workplace assessments.

With most assessments, the decision-maker is presented only relevant information, such as a personality score. In other words, all they see is a number that tells them about how the individual is likely to behave. The decision-maker does not see the person’s race, gender, age, disability, ethnicity, or any other irrelevant characteristic that could activate problematic biases. On the contrary, when a decision-maker uses only human judgment, we have no way to find out for sure exactly which factors were evaluated in reaching their decision. Unlike human judgment, assessment-based decision-making allows for continuous improvement of tools, protection of individual rights, and evaluation of decision-making practices.

Beyond human judgment, the other alternative to assessment-based decisions is pure random selection, akin to rolling the dice. Although this ensures everyone has an equal chance of being selected, it imposes an unreasonable burden on employers to hire individuals regardless of the ability to perform their work. How would you like to work alongside many incompetent coworkers?

How can we improve the reputation of assessments?

Because organizations will eventually have to follow public demand, it is crucial to take steps to improve the reputation of assessment use in the workplace.

For instance, assessment experts can conduct research and provide education on assessment applications in a way that is accessible and relevant to a general audience. Accurate and engaging stories about proper assessment use and comparisons to alternatives, such as human judgment, seem like promising strategies for connecting with lay audiences. Experts can also work with assessment critics to help mend the breakdown in communication between social scientists and the lay public.

People can also inform themselves of the differences between proper and improper assessment use and increase their self-awareness of their own biases, all of which should help shape more realistic expectations and equip them to protect themselves.

Without assessments to support workplace decisions, employees and organizations will be left to navigate the treacherous world of human biases and error without scientific and evidence-based insight.

This blog post was written by Chase Winterberg, JD, PhD, director of the Hogan Research Institute, and Brandon Ferrell, PhD.

References

1. Nietzel, M. T. (2023, June 13). The Test-Optional College Admissions Movement Continues to Grow. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2023/06/13/the-test-optional-college-admissions-movement-continues-to-grow/?sh=7f2b919b1326
2. Cottle, M. (2017, August 13). The Onerous, Arbitrary, Unaccountable World of Occupational Licensing. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-obama-occupational-licensing/536619/
3. Highhouse, S. (2008). Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee Selection. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1, 333–342.
4. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

When talent is your only true competitive advantage, it makes sense to base your talent strategies on personality data.

Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with George Randle, managing partner at Randall Partners and coauthor of The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent. A former US Army officer, George has more than 20 years of Fortune 100 and Fortune 1000 global human resources and talent acquisition experience and is also a Hogan-certified coach.

“Building elite teams became this burning passion for me,” George said. “Talent acquisition has been the best function I could ever hope for.”

Keep reading to learn about George’s passion for talent, how he uses Hogan, and why personality data is essential in both executive coaching and talent acquisition strategies.

Talent Acquisition Strategy

George and his coauthor, Mike Sarraille, a former US Navy SEAL, had a combined passion for talent. They used the lens of US special operations forces, known for their effectiveness, to evaluate how organizations defined talent. Their findings led to the conclusion that hiring the right people was essential—and they share techniques for it in their book.

The Right Talent

“Human capital is the only true competitive advantage that you can hope to achieve and maintain,” George said. All the other elements of organizations are highly subject to change and chance, but organizations have significant control over the quality of their talent resources. The best talent is what makes an organization truly competitive.

The Right Seat

George explained that getting the right talent is the first step. Getting the right talent into the right seats is the second. He pointed out that two great American football quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, would have been much less likely to succeed if they had swapped teams. Different environments and roles require specific personality characteristics for success, in sports as in business.

Both the talent and the role need to be right for the hire to be successful. The Hogan assessments measure personality strengths, potentially overused strengths called derailers, and values and motivations. We refer to these as the bright side, the dark side, and the inside of personality. As a talent acquisition expert, George uses Hogan data to match people with opportunities by asking two questions:

1. Would the person be right for this opportunity?
2. Would the opportunity be right for this person?

Hogan Assessments provides the data-driven talent insights that reach the depth and specificity that effective talent acquisition strategies demand. Referring to other assessments he used before Hogan, George said, “They told you what color the house was. They didn’t tell you how it was built.”

Personality Assessments in the Hiring Process

George has hired more than 85,000 people through the teams he has built, so he’s extremely experienced in assessing and interpreting human behavior. A skilled interviewer, he nevertheless credited Hogan with improving his perceptions. “It added that scientific, data-based credibility to the work that I do,” he said.

In the hiring process, George first makes sure the client understands what success looks like in the team. In Hogan terms, this is an evaluation of what characteristics and values are likely to align with the team’s and organization’s needs. Sometimes clients may be unclear or mistaken about what strengths are needed in a leadership role.

Next, George digs into the data. He uses pre-hire data to confirm or deny a candidate—or to reveal insights to explore before making an introduction. Depending on the target role, he might administer a more extensive assessment and debrief a candidate to understand their strengths, challenges, and motivations.

Avoiding Hiring Bias

A candidate’s behavior during an interview doesn’t always reveal who they are. Hogan data helps talent acquisition experts avoid résumé seduction as well as reveal effective candidates who may be less likely to stand out. “Many times, I think I have a great candidate sitting in front of me, then I use one of the Hogan tools—and I missed something,” George said.

In some cases, “missing something” means detecting an unsuitable candidate who may have interviewed well but whose personality data showed inauthenticity or misalignment. A candidate with polish and charm could lack necessary collaboration skills, for example. In other cases, “missing something” means discovering that someone who may have interviewed indifferently has ideal personality characteristics for the role. A hidden-gem candidate might have been feeling too nervous to articulate their strengths during an interview.

By using objective, well-validated assessment tools, George matches candidates to opportunities based on data, not just impressions.

Personality Assessments in Executive Coaching

A great Hogan coach contextualizes the Hogan results and assuages a person’s confusion or concerns about their data. A great Hogan coach will also explain that Hogan data shows a person’s strengths and opportunities. It shows how their values are aligned with their career goals and their organization’s goals.

Leadership principles in the corporate world are similar to those in the military. Being able to train and coach others and develop cohesive teams were some of the key abilities that helped George transition from military service into his career in HR. “When you’re in the military, you don’t get to hire the people that you lead,” he said. That’s often true in business, as well.

Leaders who can build and maintain high-performing teams need strong socioemotional skills to develop the talent they have. When George coaches executives, he uses Hogan data to describe the importance of reputation and how strategic self-awareness can lead to behavioral changes that affect workplace reputation. He uses Hogan results to help leaders understand how they are being perceived and identify ways to adjust how their derailers manifest in the work environment. “We use the [Hogan tools] to make a plan for them to be the best version of themselves,” he said.

Talent Acquisition Advice

To George, personality matters more than technical skills. Recalling his time in military service, George said he could teach anyone to jump out of a plane, implying that technical skills can be learned. On the other hand, personality strengths like problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and innovation are key intrinsic characteristics.

Organizations that have strong talent strategies thrive. “The companies that have a talent mindset [. . .] are reinventing themselves,” he said. “They’re making sure that their number one investment is in their people.”

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 83 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

If you’ve ever led creative people, you know that managing creative teams takes special techniques. Creativity and imagination can bring innovation as well as impracticality.

Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp discussed what works and what doesn’t when managing creative teams.

Research has shown best practices for how to manage process teams, transportation teams, supply chain teams, and others. But how to manage creative teams still seems to be an unanswered question with a lot of conflicting advice.

Let’s explore how creativity affects productivity and what it takes to manage creative teams.

Tips for Managing Creative Teams

When we talk about managing a creative person, we don’t mean a once-in-a-generation artist. People like Leonardo da Vinci are not very employable and are unlikely to seek work in an organization. We mean creative employees that you might find on a corporate team, such as UX designers, marketing specialists, animators, or content strategists. Employable people, whether creative or not, want structure and consideration. They want to know what’s expected of them and that somebody supports and cares about them.

Structure and consideration aren’t all creative employees need to thrive. Ryne referenced Ed Catmull, computer scientist and cofounder of Pixar, as a successful leader of creatives. In his biography, Creativity, Inc., Catmull names three concepts that are integral to managing creative teams¹:

1. Candor – In a creative context, candor means responding to creative ideas with constructive honesty that keeps the team from ideating unproductively. It means being able to say, “I see where you’re going with that, but I don’t think that’s going to work for these reasons,” without stifling trust or innovation.
2. Collaboration – Managing a creative team means fostering an environment where people want to work together to create something bigger than they could make on their own.
3. Focus – A focus on solving design problems ties in the aspects of candor and collaboration. When a creative team can focus on creative solutions in a specific scenario, it becomes clear which ideas are likely to work and what tasks the team members will need to perform.

“Creating an environment like this requires earning a lot of trust over time,” Ryne observed. “Trust is a critical component of teams.”

Who Should Lead Creative Teams?

In creative work, efficiency is not always the highest priority. “What happens when you put a bunch of people who know about business in charge of a bunch of creatives? You end up with a disaster,” Ryne said.

Having a creative person lead creative people has pros and cons. Often, a team leader is a former team member. “It’s pretty common in creative teams to see the leader is someone who is creative themselves,” Ryne said. A significant advantage is that the creative leader understands from experience that the creative process takes time, although a leader who isn’t creative can appreciate the nuances of the creative process too.

Defending the Team

The person who should manage a creative team is someone who can defend the team and justify their unique needs to the organization. Their leader needs to be able to tell executives that progress is happening, that more time or resources are needed, and that updates will be frequent.

Creative teams may seem to have no productivity for a while. A leader who doesn’t appreciate that creativity often happens in bursts would be less able to give a good account of the team to stakeholders. An inexperienced team manager might succumb to perceived pressure and blame the team for lack of results. In a disaster scenario, that might cause team members, the manager, or both to be fired.

Supporting the Team

In addition to standing with their employees externally, managers of creative teams need to support creativity internally. “When you create an environment where people can’t be candid with each other, where they feel like they have to agree to everything because ‘we all want to get along and collaborate,’ that can be really problematic,” Ryne said. Too much agreement—or too much disagreement—can hinder creative problem-solving. Strong socioemotional skills, including communication and empathy, will serve a creative team manager well.

Managing Mixtures: Creatives and Noncreatives

Many teams are mixtures of creatives and noncreatives. Creative people tend to score low on the Hogan Personality Inventory’s Prudence scale and high on the Inquisitive scale. These scores suggest a tendency to be curious, flexible, not focused on process or execution, disorganized, easily bored, tolerant of ambiguity, and resistant to supervision. To coworkers who score differently on these scales, creatives can seem distractable, unfocused, and even lazy. How do managers help people in these two types of roles collaborate?

“Creative individuals tend to work in bursts,” Ryne said. “There’s a spark. There’s an idea. Then you just work and work and work and work until you’ve got it done.” This production style can pose a challenge when working with people who aren’t in creative roles. Managers of creatives must provide the opportunity for them to work whenever inspiration strikes . . . without interrupting or impeding the needs of other team members.

What’s important for a manager is to maximize creativity bursts when they arrive, understand that the fallow periods are necessary, and build an environment conducive to sparks of inspiration. Forcing a creative employee to remain at a desk during traditional office hours could be genuinely detrimental to their work product. At the same time, the creative employee’s operational counterpart works best when keeping an exact schedule.

People with seemingly incompatible personalities can and do work together harmoniously and productively. Their manager needs to foster understanding between them about what’s expected from each other’s roles. A team session can be good for building mutual respect.

Advice for Managing Creative Teams

To wrap up the podcast episode, Ryne shared his best insights for managing creative teams: “Candor is critical for creative teams. Create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing the good and the bad. Create an environment where people feel comfortable saying, ‘This is a bad idea, and this is why we need to go a different direction.’ Too often in creative teams that are focused on collaboration, you never really create the thing that’s truly creative because everybody has to have their part in it, and even the bad ideas get included. Find a way to eliminate the bad ideas in a productive, nonthreatening way.”

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 82 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

Reference

1. Catmull, E. (2023). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House.

Beyond the common awkwardness of performance review conversations, Gallup has found that work performance actually gets worse after the review for one-third of employees.¹ So why do annual performance reviews tend to be so unsuccessful?

As Gallup’s writers observe, part of the issue might be that performance review conversations tend to be tied to conversations about promotions and pay raises, or even used as justification for firing.¹ Not to mention, these annual conversations are sometimes the only opportunity for employees to receive feedback on their work all year. But there’s more to it than that.

Improving the effectiveness of the annual performance review requires us to understand its impact on the recipient’s ability to benefit from the feedback given during the review. There’s a neurobiological component to this and (of course) a personality component.

This blog will review some of the problems with traditional performance reviews and propose what an alternative model of performance review might look like. To do so, it will present neurobiological considerations for feedback discussions and highlight scales from Hogan’s core personality assessments: the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), Hogan Development Survey (HDS), and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI).

Problems with Performance Appraisals

How frequently a manager provides feedback contributes to performance review success, but so does the manager’s style of feedback delivery. Both are linked to manager personality. Managers who are approachable and skilled at energizing team members (e.g., those who score moderate to high on HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity, HDS Colorful, and MVPI Altruistic) may hesitate to provide candid feedback because of the risk that the recipient will be put off and become less engaged. Other managers might wish they could provide the annual review in an email (e.g., low Interpersonal Sensitivity, high HDS Reserved, high HDS Leisurely, low MVPI Affiliation).

The structure of the typical performance review is another issue. Annual performance reviews are usually given in one sitting, providing much more information than people can readily absorb or integrate into new ways of doing their jobs. Since strengths, problems, and plans are usually discussed in the same sitting, the brain’s hippocampus (which stores short-term memory awaiting integration into the brain) can become overwhelmed, unable to retain the full message.² Because the person knows that potential problems will be discussed during the session, the amygdala (which acts as the brain’s siren) prompts the person to pay attention to only a limited amount of the feedback—usually the negative aspects.³ When the hippocampus is overloaded, especially if it includes information surprising to the recipient, frustration and anger are common reactions. This can happen even if the content of the feedback is not specifically negative.

In such scenarios, managers who strive to maintain harmony (e.g., high Interpersonal Sensitivity, high Altruistic) may take the employee’s irritation personally because they tend to be especially sensitive to rejection. Even those managers who are calm and even-tempered (e.g., high Adjustment, low Excitable) could become frustrated by what they might perceive as overreaction to constructive feedback.

A New Model of Performance Review

A few simple changes would make performance reviews more effective. For many people, two sleep cycles are required for important information to be sufficiently integrated into thoughts and behaviors. Because of this, annual reviews should be given in three segments of 20 to 25 minutes each and at intervals of at least two days. Each segment should focus on a particular area of feedback.

1. Inventory Strengths

The first 20- to 25-minute segment of the performance review should cover the person’s strengths, talents, and accomplishments. These strengths include all the reasons the person was hired, the skills the person has learned, and anything else they bring to the team. For the benefit of the individual and the team, the team member’s talents need to be incorporated into future plans.

Expect that even positive feedback won’t always be well received. Some team members are put off by having their talents described in detail (e.g., low Colorful, low MVPI Recognition). Even if they request constructive feedback, no changes in expectations are discussed in this segment. Inventorying talents is too important a topic to be clouded by other matters.

2. Review “Start Doing” and “Stop Doing” Feedback

The second segment, at least two sleep cycles later, covers the manager’s expectations for what the employee needs to start doing and stop doing. Both the “what” and the “how” are covered in this segment. This isn’t the time to discuss the manager’s philosophy on life, nor is it the time to overjustify the reasons for the start and stop feedback. This is because the team vision and its integration into the values of the organization should be made clear throughout the year.

Here’s an example of what this might look like in context: Two fairly successful salespeople were not providing specific and timely expense reports or clear activity logs. During this feedback segment, the manager described the processes for doing so, beginning immediately. This approach placed emphasis on “how” and “when.” The manager needed to be clear and persistent, and the simple reason was this: “I have a responsibility to my role, our investors, our customers, the other salespeople, and you. These are my expectations of you and of the others. These changes are part of accountability for all of us.” Although the salespeople had other more subtle growth areas, they first needed to get on track with responding to the manager’s expectations. The subtle matters could be discussed at another time.

3. Create a Plan

The third performance review segment, which occurs after at least two more sleep cycles, allows the recipient to respond to the first two segments. By this time, the team member has had time to review and integrate the feedback, and they are encouraged to express their thoughts. A plan is created for the person to leverage their strengths and respond to the manager’s expectations. Then the manager invites the individual to anticipate potential barriers to change and offers help that might be needed to execute the plan. The recipient is also invited to ask for the manager’s help in executing the plan.

Here’s an example of what this might look like in context: A new manager (high HPI Prudence) took a more structured approach to project management compared to her predecessor, but she was sensitive to the fact that too rigid a structure can inhibit flexibility and innovation (high HPI Inquisitive, moderate HDS Diligent). She had many start and stop expectations but was willing to take a measured approach to change. She decided to begin by increasing the level of structure in the next project. That way, the team could become accustomed to it and experience the benefits of a more deliberate process firsthand. The team made lots of requests for help from the manager while adjusting to the change, which she was happy to provide.

Substantial change is an emotional experience for many people (e.g., low Adjustment, high Excitable, high MVPI Tradition, high MVPI Security). Change is more easily experienced in a safe, listening atmosphere than when delivered impatiently by managers who are at risk of being unforgiving, indecisive, defensive, or judgmental (e.g., high HDS Skeptical, high HDS Cautious, high Diligent). When team members are able to review a new process and experience change gradually, change is easier to enact.

This blog post was written by James M. Fico, PhD, a psychologist and member of the Hogan Coaching Network.

References

1. Sutton, R., & Wigert, B. (2019, May 6). More Harm Than Good: The Truth About Performance Reviews. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/249332/harm-good-truth-performance-reviews.aspx

2. Havekes, R., & Abel, T. (2017). The Tired Hippocampus: The Molecular Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Hippocampal Function. Current Opinions in Neurobiology, 44, 13–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2017.02.005

3. Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (3rd ed.). St. Martin’s Griffin.

Is patience a virtue? Well . . . according to a new theory, there’s a much more fruitful way to think about the psychology of patience.

Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Kate Sweeny, PhD, professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, about the psychology of patience.

A social psychologist with more than 100 publications and 4,000 citations of her research, Kate is a Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) fellow and three-time faculty of the year award winner at UC Riverside.

Let’s dive into this conversation about different types of waiting, the benefits of worry, and a new theory of patience.

How to Wait Patiently

Waiting is a stressor. It can keep us in a state of unpleasant mental paralysis for a variety of reasons. “Can we build a toolbox for people for coping with waiting that we could teach people to use?” Kate said. “We’re getting there with some solutions, but nothing ameliorates entirely the experience of stressful waiting.”

Types of Waiting

The different types of waiting can be classified according to their outcomes—positive, negative, or neutral. Positive waiting is eager anticipation, such as a child waiting for birthday presents. Negative waiting is stressful dread, such as a patient waiting for a diagnosis. Neutral waiting is when the outcome is mundane and expected, such as waiting at a bus stop. Our responses to these situations require different kinds of patience, which can be further complicated by boredom, frustration, anxiety, or uncertainty.

Kate focuses her research about the psychology of patience on times when someone faces a big, stressful, looming unknown, such as an unpredictable and potentially life-changing situation. What are the steps to leveraging the psychology of patience under those circumstances?

Three Steps for Patient Waiting

Kate provided a three-part plan for addressing uncertainty with patience.

1. Try to affect the outcome – If you’re waiting for the results of a biopsy, for example, you aren’t likely to have any control over the outcome. But if you’re worried about someday having breast cancer, you can behave differently today to improve your overall physical health. “Let your worry motivate that action,” whenever it may be possible, Kate said.
2. Prepare for a negative outcome – Making plans for how you will respond to potential bad news can keep you from being caught off-guard. An example of this would be reviewing your insurance coverage or organization’s short-term leave policies during a health crisis. “Preparation provides reassurance that I’m getting a little bit of control back from the universe in a situation where I don’t have much,” Kate explained.
3. Seek a flow state – As well as maintaining daily practices of health and wellness, Kate mentioned flow and mindfulness as more helpful types of distraction than binging television. “If you can really get in that zone, there’s nothing else your mind can do while you’re there. That’s the joy and the benefit of flow,” she said.

Research on the flow state suggests that the mind doesn’t wander during flow because it’s fully engaged in a single task. Similarly, mindfulness can encourage coexisting with uncertainty in a calm or peaceful way. “You can’t turn your worry off, but there are some ways you can combat it,” Kate said, particularly by engaging deeply in an activity.

Why Worrying Is Helpful

Evolutionary psychology theorizes that the emotions that most humans experience must provide more benefit than harm for our species overall. The fact that nearly everyone worries reflexively means that while worry may not be good in every instance for every person, it has some advantages for humanity. For one, it can bring our attention to potential threats. For another, it can spur us into action to prevent negative outcomes. Excessive, paralyzing, or demoralizing worry doesn’t tend to promote positive action. But when worry is functional, it can be quite helpful!

Worry and Religiosity

Kate’s research found that people who reported being more religious tended to worry more than those who were less religious. People who reported being more religious also tended to rely more on coping strategies that can be beneficial under the right circumstances. Of course, correlation is not causation. But religiosity tended to correlate with a coping strategy called preemptive benefit finding, or preemption.

Preemption means looking for the bright side to cope with bad news before the bad news arrives. “In the context of waiting, that means essentially lining up your silver linings in advance,” Kate said. This beneficial strategy means imagining the good that might come from a potentially negative situation or outcome—another tool for the patience toolkit.

The Psychology of Patience and Personality

Some personality characteristics, such as emotional stability, conscientiousness, and dispositional optimism, can be predictive of patience and worry. In preparing for an exam, students experience two types of waiting: the period of preparation leading up to the exam and the period of waiting following submission of the exam. In situations where the student still has a measure of control—that is, before the exam—personality has different effects on their approach to waiting. After the exam is submitted and the student no longer has control, personality seems to have less influence on how patiently the student copes with waiting.

This personality approach to the psychology of patience underlies a new theory of what patience is and its utility for handling uncertainty.

Is Patience a Virtue?

The famous adage, “Patience is a virtue,” originated in a poem from the 1300s—so it’s not exactly a new concept. Rather than a virtue, which implies morality, Kate proposes that patience is an emotional action.¹ “When that emotion of impatience arises, we can manage it and regulate it through the process of patience,” she said. “That really takes patience quite out of the virtue realm and situates it in the nerdy research on emotion regulation. It’s not quite as poetic, but I think it’s much more practical.”

Patience is a specific, situational form of emotion regulation. When we feel the emotion of impatience, patience is the name of the self-regulation tools we apply to cope with that feeling. Whether that’s self-talk, deep breaths, or preemption, those subtle or explicit self-control strategies in the face of uncertain, stressful waiting are acts of patience.

“Patience may or may not be a virtue, but it is something we can learn to do better,” Kate concluded.

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 81 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

Reference

1. Sweeny, K. (2023, August 2). On (Im)Patience: A New Approach to an Old Virtue. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/trh4b

Academic psychology maintains that personality should be described in terms of five dimensions—the so-called five-factor model—and that all other dimensions of personality are combinations of these. But this model isn’t as comprehensive as many tend to believe. Consider ambition, for example. Ambition isn’t a factor in the Big Five, but we know it’s an important dimension of personality, essential to leadership. More recently, we at Hogan have concluded that the same is true of humility. This blog post will explain Hogan’s perspective on humility and the role of humility in leadership performance.

The Theory of Humility

What is humility, exactly? Humility can be defined as “freedom from pride or arrogance: the quality or state of low self-preoccupation.” All of the world’s major religions (including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism) maintain that humility is the proper human stance in view of the unfathomable nature of the universe. Humility is not meekness or self-deprecation; it is being willing to submit oneself to something “higher,” to appreciate the talents of others, and to recognize the limits of one’s ability or authority. In the words of “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood, Magnum Force), “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Humility is best understood in relation to narcissism. They are psychological opposites, but they are similar in that they can be rated easily by other people. Like narcissism, humility is a kind of self-attribution (i.e., how people see themselves) that can be assessed using standard psychometric methods. An item intended to assess humility might read, “I am superior in many ways,” to which the humble answer is “false.” Typical behaviors associated with humility include being willing to admit mistakes, listening to feedback, treating others with respect, and making fun of oneself.

The Role of Self-Confidence in Narcissism and Humility

Self-confidence is important to both narcissism and humility. Self-confidence concerns the degree to which people feel able to solve their problems or complete tasks they have been (or will be) assigned. People with low self-confidence are defeated before they get started; people with high self-confidence persist with tasks until they are completed. Should they fail at a task, they dust themselves off and get ready for the next one.

Narcissists are always self-confident, and overly so. Although they are willing to take on tasks that few other people would attempt, they are unwilling to admit failure. If projects don’t turn out well, the reason will be circumstances beyond their control, such as incompetent subordinates, betrayal, or unforeseen changes in circumstances. But if a project turns out well, the reason is because the narcissist was in charge.  

On the contrary, humble people may or may not be self-confident. Humble people who lack self-confidence seem weak and indecisive, whereas humble people who are self-confident usually project themselves well—for example, Tom Brady, the all-pro quarterback of the National Football League, or professional tennis player Roger Federer.

The Theory of Leadership

The leadership literature overwhelmingly defines leadership in terms of the people who happen to be in charge, but this is a major confusion. People typically become CEOs, generals, admirals, or presidents because of hard work, politics, luck, or charisma, but these are not demonstrations of leadership.

Instead, we define leadership as the ability to build and maintain a team that can outperform its rivals. Similarly, leadership should be evaluated in terms of the performance of the team vis-à-vis its competition. When leadership is defined this way, the characteristics of effective leaders begin to stand out—and humility is one of them.

The importance of charisma to efficacy, on the other hand, is a myth.

The Myth of Charismatic Leadership

In Jim Collins’s famous 2001 book, Good to Great, he evaluates a sample of 1,435 organizations over a period of 40 years to identify the highest performers.¹ Of the 11 companies Collins sees transition from good to great, none have a charismatic CEO. So where did our illusions about charisma among leaders come from?

In the earlier history of American business, CEOs tended to be benevolent caretakers with modest salaries. In the 1970s, activist investors began pushing corporate boards for better results, and this had a major impact on CEO selection. Specifically, companies began hiring charismatic CEOs who promised to deliver better financial results.

But charisma correlates with narcissism, and people with these characteristics excel at making promises to get themselves hired or elected for high-ranking positions. The data clearly show that, once hired, narcissistic CEOs ruin companies by making extravagant bets and bad decisions.²

Humble Leadership

Collins’s book shows that highly effective leaders are humble and fiercely competitive regarding the performance of their organizations. They don’t take themselves seriously, but they take business success very seriously.

A 2017 study from the MIT Leadership Center reinforces Collins’s findings.³ The authors describe the highly successful MIT leadership style as open minded, collaborative, apolitical, data-driven, and as avoiding the trappings of leadership (corner offices, private planes, etc.). Successful CEOs Sergio Marchionne (Fiat Chrysler), Alan Mullaly (Ford), Hubert Joly (Best Buy), and Larry Culp (GE) are exemplars of this humble leadership style.

Since the publication of Collins’ book, research on humility and leadership has blossomed, led by Bradley Owens and colleagues.⁴ For example, Ou et al. show that humble CEOs reduce pay disparities among their top team members, minimize power struggles, foster team integration, and encourage equal participation in strategy formation. These factors predict successful corporate performance.⁵

In sum, humble leaders are serious about their business but don’t take themselves seriously. Humble leaders can laugh at themselves and admit their flaws. They are willing to take advice. They are concerned about their staff and their ability to contribute to the team’s performance. They are not concerned about personal gain or recognition, and they tend to find the spotlight uncomfortable. Humble leaders emphasize something greater than themselves. It is a difference that makes all the difference.

This blog post was written by Robert Hogan, PhD, president and founder of Hogan Assessments.

References

1. Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. HarperCollins.
2. Chatterjee, A., & Hambrick, D.C. (2007). It’s All About Me: Narcissistic CEOs and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 52(5), 351–386.
3. Ancona, D., & Gregorson, H. (2017). Problem-Led Leadership: An MIT Style of Leading. MIT Leadership Center.
4. Wang, L., Owens, B.P., Li, J., & Shi, L. (2018). Exploring the Affective Impact, Boundary Conditions, and Antecedents of Leader Humility. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(9), 1019–1038.
5. Ou, Y., Waldman, S., & Peterson, D.A. (2015). Do Humble Leaders Matter? Journal of Management, 20, 1–27.