“You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.”
– Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and bestselling author

Unfortunately, many companies spent the past decade diverting resources from middle management, creating a talent vacuum that has proved difficult to fill. Without proper development, a company’s most valuable assets – their people – can derail and fall short of performance expectations. There are four ways companies get managing their middle managers wrong:

1)     They promote the wrong people. Many organizations rely on performance appraisals and supervisor nominations to identify and promote talented individuals rather than objective measures.

2)     They don’t effectively train them. Most companies focus their development efforts at the extremes of their management hierarchies rather than honing in on the central figures – the middle managers.

3)     They stress them out. The shift to more flat organizational structures has placed the lion’s share of pressure and accountability on the shoulders of middle managers.

4)     They let them disengage. In a 2007 study, 41% of HR leaders said engagement among mid-level managers had dropped noticeably over the previous 18 months.

How can organizations turn their underperforming middle managers into a group of competent, engaged leaders? Find out in our ebook, 4 Ways Companies Are Failing Their Middle Managers And Why It’s Killing Innovation.

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

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

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

The relationship between employees and their bosses, as well as that between followers and leaders, is one of the most studied and discussed topics in business and psychology. Yet, it remains one of the least understood. Hogan conducted a survey of 1,000 respondents examining the relationship between employees, bosses, and personality.

Rate of Bad Managers
Research shows us that more than roughly 60% of people currently in a leadership position will fail, usually due to flaws in interpersonal behavior that prohibit them from forming and maintaining a high-functioning team. Our survey results support this research – the average respondent would be willing to work for fewer than half of their former bosses (around 45%).

Respondents were most likely to describe bad bosses as:

As job level increases, there are no significant differences in terms of how people describe bad bosses.

Great bosses, on the other hand, were most likely to be described as:

As job level increases, people are more likely to describe good bosses as good at business strategy, and less likely to describe good bosses as sociable.

Why can’t we be friends?

• Respondents were most likely to say it is important for them to like their boss.
• Likewise, respondents were most likely to say it is important for their boss to like them.
• Respondents were evenly split when asked if they work harder for bosses they consider friends.

Lonely at the top: As job level increases, people are less likely to say it is important that their bosses like them or that it is important they like their bosses.

Workplace bullies are skilled manipulators and politicians who harass others not out of social frustration but to fulfill their professional ambitions. Take Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, for example. His bullying and coercive tactics were so legendary that they were termed “the Johnson Treatment.” Below you can see Johnson effectively giving Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island the Treatment.

On his somewhat irreverent Dead Presidents Tumblr, self-proclaimed presidential historian Anthony Bergen describes Johnson’s bullying tactics beyond physical intimidation: “Lyndon Johnson had an innate, often stunning ability to read the personalities of others and immediately understand exactly how to ingratiate himself with them…Johnson would tailor his strategy differently for everybody he approached, and his success rate was astonishing.” Johnson sought out those who would propel his career forward, often stating “Power is where power goes.”

While a president is a rather extreme example, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute, more than 50% of workers have witnessed workplace bullying. Read more about the characteristics and effects of a potential workplace bully in our ebook Bullying Their Way to the Top and avoid hiring employees who might dole out their own version of the Johnson Treatment.

Focusing on employee potential maximizes organizational performance. So why do so many companies lack a comprehensive plan to identify, retain, and develop their high potential employees? Current processes for identifying high-potentials produce mixed results. We surveyed more than 200 middle managers and executives to find out what works and what doesn’t.

5 Suggestions from the Hogan Coaching Network for Building an Effective Development Framework
1. Provide education and training. Formal programs, classes, or workshops; coaching; mentoring; webinars; or on-the-job training are all valuable resources to build and reinforce an employee’s skills and improve performance.
2. Leverage strengths. If a leader lacks creative and innovative ability but excels in effective teambuilding, he or she can leverage his or her ability to create an environment that facilitates and nurtures the team’s new and different ideas.
3. Compensate with alternative behaviors. Use positive behaviors to rebuild a reputation marked by counterproductive behaviors. As positive behaviors are demonstrated multiple times, the manager’s reputation will begin to change, and often new behaviors become the person’s natural behaviors.
4. Support weakness with resources. When someone has a clear weakness, such as micromanaging, sometimes the most effective development strategy is to compensate by supporting the employee with additional resources, such as a direct report who excels at dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s.
5. Redesign the job or assignment. More effective than allowing an individual’s performance to flag, it is sometimes possible to alter an individual’s job requirements to remove key roles or responsibilities and assign him or her elsewhere in the organization.

Read the full paper.

A quick-reference guide to understanding how validity relates to Hogan’s business model and marketing content.