Diversity in the workplace remains a top concern for HR professionals and hiring managers. Changing the hiring process is a necessary step in preventing discrimination and keeping ahead of the competition —  a recent study from the Center for Talent Innovation found workplaces that ensure diversity enjoy more success and attract more innovative employees than workplaces that don’t.

However, any institutional change will fail if leaders and hiring managers aren’t driven to build a climate that encourages diversity. It’s not always easy to spot those who will let their biases negatively impact those around them, but early research suggests those with high Bold and Excitable scales might not foster inclusive environments.

Hogan’s in-house research team is always looking to find new applications for our assessments. With that in mind, Brandon Ferrell and Steve Nichols conducted a meta-analysis of results from four Hogan Development Survey (HDS) studies to measure which personality scales hinder leaders’ ability to leverage diversity.

To search for these diversity-derailing characteristics, our researchers examined four studies with HDS data from 443 managers and executives. They compared this information with subjective ratings of the Leveraging Diversity competency from the Hogan Competency Model.

Of the 11 scales in the HDS, Ferrell and Nichols found only those who scored highly on the Bold and Excitable scales were less likely to “leverage diversity.” Although concrete explanations for this negative relationship are somewhat speculative, one suggestion from Ferrell and Nichols is that leaders scoring high on Bold may hold excessive self-worth and view individuals in other categories as less attractive in order to build their ego.

As for the Excitable scale, the authors suggest that leaders with high Excitable scores (who generally are more sensitive to criticism) may more easily perceive a person’s behavior as critical or antagonistic when that person is dissimilar demographically from the leader. This tendency, if acted upon, might give people with high Excitable scores a reputation for being poor promoters of diversity.

This line of research is just a start, as four studies and 443 participants aren’t enough to start widely generalizing. As the report concludes, future research could start to examine just how over-confidence or emotional volatility work against workplace diversity. The full report, which was presented during the 2018 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology annual conference, is available to read here.

The Middle East and Africa Association of Test Publishers (MEA-ATP) held their inaugural conference entitled “Education Technology in the Middle East and North Africa: Unlocking Student Potential,” in Abu Dhabi on January 28-30. As a gold sponsor, Hogan sent now-former CEO Scott Gregory, Senior Consultant Darin Nei, and Director of Asia Pacific Business Development, Krista Pederson to attend and present on various topics along with several of Hogan’s distributors in the region, including Career Connections in Kenya, Mentis in the UAE, UK, and Thailand, Baltas in Turkey, and JvR Africa in South Africa.

Scooping up the first speaking session of the day, Scott and Krista presented Hogan’s take on using personality to assess General Employability, while Madeleine Dunford of Career Connections, and Andrew Salisbury of Mentis, followed by sharing Hogan case studies.

During the next session, Darin and Scott discussed the merits of Competencies and how Hogan maps them, while Nicola from JvR Africa, and Ekin Capar from Baltas, shared Hogan competencies case studies from South Africa and Saudi Arabia.  Hogan Distributor JvR Africa also made an additional three presentations across the course of the conference.

Some strong themes from the conference included Technology and how to use technology to further advance the assessment market in education and all other fields; General Employability, especially the need to assess student graduates and other entry level employees on this; and Education Assessment, and how to use assessment to promote further development of the field of education. During the conference, Senior Officials from the UAE announced the launch of MESA, the Moral Education Standardised Assessment, becoming the first nation to implement standardized testing for moral education.  

Hogan is a long-time sponsor of the Association of Test Publishers (ATP), supporting various events across the word including the main “Innovations in Testing” conference each year in the US; the E-ATP conference held in Europe each year; and smaller events organized by the Asia-ATP steering board. 

Whether getting Hogan certified is one of your New Year’s resolutions or something you’ve been planning to cross off your bucket list, there are several Hogan Assessment Certification Workshops planned throughout the United States in 2019. By completing this two-day program, you will be able to administer and interpret Hogan’s three core assessments: the Hogan Personality Inventory, the Hogan Development Survey and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory.

If you are already Hogan certified and want to hone your feedback skills, you should consider registering for the Hogan Advanced Feedback Workshop, previously known as Hogan Level 2 Certification. This one-day workshop was designed for practitioners who want to receive more extensive instruction and opportunities to practice delivering effective feedback.

In addition, Hogan certified users can now register for the newly-developed Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop. This one-day workshop was designed for practitioners who want to gain more advanced instruction and practice on how to interpret Hogan assessment profiles. Attendees will also gain a deeper understanding of how to extract maximum interpretive value from Hogan scales and subscales.

The workshops will be offered in multiple cities across the United States throughout 2019, with the advanced workshops occurring on the third day. Participants can complete the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop during the first two days with the option to attend either the Hogan Advanced Feedback Workshop or the Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop on the third day. Each of the two, one-day advanced workshops are also available upon request for those who have previously completed the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop. Hogan certified users can email training@hoganassessments.com to register for an advanced workshop separately.

Click here to learn more about Hogan’s three certification programs.

At Hogan, we work with organizations every day to help them identify effective leaders using a data-driven approach leveraging the predictive power of our personality assessments. To ensure our services are the best in the business, we have spent decades studying successful and failed leaders.

Our data show that three psychological factors have a profound influence on leadership effectiveness: charisma, narcissism, and humility. Charismatic and narcissistic CEOs have plagued organizations for decades. However, their strong political skills and ability to stand out from the rest of the pack have helped them emerge as leaders within their organizations. On the other hand, humble leaders often go unnoticed, largely because they focus primarily on their teams and not drawing attention to themselves, but research shows they are more likely to be effective leaders.

Join Ryne Sherman, chief science officer of Hogan Assessments, for a webinar hosted by Talent Quarterly 10 am EST on Monday, February 14 as he discusses these three leadership qualities and why “The Charismatic CEO is Dead.” Register here!

According to Hogan Assessments founder Robert Hogan, life is about competition. There’s competition within groups to attain status, and those who win generally are those with good social skills. There’s also competition between groups, and the groups with the strongest leaders win in this arena.

Competition within groups is what fascinates and entertains people. However, competition between groups, such as the increasing rivalry between the United States and China, has real worldwide consequences.

In a new video, Robert Hogan takes on these topics and more, in “The Nature of Human Nature.”

Over the years, we’ve discovered growing enthusiasm for identifying leadership potential, since talented leaders drive success. Unfortunately, many organizations make a critical mistake at the very beginning of the process – they don’t define potential in a way that leads to the selection of strong leaders.

Through our decades of research, we’ve found the person who draws attention to himself and performs well at his role may turn out to be a dud as a manager. And those who might perform best at the role might never get the opportunity to lead since they focus on their job and don’t draw attention.  

The Hogan High Potential Talent Report can help. This new video will walk you through the process, from our streamlined definition of success to personality characteristics of effective leaders.

No one likes a know-it-all.

They’ve annoyed us all by talking down to us about anything and everything, even when it’s obvious they know far less than they believe. But know-it-alls don’t just ruin watercooler gatherings and dinner parties. When they rise to positions of power, they can wear away at productivity and trigger costly mistakes.

Joann S. Lublin wrote an entertaining article on the subject in the Wall Street Journal. She interviewed a number of self-professed former know-it-alls that caused major problems for themselves and their companies, such as losing over $2 million on a home purchase, hiring an unsuitable job candidate, and not asking subordinates for their input.

The know-it-all causes all kinds of professional headaches. They don’t try to learn about an issue or ask for help, which leads to poor decisions. They ignore some people or are condescending to others, which leads to a toxic work environment. They project a false aura of power and knowledgeability, which gets them promoted into jobs they might not actually be able to perform.

Right now, the United States has a perfect example of know-it-all leadership – President Donald Trump. Even before his election, he’s directly and literally said he knows it all. Axios compiled a list of all the things Trump has said he knows about more than anyone, including campaign finance, ISIS, the visa system, international borders, international trade, and drone technology, just to name a few of their nearly two dozen examples.

Despite the bravado, Trump’s declarations of expertise have created a culture of chaos in the White House and beyond. His claim that ISIS was defeated became his justification to immediately pull the U.S. military from Syria, a decision that caused confusion in the Pentagon and ultimately led to the departure of this secretary of defense. His insistence on a trade war with China has created new challenges for Apple and other American companies. And rather than tackle the numerous complex and technical issues along the U.S./Mexico border, he is insisting on a wall and walked out of negotiations to reopen the government when Democrats refused.

Though the political news of the day seems bleak, the know-it-alls in Lublin’s article took significant steps to improve their behavior. One made certain his managerial hires hold diverse viewpoints, and he encourages them to call him an idiot. Another gave his committee more power when making hiring decisions. All of them took a similar approach – they became more humble.

Humble leadership is the flip side of know-it-alls. Rather than assuming they know what’s best, humble leaders turn to their co-workers and ask questions in order to make the most informed decision possible. At Hogan Assessments, we define humility as self-awareness, appreciating the strengths and contributions of others, and openness to new ideas and feedback toward personal performance. Know-it-alls generally lack those three characteristics.

Furthermore, humble leaders become more successful than know-it-alls. They don’t allow their sense of self-worth to interfere with leading their organization to success.  A recent study revealed high levels of humility lead to higher rates of employee engagement, more job satisfaction, and lower rates of turnover. Humility is the antidote to know-it-alls.

Although Lublin’s interviewees became self-aware enough to change their habits, not all know-it-alls can correct their habits without outside intervention or a particularly costly mistake. Personality assessments can also help know-it-alls understand what they’re doing. No matter the method, increasing self-awareness and learning to ask questions is clearly a better strategy than pretending you know everything while showing the world you clearly don’t.

The trend toward Big Data shows no signs of slowing down, as businesses, organizations, and governments continue incorporating new technology in the race to collect an almost unfathomable amount of information. But a more critical problem remains – what do you do with all that data? How can you find something useful within?

In this video, Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessments, discusses how Hogan has embraced Big Data from the very beginning in order to study one of the most complex subjects of all – the human mind.

The concept of ambition has a bad reputation in popular culture. The textbook definition – a strong desire to achieve something, typically through determination and hard work – seems innocuous, but the word is often associated with destructive consequences. Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler were ambitious, and that cost the world millions of lives. On a smaller scale, it’s easy to picture ambitious businesspeople who put their careers ahead of the wellbeing of their employees or family. But at Hogan, we think about ambition in more positive terms, and believe that to ignore ambition is to miss a crucial component of human personality.

For many years, psychological science has ignored, and even vilified ambition. Freud decreed ambitious people to be neurotic and potential father murderers, and Jung felt that ambitious people suffer from a “regressive restoration of the persona” which blocks their potential for personal growth. Even during the development of modern personality assessment, ambition has been ignored. Neither the well-known Five-Factor Model nor the six-factor HEXACO personality inventory assess ambition, and both of these models claim to be comprehensive.

Recently, psychologists have started to take ambition more seriously. The school of proactive personality asserts a disposition to take proactive action to change one’s environment predicts leadership and personal achievement. “Grit,” a measure of perseverance in long-term goals, has taken pop psychology by storm. Though both proactive action and grit overlap with ambition, they don’t fully align with ambition either.

Robert Hogan, founder of Hogan Assessments, Ryne Sherman, Hogan’s Chief Science Officer, and Bell Jones of Florida Atlantic University, recently examined how ambition was assessed by prominent factor models of personality, specifically HEXACO and NEO-PI-R personality inventory. Their paper, Where is ambition in factor models of personality?, concluded that these models can predict ambition, but in an indirect and  inefficient manner—by combining facets relating to energy level, social dominance, achievement motivation, and self-control.

Hogan Assessments has always stressed the role of ambition for predicting career success. Socioanalytic Theory, the foundation for all our assessments, tells us that all people are motivated to get along and to get ahead. Ambition describes the degree to which people want to get ahead. Over the course of human evolutionary history, people with higher status enjoyed better food, mates, and living conditions; conversely, people feared and suffered from the loss of status.

Of course, there is good news and bad news about high and low scores on the Ambition scale. Highly ambitious people are productive, energetic, and driven, but are also competitive, pushy, and domineering. Their less ambitious counterparts, on the other hand, seem considerate, cooperative, and good team players, but also lacking motivation.

One of our three core assessments, the Hogan Personality Inventory, features Ambition as one of its seven scales. Research shows that people with high Ambition scores can be energetic and competitive, though also restless and forceful. Low Ambition indicates good teamwork, and complacency and lack of initiative.

Although people are beginning to understand how personality impacts career success, Hogan Assessments remains unique in its understanding of the way ambition impacts peoples’ ability to achieve their life goals.

*This article was originally published on November 2 by People Matters.

Agility in leadership is about the ability to effectively balance factors that drive organizational performance at a rapid pace. But does moving quickly, integrating data, and engaging staff really require a different type of leadership?

The leadership consulting industry loves catchphrases. Popular ones include transformational leadership, servant leadership, boundless bravery, coherent confidence, learning agility, grit, and now agile leadership. These are all superfluous words consultants use to keep their work current in the eyes of consumers.

The challenge with all these phrases is the majority are just a repackaging of what we have known for a long time: personality predicts leadership performance. The lens through which personality is viewed – and the buzzwords – can change; but in the end, personality is just that: personality.  

This brings us to “Agile Leadership”, which some describe as the ability to effectively balance factors that drive organizational performance (i.e. people, processes, and innovation) at a rapid pace. Sure, information is flowing at faster rates than ever before, and leaders are being asked to integrate all of this into real-time decisions. But does moving quickly, integrating data, and engaging staff really require a different type of leadership? Although the evidence-based answer is still pending, our preliminary findings suggest that the majority of high-potential leaders simply need the organization’s environment to change. Many of these leaders are already fighting what McKinsey describes as the “machine organization.” Specifically, their goal is to introduce a new mindset of collaboration, new technology, less structure, and higher team engagement — but most have to fight against their organization’s old-fashioned ways. 

We believe the discussion should not just focus on digitization and the speed of change. Equally important to the debate is the need for strategic self-awareness — the ability to be introspective while listening to outside opinions of oneself. A stronger focus on self-awareness is the underpinning of true agility. The characteristics of great leaders include the ability to understand how they view themselves, and how that aligns or departs from how others view them. Accordingly, leaders like those at ING, Pixar, Alibaba, and Walmart would be appropriately described as having agility. 

Three things can occur to help drive leadership agility in organizations. First, recognition that many leaders have the necessary characteristics to survive in the digital world; they just need to be unleashed. Second, that organizations, not so much the people in them, need to change structures to tear down silos. Third, using valid personality measures can facilitate the awareness that current and future leaders need in order to keep the concept of agility top of mind.

Agile leadership is important, but it is not new. It is just being rediscovered. The emphasis must be put not only on the individual, but also the organization. Some organizations are so stuck in the past that agile leaders waste most of their energy fighting history. So, let us not get so awestruck by a new phrase that we forget the basics of effective leadership — to build and maintain high-performing teams. Industry buzzwords will continue to change, and in 2019 there will undoubtedly be a new catchphrase that enamors organizations. However, what won’t change are the tenets of leadership that translate to organizational success, and those can be measured using valid personality assessments.