Does personality change? This is a question we receive regularly from our clients, along with a lot of hypotheses about when and why scores shift. Answering this seemingly straightforward question actually requires addressing three related questions:

1. How often do scores on assessments change?
2. When scores on assessments change, how large are those changes?
3. Why do scores on assessments sometimes change?

How often do scores on assessments change?

Personality assessments—like the ones we create at Hogan—measure patterns of behavior. Decades of research have demonstrated that personality assessments predict future behavior, including workplace performance. A major reason why personality assessments work so well at predicting future behavior is because personality is quite stable; that is, people do not change very much. For example, in one study elementary school teacher ratings of students’ personalities predicted how those students behaved as adults 40 years later! The best method for quantifying personality stability is the test-retest correlation: you take a test now and we see how well it predicts your scores on the same test in the future. The short term (14-21 day) test-retest correlations for the Hogan Personality Inventory scales range from .69-.87. The long term (8-year) test-retest correlations range from .30-.73. A meta-analysis of 3,217 (7-year) test-retest correlations ranged from .30-.70. The point here is this: personality test scores are highly stable. Thus, most of the time, a person retaking a personality assessment will get very similar results.

When scores on assessments change, how large are those changes?

If you are a careful reader, you will note that “very similar results” is not the same thing as “identical results,” or that the test-retest correlations just described are not perfect. Indeed, even over short intervals, test scores do fluctuate. This is true for all tests, including cognitive ability and even medical tests (e.g., blood pressure, glucose tests, etc.). For Hogan, reassessments typically fall within two raw points of the original assessment. This indicates a small degree of fluctuation, and typically does not change the interpretation of the overall profile.

Why do scores on assessments sometimes change?

Consider the following situation: Your doctor measures your cholesterol levels. After some time has passed, your doctor measures your cholesterol again to discover the result has changed. In this scenario, there are two broad (and obvious) reasons the result changed: (a) something about the measurement process changed and/or (b) your actual cholesterol levels changed. Likewise, for psychological assessments, changes in scores may occur because of measurement-related and/or individual/psychological reasons.

Changes Related to the Measure

Sometimes aspects of the testing and measurement process itself result in score changes upon reassessment. There are three major methodological reasons scores on a psychological assessment might change: (1) imprecision in measurement, (2) changes in forms, and (3) changes in norms.

Imprecision in Measurement. When a doctor measures your cholesterol, he or she is not literally measuring all of the cholesterol in your bloodstream. Only a small sample of your blood is taken, and this sample is assumed to represent all of your bloodstream. Cholesterol in one sample may vary from cholesterol in another sample. Thus, one reason your cholesterol levels might change is because the instruments and procedures employed are imperfect. These imperfections are referred to as measurement errors. On a personality assessment, most people will always mark the item “I like to bend the rules every now and then” as either True or False no matter how many times they are asked. However, for a small group of people, whether they mark True or False to this item may depend on something that has happened to them recently (e.g., watched a movie about prisoners; sped through an intersection). Such imprecision in measurement affects the person’s score on the assessment. The good news is that these measurement errors occur randomly, meaning that the tests are unbiased. Such imperfections are present in all assessments, including medical tests. In developing our assessments, we work to reduce measurement error to the minimum possible. The short-term test-retest correlations reported above indicate that measurement error is quite low for our assessments.

Changes in forms. At Hogan, we believe in Kaizen Psychometrics. This means we work to continually improve our assessments. In doing so, we regularly update our testing instruments with new, better, forms when they are available. Because the new forms are designed to be better, they are not identical to the previous forms. Thus, a person completing an assessment on an earlier form and later taking an assessment on a new form, may receive slightly different scores.

Changes in norms. Because raw scales score can be hard to interpret (e.g., what does a 7 out of 12 mean?), we report normed (percentile) scores for our clients. Our norms are calculated from a stratified sample of millions of assessments completed by test-takers from nearly every job in every sector all over the world. However, in keeping with our commitment to Kaizen Psychometrics, we continually work to update our norms as better or more representative samples become available. As a result, a person completing an assessment scored on a previous norm may receive slightly different scores on a more recent assessment using updated norms.

Changes Related to the Individual

Beyond methodological reasons for change, there are also psychological reasons scores on assessments can change over time related to (a) maturity, (b) major life events, and (c) feedback and coaching.

Maturity. Although personality is relatively stable, personality does change across the lifespan. People become more self-confident, agreeable, conscientious, and more emotionally stable as they age. This pattern of personality development is typical for most people and reflects maturation into adulthood. As a result, such changes in personality are most dramatic for teenagers and young adults (early 20s), with personality becoming more stable with age. Thus, assessments taken over a shorter time span and assessments taken by older adults are less likely to show change.

Major Life Events. Personality can also change due to life events or personal experiences. For example, personality does seem to change in the wake of major life events (e.g., unemployment, marriage, divorce). Likewise, there is some evidence that experience in the military can result in personality change. However, people tend to adapt and return towards their baseline scores shortly after, even when these events are traumatic (such as bereavement) or conversely, positive (such as winning the lottery). Large changes due to major life events are rarely permanent, though small changes may be more lasting. Assessments taken recently after a major life event may show dramatically different results from assessments taken under more normal circumstances. However, in our experience, these results are still accurate at the time of assessment. For example, if a person experiencing a personal trauma scores lower on a scale measuring stress tolerance compared to their baseline, this is often a real and interpretable result. In other words, even though the change in scores may be temporary, they should not be discarded as “inaccurate.”

Assessment Feedback and Coaching. Finally, there is evidence that personality can change as a result of intentional practice and/or expert feedback and coaching. Likewise, effective coaching in business contexts appears to affect personal and organizational outcomes. However, in such cases the change in personality assessment scores tends to be relatively small. Thus, while coaching can be effective, we would expect any changes to manifest in 360° or performance feedback rather than in personality test results. When changes do occur, it is impossible to discern whether this is due to actual developmental growth or due to increased awareness about one’s assessment results (e.g., the person becomes aware of tendency to be arrogant and un- or sub-consciously manipulates assessment responses). These changes can and do occur in both directions: (1) the score becomes more exaggerated or (2) decreases in strength due to heightened awareness.

Summary

Personality is quite stable overall. Changes in scores on re-assessments of personality are rare, usually small, and often due to methodological reasons related to the assessment rather than meaningful psychological reasons specific to the individual. Thus, when a reassessment looks very different from the original result, it is best to verify whether these differences are driven by methodological reasons first (changes in forms or norms). Although less common, assessment results may change due to psychological factors (maturation, life events, or intentional efforts). However, such changes usually are not very large or meaningful, and are difficult to interpret.

Want to learn more about personality tests? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Personality Tests

*This post was co-authored by Hogan’s Chief Science Officer, Ryne Sherman, and Hogan’s Director of Global Learning, Jackie VanBroekhoven Sahm.

The demanding nature of today’s globalized markets has forced organizations to be ever reliant on teams for breakthrough solutions that keep them ahead of the competition. While effective teamwork is still necessary for success, today’s teams face far bigger obstacles than teams of the past.

Stumbling blocks of late include the modern team’s makeup, which is usually arranged to flex with the continuously evolving business landscape: they tend to be more diverse, operate in a digital environment, and are increasingly dynamic. Perhaps these challenges are behind the alarming statistic that only 1 in 5 teams are considered high performing!

Dr. Gordon Curphy, famed author of The Rocket Model, will guest-host this upcoming webinar, brought to you by Hogan’s Solutions Partner Team. Dr. Curphy will be discussing the elements of team effectiveness, pitfalls to avoid, and how a consultant can use the Team Assessment Survey in conjunction with individuals’ Hogan results to help struggling teams of the Fortune 500 get back on track. More specifically, we review how to effectively deploy and utilize these metrics in the following talent management initiatives:

• Team off-site facilitation
• Leadership coaching & development
• Succession planning

As always, supportive data, practical take-aways, and tales of success will be in abundance! You will also learn about your chance to register for the next TAS Workshop in Chicago on September 12-13.

To Attend the Webinar:

Team Effectiveness: Moving Target or Continuous Journey?
Thursday, August 23, 2018
11:00 am | Central Daylight Time (Chicago, GMT-05:00) | 1 hr
Meeting number: 801 666 213

Join by Phone:
Call-in toll-free number: 1-678-981-8487 (US)
Call-in number: 1-866-505-4014 (US)
Show global numbers
Conference Code: 696 085 8362

Hogan is proud to officially announce the addition of RELEVANT Management Consulting to the Hogan International Distributor Network. Hogan has an intense focus for helping individuals, teams, and companies across the globe be the best they can be, and we are so happy to have RELEVANT improving our reach throughout Europe and beyond.

Leading this charge is RELEVANT owner, Dr.René Kusch, a renowned psychologist that is known for being a go-to Hogan Expert in German-speaking countries. Dr. Kusch has been working with Hogan Assessments since 2008 and is also a member of the global Hogan Coaching Network. He exemplifies the hardworking, but still hedonistic spirit of Hogan with his workplace mantra of “Relevance arises where goal-orientation, effectiveness, and fun come together.”

Together with Sarah Asskamp, Head of Operations, and their 10 consultants, RELEVANT consults global German organizations, but also supports consultancies, coaches, and trainers to develop, offer, and implement solutions for their own customers. Additionally, RELEVANT has already been working with other Hogan partners, distributors, and clients from all over the world for many years.

“Their contributions and experience have led to the implementation and execution of a wide range of projects,” said Dustin Hunter, Hogan’s Practice Manager of the Hogan International Distributor Network. “I’m proud of our team’s hard work in securing more world-class distributors like RELEVANT every year. It’s incredible to know that we are making a huge difference for companies all over the world from our global headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

RELEVANT is also extending Hogan’s collaboration with the International Coach Federation with the German Chapter and together we are sponsoring the first German Prism award for a coaching program with outstanding effectiveness and sustainability.

In addition to providing consulting services that leverage the predictive power of Hogan’s assessments for individuals and teams, RELEVANT also facilitates Hogan Certification Workshops throughout Germany, with 10 already scheduled from September 2018 to July 2019.

Sarah Asskamp, who directs the training program, says: “The impact we can have on the European workforce is far greater if we are able to educate and train HR practitioners, talent management professionals,coaches, consultants, and trainers to implement Hogan’s assessments.”

Kusch agrees: “As the saying goes, ‘give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.’”

For more information about RELEVANT Management Consulting, visit http://www.relevantmanagementconsulting.com/hogan/.

*This interview was originally published in Business Class Magazin – this is the translation of the Hungarian text. The original version can be found here.

We met Dr. Robert Hogan at the Four Seasons Budapest. He is an American psychologist and the founder of Hogan Assessments who has institutionalized the use of personality assessments for the enhancement of work performance, and whose organization serves more than half of the Fortune 500 companies. He visited Budapest for the “Future of Coaching in Organisations” international conference organized in April, and he took some time to meet us for a glass of Chardonnay.

Please summarize briefly the principles and main elements of the personality test which you have developed, and which is used so widely in the business world.

People who have power make decisions every day that affect those who have less power. They hire, promote or fire them. These decisions are usually based on work interviews with them, but this is the worst possible way to make a decision that has such an effect on a person’s life. My aim was to make employee evaluations – firings, promotions, hiring interviews – that is, the whole decision-making process – rational and empirical. So, I based it on defensible, scientific foundations. Over the years, we have built up a serious database – based on this we can demonstrate that if business leaders listen to us, they will make better decisions regarding their employees. And why is this important? The keys to success in business are money and people. Managers generally make rational decisions when comes to money, so why wouldn’t they want to make rational decisions when it comes to people?

Do you think it’s important for a good leader to have psychological or coaching experience?

It’s a good question. My views are based on scientific research and data. These data show that good leaders need to possess four attributes. They have to be honest – it’s important that they have a moral compass, so you don’t end up with liars, thieves or frauds. They shouldn’t make duplicitous decisions behind the backs of others. If they are not honest, then they will fail. For example, Bill Clinton was a liar, that’s why nobody was loyal to him in his government. The second requirement is to be competent – they have to know what to do and how they should do it. If you are always the boss, people turn to you for advice. If you don’t know what you are talking about, then you can’t give good advice, which has immediate consequences. For example, Barack Obama never led anything, he wasn’t ever the boss of anything, and so he failed.

Do you think he failed?

Yes, I think so, namely because he didn’t know what he was doing.

He was elected twice.

The reason behind this is the quality of his rivals. Many people don’t like Donald Trump, but what was the alternative?

Honesty and competence. Which other attributes are necessary?

The third is whether you are capable of making good decisions, or if you made a mistake, to admit it and fix it. Evidence shows that 50 percent of business decisions are bad. So you can’t always arrive at good decisions. The key to good judgement is to realize if you’ve made a bad decision, and to be able to fix it. Let me mention one more politician as an example, George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq – which was a bad idea. Then, Bush raised the stakes and he didn’t leave the area. Bad decisions ruin the organisation, whether it’s a corporation or a political body. In the end, it’s important whether you have vision, whether you can explain why you are doing what you are doing, or what your objective is from which others can set their own. These are the four indispensable tools of a leader. Things like having to be kind to others are not among these. Meanwhile, I think a good leader has to be humble as well; he or she has to listen to the opinions of others. It’s important for him or her to be open, and it’s just as important that when he or she delegates a task to someone, he or she has confidence in that person. At the same time, a good leader is also a good manipulator – it doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she has to understand people, he or she just has to persuade them to follow him or her. To bring up another presidential example: although Ronald Reagan was an excellent manipulator, he couldn’t be truly appreciated because all his other attributes were imperfect.

They were politicians?

Exactly.

Aren’t business and political attitudes different? Don’t they require different skills and capabilities?

There are solid arguments which prove that really successful executives are humble and listen to their employees. They listen to feedback. They trust their people and they build teams. This is why Barack Obama failed – he never built a team, never talked to anyone, just sat in his office alone. You have to be able to build a team.

I suppose that you are aware of the highly successful series, “House of Cards” – what is your opinion of Frank Underwood; what kind of leader is the president in that series?

I liked the British version more. The BBC version was top-notch. Frank Underwood is a real leader. Politics are about this, people like him can collect votes, but then what will they add to the whole when they get to the top? I think this is a problem in the business world too: that in the end politicians rise above executives, but they are not experts in anything apart from getting themselves elected. Even campaign slogans are about this: for being able to make a change, they have to be elected first, but what do they actually do after having been elected? They try to remain in power, and for this they just say to the people whatever they want to hear. And this is just a kind of entertainment, nothing more. At the same time, as a corporate leader you have to do something to bring about change, you have to achieve something. An army general or the coach of an athletic team has to achieve victory; it’s not enough for him or her to be popular.

What caused you turn your attention towards the business sphere after leaving university, as a practicing psychologist?

I have always been interested in leadership and the business world. During my university years during the ‘60s and ‘70s, the general view among academics was that the personality of the leader is unimportant. If business was successful, they owed it to luck, not the personality of the leader. But I have never believed this. I had been practicing as an academic for a long time, and when I finally received my pay check, I started asking myself about the way ahead. Academic salaries are poor, and I didn’t want to live this way; I had to make money somehow. I knew that I was good at psychological evaluations, and that maybe I could profit from this, so I tried to make money from my interest, that is, from studying leaders.

It wasn’t easy to shape the way of thinking, you have been attacked by many.

I have proven with my team that managerial attitude is indeed important. In the 1990s, we proved, scientifically and supported by data, that the role of personality is fundamental in how people perform in the workplace. Then in the beginning of the 2000s we proved that leadership characteristics are also determinants in leading a company to success. And in the middle of the 2000s I published that personality characteristics determine corporate results. It turned out that the successful operation of an organization depends on the formation of personal relationships within the organization. We have proven that if companies listen to us with these questions, they will earn more money, because they will hire more effective people for the corresponding positions.

Which skills do you think helped you to become so successful in your field?

First of all, our team has worked very hard. We do very high-quality work, and we pay attention to what our customers want. We have found the way to promote what we know. One has to work very hard; 90 percent of ventures go bust.  At first,we have had both good and difficult moments, but when you get that first big client, everything comes together immediately. In our case, this big client was the government. We received an order from the American government.

*This article was written by Danielle King and published in Human Resource Executive on June 1, 2018. 

How to Recognize Absentee Leaders. 

A high-performing salesperson knocks his sales goals out of the park every month and consistently brings in new clients while maintaining great internal and external relationships. When a new sales-leadership position opens, his boss suggests that this star performer fill the role. Following a stellar interview, the star performer is now a sales leader. Is this happily ever after?

Not always, says Scott Gregory, CEO of Hogan Assessments. Too often these top performers are promoted into leadership positions for which they aren’t suited, he says.

“What it takes to be a successful salesperson versus a successful sales leader is different,” says Gregory. “Companies fail to recognize that and fail to measure the characteristics required for leadership roles appropriately. These star contributors get promoted but not on the basis that they have talent for a leadership role.”

In the star-performer scenario, you lose the best salesperson and gain a poor manager. It’s not good for the leader who got promoted, his team or the organization, says Gregory.

These types of corporate promotions happen frequently and the characteristics that may have made a stellar salesperson don’t carry over easily into leadership, which can derail both the leader and the company. Many leaders fail because of what Hogan has termed “dark-side” characteristics, or strong and overused personality characteristics that get in the way of productive leadership. Some of the same characteristics that made for a good salesperson, for example, strong self-confidence and independence, may become derailers in a leadership role if the person shows up as overly confident or unwilling to consider others’ perspectives. A good deal is known about identifying dark-side characteristics, and they are relatively obvious in many organizations. Bosses and teams often know when dark-side characteristics are getting in the way of leadership success.

The dark side of leadership is just as worrisome as it sounds. It may suggest a narcissistic, passive-aggressive, emotionally abusive and demanding figure; however, that’s not the only kind of derailed leader, says Gregory. He argues that an even worse leader is one in title only.

“Absentee leaders are neither actively destructive nor constructive, so they tend to get overlooked,” he says. “In organizations, people pay attention to actively destructive, dark-side leaders. People who don’t cause trouble won’t get much air time. They’re invisible. That’s why it doesn’t get talked about.”

Absentee leaders are psychologically absent from their roles—they enjoy the perks and privileges that come with a promotion but shirk any management-related tasks and avoid meaningful involvement with their teams. Though these leaders may fly under the radar, their negative impact on the company is much more pronounced. Gregory says that the most significant impact absentee leaders have on employees is job satisfaction—rather, the lack thereof.

“There are decades of research on how to measure job satisfaction and it’s well known that job satisfaction is highly related to turnover, individual performance, role ambiguity and more,” he says.

In 2015, Interact Authentic Communication conducted a survey of 1,000 U.S. workers to uncover the top complaints about leadership—although not labeled as such, the overwhelming majority of responses were related to absentee leaders. Some of the issues workers cited were that their leaders were not giving clear direction, not recognizing employee achievements, refusing to talk to subordinates and not giving constructive feedback.

Gregory says that on top of decreased job satisfaction, research indicates that there’s an increased risk of bullying within work teams who have an absentee leader and that safety outcomes are compromised when active leadership is lacking.

Employees are left wondering who is in charge, what they should really be doing and to what standards will they be held. This ambiguity often manifests into stress, which is detrimental to both the individual and the organization.

“We know that the conservative estimate of stress in the U.S. workplace is that it costs nearly $30 billion per year, making absentee leadership a costly organizational problem.”

Personality Assessments Highlight the Bright and Dark Sides of Leaders 

Absentee leaders, the silent killers of an organization, are hard to pick out from a crowd. Gregory says people’s dark-side qualities usually don’t appear until they have let their guard down, but are obvious when they appear.  Absentee leadership, by its nature, is detectable only through the vacuum it creates.

This means that absentee leaders may already be settled into their management roles before problems arise. Though no assessment currently exists to pinpoint the exact qualities of an absentee leader, Hogan’s Leadership Forecast Series combines four development-focused reports that paint a clear picture of the good, the bad and the ugly sides of a leader.

Its three flagship assessments, the Hogan Personality Inventory (bright side); Hogan Development Survey (dark side); and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (inside) offer information regarding the characteristics, competencies and values that underlie ways in which a leader approaches work, leadership and interaction with others in the workplace.

Gregory says that the Hogan Personality Inventory characteristics, or bright side of leadership, show up in a person’s day-to-day behavior and predict performance in a variety of jobs. The Hogan Development Survey highlights dark-side characteristics that appear when someone is stressed, bored or not self-monitoring their behavior. These characteristics don’t show up during interviews because most people are highly self-aware during the interview process. Finally, the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory measures, as the name suggests, someone’s motivation and values. It answers questions such as: What does this person value? Are those values compatible with an organization’s values? Will he or she be a good fit within this company’s culture?

The Series, and its subsequent self-awareness and development reports, are targeted toward senior- and executive-level leaders. There are four core reports, three of which correspond to the assessments. The fourth can be one of the following: a summary report, which supplies an integration across the other reports; or a coaching report, which is designed to help the individual think holistically about the results and translate them into a development plan.

Gregory cautions that there is not one set of characteristics that pinpoints an absentee leader—yet.

“It may not be a set of dark-side characteristics.It might be the absence of some bright-side characteristics, such as ambition, desire to be in charge or make an impact—things that aren’t overtly destructive unless in their absence,” he says. “It’s something we’re actively researching. It’s clear that absentee-leadership qualities differ from what has been found in overtly dark-side leaders, which are easy to spot based on dark-side characteristics—absentee leadership is more about what’s missing than what’s actively present.”

*Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash

*This post was authored by Dr. Gordon Curphy, Managing Partner of Curphy Leadership Solutions.

Teams are fundamental structures for getting work done, and tens to thousands of teams can be found in organizations. Despite the prevalence of teams, research shows that only 10-20 percent are high-performing, which means most have room for improvement. There are four basic ingredients needed to properly launch new teams or improve team performance. First, teams need a roadmap for performance. They need to understand the key factors associated with high-performing teams, which factors are the most important, and how they are interrelated. The Rocket Model fills this need, as it is a well-researched yet practical roadmap for building high-performing teams. 

Second, teams need both “how” and “why” feedback. The Team Assessment Survey provides benchmarking feedback on how a team is doing in each of the eight Rocket Model components. The Hogan suite of assessments can be used to provide “why” feedback, and the particular assessments used depends on which questions teams need answered. The Team Assessment Survey works best when team membershave been working together for a month or two, but the MVPI and HPI can be used when launching new teams. The third ingredient is a team improvement toolkit, which can be found in The Rocket Model: Practical Advice for Building High Performing Teams (Curphy & Hogan, 2012). This book describes different effective team improvement tools and techniques for improving team performance.

The last ingredient may be the most important, and this is using skilled team coaches to design and facilitate off-sites. The best team coaches have a deep understanding of the Rocket Model, can interpret Hogan and Team Assessment Survey results, understand team dynamics, can facilitate team improvement exercises, and help teams develop action plans and accountability mechanisms to enforce team agreements. Team coaches can come from inside or outside an organization; knowledge, experience, organizational politics, cost, and an understanding of the context in which a team operates are some of the more important considerations when choosing facilitators.

When properly designed and facilitated, team off-sites can accelerate the team launches and dramatically improve the performance of existing teams. The amount of time dedicated to team off-sites varies considerably; some are a couple of hours long and others take several days. In crafting a team off-site agenda we recommend the following contextual variables be considered:

1) How long the team has been in existence

2) Any recent restructuring or newly onboarded team members

3) Team members’ roles and responsibilities

4) Evaluation of team’s key performance indicators

5) Team goals and plans

6) How the team has been doing in achieving key milestones

7) Ownership and accountability norms

8) Shared assumptions about customers, competitors, regulators, and other teams being relied on for support

9) Effectiveness of team meetings and decision-making processes

Dr. Gordon Curphy is the Managing Partner of Curphy Leadership Solutions and the thought leader behind the Team Assessment Survey. With over 30 years of education and experience, Dr. Curphy helps clients navigate a range of talent management challenges, including leadership and team improvement workshops.

Photo by Alex Sajan on Unsplash.

Building the perfect team isn’t about assembling an all-star squad of archetypes. It’s about find- ing contributors who are generous and respectful, but confident and charismatic, too— and picking the right leader who can pull them all together.  

IF CLASSIC CARTOONS like Scooby Doo, Captain Planet, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have taught us anything, it’s that only a team has the capacity and resourcefulness to solve a mystery or save the universe.

As working adults, sometimes it can feel like we’re being asked to handle similarly complex undertakings. But in a world devoid of talking dogs, superheroes, and pizza-eating reptiles, a sense of duty to something greater than one’s self doesn’t come naturally—or, quite frankly, easily. To maximize the advantages of teamwork in the workplace, and to avoid the common pitfalls, the environment must encourage individual members to set aside self-driven interests while pursuing a collective goal.

This is precisely where a leader is supposed to emerge. An effective leader is expected to galvanize a team’s superior performance toward common aims. Although being able to envision the future, inspire trust, and repeatedly make good decisions are keys to a leader’s competence and reputation, none of those qualities demands the communal mind- set that cultivates selflessness and productive kinship.

So if having a capable and reliable trailblazer at the helm is no guarantee of success, let’s consider which characteristics enable a group of individuals to actually band together and move forward as a singular, like-minded unit. In other words, what does it take for a team to not only get something done, but get it done well?

What Are the Key Ingredients to a Good Team?  

Personality, personality, personality. At its basic core, a team is merely a collection of diverse characteristics (i.e., individual members) being asked to work in concert to accomplish an objective.

To do so, each person must restrain certain propensities or desires for the betterment of the team. When looked at collectively, individual pro les can provide pivotal insights into the dexterity of the team. A team’s drive, passion, self-imposed obstacles, and blind spots are the sum of the personalities involved. We know successful teams get this blend of personalities right. Whether or not “getting it right” has a universal formula is another matter entirely.

In a 2017 article in Harvard Business Review, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D., and Dave Winsborough found that certain roles need to be fulfilled to optimize team functioning. Ideally, you want the following generic types of people operating in a team:

• Results-oriented team members to keep the plan on track.
  • Relationship-focused team members to socialize ideas and align people.
• Process and rule followers to ensure team compliance with organizational policy.
• Innovative thinkers to keep the team ahead of evolving and future needs.
• Pragmatists to ensure the feasibility of the team’s way forward.

This model presents an easy-to-understand roadmap for staffing, or at least coaching, individual team members to position themselves into a role. Here, everyone has a place and a part to play.

But does this approach merely glorify our cartoon ideals, insisting every gang of heroes needs a range of archetypes present to succeed? What happens when individuals could excel at multiple roles, or when a person simply has no cookie-cutter role to play? Granted, this isn’t the only organizing structure aimed at identifying and arranging archetypical team members according to broad- stroke ideals. But it’s one we’ve favored in the past.

No matter to which role-based model one ascribes, most agree that to extract maximum value, the assessment of team members’ pro- les in relation to a role (as well as any resulting inferences) should be data-based. Furthermore, most team evaluations highly recommend results be examined in consideration of the team’s strategic imperatives, operating environment, and understood goals.

When working with team members on accelerating individual and team performance, the emphasis on each role can depend on the team mission and how that fits into the organizational plan and business landscape.

In TQ: The Elusive Factor Behind Successful Teams, Gordon Curphy astutely points out that when describing the Rocket Model (a team-based approach to development), “teams build TQ [team effectiveness quotient—the capacity for becoming a high-functioning team] when they understand the factors contributing to team performance, get feedback on those factors, and address the gaps.”

How a team approaches their development and tasks varies based on the context (volatile, stagnant, or gradually changing), organization- al constraints (how much is the company driven by regulation versus market needs?), operational characteristics (multinational, government- run, or locally confined), and the line of business in which the team resides.

Furthermore, to the best laid strategies and plans, there are unforeseeable, uncontrollable, and irrational variables that often seem to derail progress. To paraphrase the adage: “Teams plan. Markets and organizations laugh.”

Considering these factors, it’s not unreasonable to assert that a team’s optimal constitution of role representation is somewhat bespoke and fluid. And despite a role not being personified, success is still possible with the right components. If this sounds eerily familiar to the trappings of which characteristics will predict senior leadership success in a particular time and place, you’re not alone in your déjà vu.

Just like with leadership, all the planning, data, and experience in the world might not help a team get to where it needs to be. And similarly with leadership, there must be a common thread differentiating the teams that have all the right ingredients but still fall at from the teams whose members’ interdependent personalities bring big wins for the organization.

Effective Teams Try Smarter 

It’s tempting to buy into the idea that cognitive or creative abilities are the answer to predicting success across the board. After all, if a team is expected to face a series of challenging scenarios, it seems logical to assume that intelligence and innovativeness can be the keys to staying on track. That is to say, despite one’s expected role, a bit of cognitive horsepower and creativity in each team member would do the trick vis-à-vis strategic acumen.

But cognitive studies don’t tend to offer much in terms of linking the “g factor,” as it’s known, to specific behaviors that support targeted goal attainment. Furthermore, intelligent people, just like everyone else, consistently make poor decisions.

And not every team’s ongoing mission compels the need for strategic thought leaders. In fact, for many teams, these traits can serve as a detriment if they’re predominant among members; there are plenty of tactical teams that need to rethink processes and adapt to quickly changing parameters without the distraction of constant brain- storming, what-ifs, and paralysis by analysis.

Nevertheless, cognitive ability and creativity, as well as related newer-age concepts like learning agility and coachability, endure in the talent management zeitgeist.

Regardless of the label used, experts often conclude the secret to high-performing teams is that they try smarter. What they often fail to acknowledge is that the search for a singular, linear construct predictive of a group’s penchant to try smarter together is, at best, quixotic; this is another likely reason why an approach advocating a balanced distribution of roles also periodically gains more traction.

Rather than continue to wax nostalgic on the benefits and drawbacks of a role-based model or examine the limitations of focusing on a group’s collective intellectual capabilities, we propose

an idea that introduces a blend of characteristics. This recipe for team success includes ensuring each team member engages a continuous improvement mindset, maintains other members’ confidence in his or her contribution toward goal achievement (and vice versa), and continuously questions the rules of engagement when approaching an unforeseen challenge.

More specifically, team members should:

• Be willing to learn, un- learn, and then relearn— constantly.
  • Default to an optimistic attitude grounded by realism and emotional control.
• Be prone toward action, but also toward continual evaluation of the biases embedded in their determinations.

Having observed high- performing teams in varying situations, we also arrived at the conclusion that some form of moderated humility can be the ultimate accelerator of team performance. Although high-performing teams can spontaneously take shape if the right characteristics are present, these teams can achieve even better results when they show humility and learn from one another’s mistakes.

What Is Team Humility? 

In a 2013 study in Organization Science, Brad Owens and colleagues noted that humility is a characteristic based in behavior that emerges during social interaction and is recognizable in others. Key behavioral characteristics that define humility include trying to view yourself accurately, being able to appreciate the strengths and contributions of others, and being open to new ideas and feedback regarding your performance. Humility shouldn’t be confused with deference or lack of confidence.

Research shows humility in leaders can positively impact an organization by propagating employee empowerment and increasing the likelihood team members will demonstrate organizational citizenship behaviors. More importantly, humility may also have a substantial positive impact on a company’s bottom line. For example, studies have shown that humility is associated with increased follower performance, team performance, and reduced turnover.

Still, humility can’t be the only missing piece to the puzzle of maximizing team performance. Overdone, collective humility can have the opposite effect. If left unfettered, members may inadvertently build a team culture that sends signals to other teams and leaders that they are insecure—or worse, incapable. The same dynamics may eventually affect team members’ levels of self-efficacy and confidence in one another. Thus, a team’s level of humility needs to be counterbalanced by optimism, persistence, and openness to change.

At first glance, the idea of humility and self-assuredness working together might seem counterintuitive. But we think there’s a form of confidence that complements humility, and that this blend is the unifying super- power a leader should instill in team members.

In our view, the success of teams depends on what type of charisma is demonstrated by those who have assumed or are vying for ownership of the team goal (or facets thereof). The psychologist David McClelland found charisma comes in two forms: socialized and personalized. Only one complements humility well.

Personalized charismatic team members are primarily concerned with obedience and immediate goal achievement; they’re not as considerate of the way in which something is accomplished or with other team members’ needs. Socialized charisma, however, is a different story. If the team member leading an initiative brings socialized charisma to the scene, he or she will truly care about other team members as well as the best interests of the group overall. People with socialized charisma are more likely to communicate and listen to others, as well as encourage ethical behavior.

Several studies find that success is more likely to be achieved when project leaders are socially charismatic, as they will look to align their vision with followers’ needs and goals, versus demanding implementation. Furthermore, research shows socially charismatic leaders tend to inspire their fellow team members to be autonomous, empowered, and responsible.

Team dynamics can make or break cooperative goal achievement. An engaging, effective team leader will have a far easier time guiding a team if he or she cultivates members who consistently demonstrate humble self-assuredness. Additionally, teams will be successful if they have the following:

• Members who have different personality characteristics.
  • A leader (or leaders) who can pull individuals together despite competing agendas to achieve a common mission and goal.
• A willingness to try smarter by listening, evaluating, and correcting.
  • A combo of humility and socialized charisma to support the constant search for feedback in a way that increases self-efficacy and empowerment.

When teams and leaders focus on leveraging collective strengths and seek advice around shortcomings, they have a far better chance of seizing the right opportunities and maximizing gains. Although adjustments will be necessary, this approach puts teams, and ultimately organizations, in the best position for success.

*This article was authored by Ryan Ross and Michael Sanger, and was originally published in The Teams Issue of Talent Quarterly. Visit their website to purchase the full issue as well as all previous issues.

*This press release originally appeared on Business Wire.

In a new study published in Psychology, Dr. Robert Hogan, Chairman & President of Hogan Assessments, was nominated by his peers as a top psychologist in multiple categories.

The study, conducted by Adrian Furnham, Professor of Psychology at University College London and the Norwegian Business School, asked 101 qualified participants, all psychologists, to nominate the person they consider the “Greatest Living Psychologist.” Dr. Hogan was one of 10 psychologists to receive multiple nominations for this distinction.

The study aimed to determine how psychologists thought about their peers, asking each participant via an online survey to respond to open-ended questions such as “who is the greatest psychologist of all time?” and “who is the greatest living psychologist?” Participants were asked to rank psychologists across six different categories.

Dr. Hogan, who is widely known for his groundbreaking research on personality and how it translates to organizational and leadership effectiveness, was also ranked among the top five greatest personality psychologists. This group consisted of famous psychologists, such as Sigmund Freud, Hans Eysenck, Gordon Allport and Carl Jung.

Although the study does not go so far as to provide insight into what criteria was used to make these nominations, the psychologists listed are highly-recognized for having made significant contributions to the field.

“It is hard to imagine a modern psychologist who has influenced more peers in science—or more leaders in the world of business—than Robert Hogan,” says Rob Kaiser, President of Kaiser Leadership Solutions. “When he started in the 1960s, conventional wisdom held that personality doesn’t matter. Thanks to Hogan’s tireless efforts, we all know better—and have the tools for assessing, selecting, and developing the right people into the right roles for the right reasons.”

According to Furnham, the participating psychologists found this pilot study “both challenging and engaging,” and it could result in a more serious and systematic study in this area in the future.

*This article was authored by Robert Hogan and Joan Jacobsen, and was originally published in The New Thinking Issue of Talent Quarterly. Visit their website to purchase the full issue as well as all previous issues.

Assembling a roster of all-stars isn’t easy—and keeping your squad together is even harder. Steal these five strategies and your team will be a perennial contender.

SUCCEEDING IN BUSINESS is a lot like succeeding in sports: The team with the most talent and best coach will almost always come out on top. But as any struggling squad will tell you, finding top talent isn’t exactly easy.

Let’s say, however, that you draft some homegrown stars and supplement your roster with a few big free agents. Even then you may not beat your competitors, because finding talent is one thing. Using it efficiently is some- thing entirely different.

But don’t throw in the towel. Here are five simple strategies you can use to sign franchise players, create a winning formula, and execute flawlessly.

STEP 1: Don’t Cheat Your Way to the Top 

Well-run organizations have always engaged in the systematic search for talent. For example, in China, the Ming Dynasty established an objective, multi-stage assessment process to find talented civil servants to serve the empire. After World War I, the German Army invented the modern assessment center as an objective method for identifying leadership talent.

Today, objective (and proven) assessment methods for talent identification are well known and commercially available; so are fraudulent methods for identifying talent. One of the biggest issues with today’s assessments is that most organizations have trouble distinguishing between valid and fraudulent methods. Make sure you learn the difference.

STEP 2: Understand Your Players’ Real Contributions 

Talent has serious financial consequences. The Vilfred Pareto Rule tells us that performance is essentially a fractal distribution: Twenty percent of the players on any team will account for 80 percent of the performance, while 80 percent of the players will account for 20 percent of the performance.

What’s true in team sports is also valid in sales, where 20 percent of the salespeople will account for 80 percent of the revenue. Along the same lines, 20 percent of employees will account for 80 percent of an organization’s personnel problems, and vice versa.

STEP 3: Steer Clear of Team Killers 

How should we define talent? The answer isn’t as straightforward as you think. Talent can (and should) be defined in terms of actual and measurable performance. However, in most organizations, it’s in the eyes of the beholders. Specifically, talent is almost always defined by supervisors’ ratings for performance.

In our experience, supervisors don’t know which employees are doing a good job. They think they do, but in reality, they only know which employees they like. And those employees may or may not be high performers.

Think back to your days in middle or high school. There were probably two groups of smart kids: The students whom the teachers thought were smart, and the students whom all the other kids knew were smart.

Unfortunately, the same process applies in the adult world of work. Inside many organizations, it’s all politics, all the time, and success depends on whom you know, not what you do.

In addition, supremely gifted athletes aren’t always good team players. Sports history is littered with examples of great athletes who fought with their coaches and teammates, so much so that we label these stars “team killers.” They generate mind boggling statistics for themselves while their teams underperform.

The same is true for law firms, healthcare providers, and research groups: Highly talented people who can’t share or collaborate often create more problems than they solve.

In our view, being willing and able to work well with others should be a key part of the definition of talent. All significant human achievements, from building the pyramids to landing on the moon to building a world-class company, require coordinated team e orts as well as stellar individual contributions.

STEP 4: Protect Your People from Incompetency 

Once any organization has successfully identified and recruited a talented player, it will have difficulty retaining that new team member because he or she has a 60 to 70 percent chance of working for an incompetent boss.

The stats are stark: In the industrialized world, 70 percent of employees hate their bosses. Bad managers destroy employee engagement, but most employees have no choice but to put up with their horrible bosses.

Talented employees have more options than average employees; they can easily move onto better jobs internally and externally. A major key to retaining talented employees, then, is to shield them from incompetent managers.

STEP 5: Don’t Be Fooled by Emergent Leaders 

So how do organizations find talented managers who won’t alienate their new recruits? In the corporate world, this is known as high-potential (hi-po) identification.

Many organizations identify the next generation of leaders, the hi-po talent, using nominations. Bosses handpick junior people who ooze with talent and potential for future leadership. But re- member: Bosses know who they like, but not necessarily who’s doing a good job.

Here’s where an important leadership study comes into play. Back in the 1980s, management guru Fred Luthans followed more than 400 young managers for a year and recorded their behavior daily. At the end of the year he found they naturally fell into two groups based on their performance.

The first group, which he called “emergent leaders,” received rapid promotions and pay raises. The second group, the “effective leaders,” managed high-performing teams.

The two groups only overlapped about 10 percent as managers; emergent leaders spent much of their time net- working and tending to office politics, while effective leaders worked with their subordinates and provided coaching and performance feedback.

The takeaway? Organizations tend to systematically overlook their most effective managers when trying to identify high-potential leadership. Instead, they choose as high-potentials those managers who are visible and self-promote, and tend to overlook those who are busy doing a good job.

Is it any wonder why there are so many incompetent bosses today?

The good news: While emergent and effective leaders have very different psychological profiles, it’s possible to distinguish between the two groups quickly and efficiently using modern assessment methods.

In other words, stop guessing and start testing. The future of your business depends on it.

*Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash

*This post was authored by Robert Hogan & Ryne Sherman.

There is a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated topics: self-deception and leadership. The two themes often come together in the lives of prominent politicians, for example, in the career of Barack Obama. Let us explain.

We are both fascinated by the idea that people often do things for reasons of which they are unaware. On the one hand, it is pretty obvious that people frequently act without knowing (or caring) why they behave as they do. On the other hand, why is that? For Freud, unconscious thoughts are created by what he called “repression:” one part of the mind (the Ego) recognizes that another part of the mind (the Id) prompts us to do things that will be great fun but which will get us in trouble. The Ego saves us from ourselves by repressing the impulses of the Id—most of the time. But from time to time, the Id escapes the Ego, and we do naughty things. Even then, however, the Ego protects us by “repressing” our awareness of what we have done and why. Freud goes on to say that maturity involves replacing repression with condemnation: immature people repress their socially inappropriate impulses; mature people acknowledge that they have socially inappropriate impulses but refuse to act on them.

The existentialists (Sartre, Camus) interpreted the Freudian unconscious in an interesting way. They understood that people often do selfish things without being aware of what they are doing. But they attributed this lack of awareness to “self-deception” (in French, mauvaise foi—bad faith), a tendency to avoid recognizing the reasons for one’s actions. Self-deception is nothing more than lying to oneself about the reasons for one’s actions. For the existentialists, then, self-deception is a form of cowardice—an inability to face up to the meaning of one’s decisions—and they argued that people have a moral obligation to overcome self-deception. So, we are left with two questions: (1) Are people often unaware of the reasons for their actions; and (2) are they still responsible for those actions?  Freud says “yes” and “no,” the existentialists say “yes” and “yes,” and we agree with Sartre and Camus.

Freud mistrusted politicians, whom he saw as ruthless psychopaths driven by the desire to dominate others—Freud had Hitler and Napoleon in mind. In our view, psychopaths are charismatic, charming, and ruthless, but they also tend to be impulsive, opportunistic, and lacking career agendas. Like psychopaths, narcissists also can be charismatic, manipulative, and ruthless, but unlike psychopaths, they tend to be strategic about their careers. In addition, most psychopaths are loners, whereas narcissists often build coalitions of supporters. We believe many politicians are narcissists—people who want power and control, feel they deserve it, and work to gain it.

Charisma and narcissism are closely related—to the point that charisma is a code word for narcissism.  And this has important implications for leadership. Charismatic people tend to be chosen for leadership positions, but charismatic narcissists make ruinous leaders. A substantial literature (cf. O’Reilly, 2017) shows that narcissistic CEOs are overly confident, unwilling to listen to feedback, and hostile and combative when challenged. These tendencies are associated with excessive risk-taking and a range of unethical behavior including tax avoidance, manipulating accounting data, and excessive personal compensation. The risk-taking leads to bad investments and ill-advised law suits, staff alienation and defections, and poor overall financial performance. Humility is the opposite of narcissism, and a growing empirical literature shows that humility in combination with appropriate self-confidence predicts leadership effectiveness and organizational success (Ou, 2012; Owens et al., 2013).

Turning back to political leaders, politicians want power and control, but they are surrounded by like-minded competitors. To gain power, they often claim that they only want to serve the public and work for the greater good, with no thought of personal gain. They claim to seek power in order to help those who lack power. And they can project this message so well that it becomes hard to see what is behind it.

The essence of animal communication is deception—most animal communication is intended to deceive competitors and predators. It follows that much human communication serves the same purpose. The difference between politicians and the rest of us is not that they are deceptive; the difference is that they are good at it and they know why they are doing it. In addition, the best liars are those who believe their own stories, and this brings us back to self-deception, to Barack Obama, and to Ben Rhodes’ new book on Obama’s leadership. Rhodes was recently interviewed about his book on National Public Radio. In that interview, Rhodes came across as bright and articulate, but also as narcissistic and self-deceived. This impression was confirmed in the following (astonishing) commentary on his book in Sunday’s (June 10^th) Wall Street Journal:

“Mr. Rhodes’ prose is engaging, and his Syria narrative, contrary to his slippery reputation, is astonishingly candid. We can attribute his honesty to a lack of self-awareness. He depicts himself, Mr. Obama and other members of the former president’s team as not only tragically indecisive and irresponsible but self-absorbed to the point of moral insensateness.  Yet there is no indication Mr. Rhodes understands that his account is damning.”

So, what is the point? First, Freud was right: politicians are not like the rest of us; they have a distinctive psychology that sets them apart from ordinary citizens. Second, Freud was wrong about that psychology. Even dictators like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad are not psychopaths; rather, they are narcissistic politicians who escaped the bonds of accountability. Unlike psychopaths, successful dictators are clear minded about their goals—they are pragmatic, rational, and make data-based decisions in order to secure their legacies. Third, our own elected politicians also tend to be narcissists (Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Woodrow Wilson, etc.); charismatic, charming, and self-deceived. Sincerity is the mark of people who have been taken in by their own acts. The problems occur when political leaders commit their countries to seemingly humanitarian projects that are actually intended to secure their own personal legacies: Woodrow Wilson in WWI; Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam; George Bush in Iraq…

References

O’Reilly, C.A.  (2017).  The Leadership Quarterly.  http//dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.08.001

Rhodes, B.  (2018).  The world as it is:  A memoir of the Obama white house.  New York:  Penguin.

Ou, Y. (2012). CEO humility and its relationship with middle manager behaviors and performance: Examining the CEO-middle manager interface. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, 72(7-A), 2478.

Owens, B. P., Johnson, M. D., & Mitchell, T. R. (2013). Expressed humility in organizations: Implications for performance, teams, and leadership. Organizational Science, 24, 1517-1538. doi: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0795