*This is a guest post authored by Dr. Nicholas Emler, Professor of Psychology at University of Surrey.

Social organizations generate immense power and great benefits. Today, we rely on social organizations to support every facet of our lives—from food production and distribution to water supply and waste disposal to the provision of health care and national security. However, that power can also be a source of massive harm.  It therefore matters whose hands control the levers of this power. And moral character matters immensely at this level because leaders have significant discretion to act, discretion denied to people lower in the organizational hierarchy.

There are some distinct moral challenges associated with the exercise of organizational leadership; unfortunately, some leaders are not up to these challenges.  This essay identifies seven moral challenges of leadership, and concludes by suggesting that moral failure may be commonplace at the top of social organizations.

The first and most elementary moral challenge concerns the fact that leaders occupy positions of trust; they are entrusted with managing the material resources of the organization. As criminology clearly shows, theft depends on opportunity and most societies are arranged so as to minimize the opportunities available to known delinquents. But matters are very different at the top of organizations; the opportunities and temptations – of personal enrichment at collective expense — can be huge and the strength of character to resist those temptations is often lacking. Think of Enron executives, Bernie Madoff, Jacob Zuma, or virtually any Russian oligarch.

The second challenge arises because leaders occupy positions of power – over subordinates—and the temptation is tyranny. People often have reasons to dislike others and wish them harm. But they seldom act on their wishes because aggression is not free; victims retaliate and the law intervenes. In criminological terms, there are credible deterrents. But as we move up organizational hierarchies, the deterrents become less credible and the cost of aggression fades away. Consequently, bullying, sexual predation, persecution, torture and mass murder can result. The examples here begin with Harvey Weinstein and Robert Maxwell (head of a British publishing empire and notorious bully) and extend to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung and the horrors they perpetrated.

The third moral challenge is based on the fact that leaders are in positions of authority, and are, therefore, responsible for maintaining fair procedures for administering justice.This might seem to be a benign challenge, but not managing it properly can be very costly to organizations. People care about justice—the fairness of the procedures to which they are subject and the outcomes they receive. And when they perceive matters to be unfair, they withdraw their commitment to organizational citizenship, a commitment on which all organizations depend. This leads to depressed morale, lowered motivation, and resentment-driven sabotage. However, the literature on organizational justice mostly concerns how the recipients of justice react; it tells us little about how to deliver justice in a manner acceptable to those recipients.

The fourth challenge reflects the fact that social organizations tend to embody a particular set of values. Think about the claims of competing candidates for political office; there will typically be a contrast in the values they endorse, for example, freedom versus equality. The elected candidate then has an obligation to promote those values. Leaders need to be clear about their value priorities. Without being clear about their values, they risk decision-making paralysis.

Fifth, organizations exist to do something, and achieving that mission is the responsibility of the leadership. Mission failure is also a moral challenge; mission failure is all too often due to incompetence. However, the problem ultimately is not the limited competence of leaders but their failure to acknowledge their limits. Complex organizations require expertise beyond the capacity of any single individual and good leaders have the humility to recognize this and seek expert advice from others. Bad leaders refuse to admit any limits to their omniscience. The results can be corporate collapse and financial ruin for thousands of investors, the catastrophic failure of health care organizations, battles lost with massive casualties, the economic ruin of entire countries (think Robert Mugabe), and mass starvation.

Sixth, leaders have a moral obligation to avoid collateral damage when pursuing the organizational mission. Much of the literature on corporate crime documents this moral failure. It is estimated that on the job injuries resulting from unsafe working practices are 7 times the injuries resulting from criminal assaults. Avoidable deaths from occupational accidents and diseases are between 5 and 7 times as frequent as deaths by homicide. In addition, evidence collected by US federal agencies show that about 20 million Americans a year are injured or killed by unsafe consumer products. Corporate executives may not intend these consequences but they are foreseeable, and often foreseen; the Ford Pinto and Thalidomide are but two examples.

The final and perhaps most difficult moral challenge to meet, is to use the opportunity provided by leadership of a powerful organization – most notably but not only a nation state – to do good, to address grievous wrongs and injustices, to root out corruption and oppression, and to face down tyrants. The list of leaders rising to this challenge is depressingly short. One reason may be that the complex causal linkages in social systems are difficult to grasp and interventions designed to fix one problem often have other unintended but damaging consequences.

Why are we so often poorly served by our leaders? Some of the reasons are noted above – the corrupting consequences of opportunity, the lack of effective deterrence, etc. But another reason lies in processes of leader selection. The extensive psychological literature on leadership selection and evaluation is largely irrelevant because it assumes the selection process is rational and empirical—e.g., assessment center methodologies. In most real organizations, however, people are chosen for positions of leadership through selection processes that are heavily top-down. And in top-down selection, politics and technical competence often trump questions about the moral integrity of candidates.

*This Q&A was originally published by HRPWR.com. 

Dr. Robert Hogan is an international authority in the fields of personality assessment, the assessment of management skills and organisational efficiency. He is the author of more than 300 articles, book chapters and books in total; the founder of Hogan Assessments and eponym of the Hogan test.  Dr. Hogan is a determining personality of 21st century applied business psychology, who is widely acclaimed internationally in scientific and business circles alike. We recently spoke with Dr. Hogan when he was in Budapest to speak at the Future of Coaching in Organisations conference.

May I start with a personal question? Have you always been interested in organisational psychology, or had you previously tried your hand at other fields of psychology?

I’m a retired naval officer. After leaving the navy, I worked with youthful offenders for one and a half years – my interest in psychology derives from these times. I was completely enchanted by the task of understanding how these young people had arrived at this point, many of whom were really smart and good at sports – how did they become youthful offenders? I wanted to find out what could be done to reverse the process which had led them to that point. After this, I decided to pursue a PhD in psychology, and I spent the first 11-13 years of my post-navy career studying crime.

How did you arrive at studying personality assessment, leadership and organisational development from there?

While I was studying the psychology of delinquency I realised that in truth I’m more interested in the normal personality – through criminals we can’t understand the normal personality, but through studying the normal personality we can understand what has happened to those who become criminals. This is how I got to the point of studying personality in itself, and how I got to the question, which is a very important question in life indeed: what shapes our career? How can we be successful in life? As this is something criminals can’t have: success in career. This was followed by the question of how to make a career within an organisation – since nobody makes a career in the desert alone… I started thinking about the topic of “people in the organisation”, then one thing came after another. I explored the literature of organisational theory, and I realised that this doesn’t exist: that nobody had ever talked about organisational theory before. Even though people create organisations, organisations develop cultures, and after this, the culture affects who can be inside and who remains outside… This is how someone becomes a criminal – they are the ones who remain outside – and this is how I started dealing with organisational psychology.

I have seen a video on the web page of Hogan Assessments, in which people are asked what they think the concept of personality covers. Now I would like to ask you: what is personality?

It’s about two things. One of them is what a person thinks about him or herself: this is his or her identity. The other is what others think about him: this is his reputation (in other words, his honour or credit). The first covers what a person thinks about who he or she thinks he/she is, the second is what others think about him or her. During the history of psychology, most psychologists have focused on identity, even though the most important part of our life is our reputation: since based on this we are hired, fired or promoted; people lend us money, vote for us and so on. So psychologists have missed this opportunity, because we focus exactly on this, on how we affect others. Our reputation is the key to everything. For instance politicians understand this very well – but psychologists don’t.

From where did you get the idea to measure reputation?

Freud phrased it something like this: “The ‘you’ that you know is hardly worth knowing” – as it’s something that you invented about yourself. The problem with all of this is self-deception: people lie to themselves most of the time. And one of their biggest lies towards themselves is in connection with who they are and what they do. What we can believe is what other people say about them. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Our reputation aggregates of all our past behaviors: this is our best data source for how we are going to behave in the future.

Can we always believe what other people say about someone?

We have to analyze all of the results. We can’t take the opinions of only one or two people. We have to ask at least ten or fifteen people, since anyone can be antagonistic towards someone – or is his or her good friend. That’s why we need a lot of data.

Does all the above mentioned mean that self-knowledge doesn’t play a part at all in a successful career – and it’s not important in the assessments?

Exactly! How do we know where self-knowledge comes from? We assume that it comes from introspection – namely, what we think about ourselves. But many, many successful people are incapable of introspection! They are just not capable: they become angry if you ask them to peer inward. Ronald Reagan was famous about not being able to do this; another example is Voltaire. So if very successful people are not capable, then introspection is not even important – is it?

I will have to think about that a bit…

All right! So the thing we have to speak about, is strategic self-knowledge. This means that we have to be aware of how others see us, and also of how we affect others.

If it’s true that a person’s reputation consists of all his/her past behavior, then how should we evaluate if someone’s personality has gone through a big change – how can we assess that? Can we assess it at all?

I don’t think that personality could ever change in a large measure. It’s very hard to change personality. What we can change is behavior: based on feedback, we can change something in our behavior. At the same time, personality has an important dimension, which we call coachability. This means that not everyone listens to feedback. Let’s just think about athletes: you get 9-10 athletes to every star athlete who are just as skilled, but they don’t become star athletes. Those who become star athletes listen to coaching. Without this, they can’t perform at their best: it won’t work if they don’t allow themselves to be coached.

So what you are saying is that coachability is something which can be measured, and if someone is coachable, there is a chance that his or her behavior will change later on?

Yes. And if someone reaches low scores in coachability, it means that he/she will never change. Because these people like themselves as they are – why should they change? (Or so they think.)

Hogan Assessments also deals with measuring leadership skills. What characterises a good leader?

That their subordinates like him/her and they trust him/her. And they believe him/her. I can also tell why they like a good leader. There are four reasons: first, they know that they can trust him or her, and that he or she won’t betray them. Second, they see that this person knows what he/she is talking about. She/he knows the field she/he is dealing with, and is really competent in it. The third is that she/he has good judgement: she/he makes very good decisions. Nelson – one of the best leaders I know – never made any bad decisions. And the fourth? These people have a vision which is attractive. If we would like to define the bad leader, just recall all the bad managers we have met so far: they lie, they don’t know what they are talking about, they make bad decisions, and they aim to realise bad values. What they are trying to achieve is not worth achieving. As a matter of fact, what I have just said is based on knowledge gained from millions of data points about what a good leader looks like. I’m not a philosopher, I approach the question from the viewpoint of an engineer. I really have to build on data. For building up a business or anything else, we need to support the process with data. We don’t build bridges from instinct either. (Laughs.)

Could you share your views about how digitalisation has changed, or how it is changing, personality assessment?

First, I have to lay down that I’m constantly thinking about this question: in fact, it’s been troubling me since 1965, so I’ve been worrying about it for a while. But I think that human nature has a biological core, which will never change. What we would like to measure does not change; the method of measurement can change at best. At the same time, I also think that the best way to collect data from a person is to ask him or her a series of sophisticated questions. I don’t know yet if there is any faster way of getting information about people. And the best way to get information about people is to ask other people about them. And how can we digitize this…? Digitalisation makes all this faster and more effective, we can ask more people within less time – but what we want to measure will always remain the same. Today we can collect the amount of data within 4-5 days which took me 2 years in the first occasion. And this is astounding!

As a conclusion, I would ask you a personal question again: what are you most proud of in your career?

There are four things of which I think I can be proud. I think I was the one who stood up and showed to the scientific world that personality is important, indeed: that it predicts workplace performance, moreover, in the case of all occupations. It predicts work performance more than anything else, including IQ. And personality doesn’t discriminate. Here there is no difference among the attainable scores between women and men, or between people coming from various places, and so on. Anyone completing the test can reach the same scores. In the second place, I also showed that leadership and leadership skills are important. So, first of all personality is important. Secondly, leadership ability is important, and thirdly, personality predicts leadership ability. And the fourth thing I’m proud of is that (through mapping the dark side of personality) we also pointed out the fact that 65-75% of present managers don’t perform well in their work. I think these are important contributions. And it can be said in every case that the scientific community has always had a different opinion. So when we pointed at these things, we met serious resistance from the scientific community. And I’m very proud that we did it!

Today, many organizations use personality assessment tools to assess their employees. But before deciding to use a personality tool, should organizations create their own thermometer test? 

Imagine someone walking up to a doctor with a new kind of device that claims to measure the body temperature. What if the manufacturer requested the doctor to endorse the new product? The doctor is the head of a hospital and her endorsement could mean opening up a new market for the manufacturer. How should the doctor go about taking that decision?

The doctor would check it for the safety and reliability of the readings, and calibrate it against thermometers used by the hospital. The doctor could check her own temperature a few times over the hour to check if the reading is consistent. In short, one would take all measures to check the reliability and validity of a product or a tool against the accepted standards.

Passing the “Thermometer Test” 

Today, many organizations use personality assessment tools to assess their employees. Talent acquisition, job fit, and coaching are all great cases for the use of personality assessment tools. After all, the leader’s personality is what gets reflected in his or her leadership style and can be a great source of understanding the organization’s culture. But before deciding to use a personality tool, organizations should create their own “thermometer test”. It is important to know that the test that one is using is capable of doing what it promises to do and have an expert psychometrician decide the “reliability and validity” of the tool.

Here is a set of elements that one can use to choose the right personality assessment tool:

• Check for the science behind the test: Check if a sufficient number of top peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Human Performance, International Journal of Selection and Assessment etc.) has reviewed the tool. Check if the test adheres to globally accepted standards of designing personality assessment tools and check for the reviews in Buros’ Mental Measurement Yearbook or the British Psychological Society (BPS) standards or the Psychological Testing Center. Do not get carried away by the names of client organizations provided by the test provider.
• Determining what the test will be used for: The tests can be used for making decisions on hiring, the potential for success in a new role in case of an internal move, or to provide a basis for coaching a leader. It is important to define the key demands on the role for which a person is being evaluated. Then decide if the test that is being chosen measures what is wanted. You cannot use the thermometer to check the weight of a patient (at least, not yet).
• Membership of bodies that regulate statistical and ethical standards: Check if your test provider is a member of the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology (SIOP), or some other professional organization that mandates ethical and statistical guidelines for creating assessments. It is like checking if a surgeon has the requisite experience defined by a professional body regulating guidelines applicable to surgeons or a Chartered Accountant is a member of the Institute of CAs — it is a proxy for the person’s ability to advise.
• Test manual’s standards: The test manual should adhere to the standards described by a body (e.g. SIOP) that regulates standards in development, validation, and norms for the assessment. The test manuals and reports must follow these standards. If your mobile phone manufacturer provides details on the radiation levels, standards around display, battery life etc., so must the personality assessment tool.
• The Job: The test being used should be validated for a job similar to the one it is being tested for. Ask the personality assessment provider to produce a summary of validation results for the job. Just as what is needed to succeed in Sales differs from what is needed in an Executive role, the test must be a valid predictor of performance in the target job. Ask the provider to explain how the high and low score cut-offs have been arrived at. That would help in understanding the norms against which the results will be compared. In the thermometer test, it is like asking the range of temperature that would be considered normal. A temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is cast in stone as a measure of normal temperature. A body temperature of 99.7 degrees F or higher measured using an oral thermometer is considered fever.
• Test the test: Personality assessment tests need to be developed by skilled psychometricians. They need to be tested and calibrated by experts before they are administered to the employees of your organization. Your employees trust you to do the due diligence before their career choices get shaped by an assessment. Try the ‘thermometer test’ with your assessment provider and evaluate the science behind the instrument.

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

*This article was first written by Abhijit Bhaduri for People Matters Magazine, June 2018 issue.

*This is a guest post authored by Rob Field, Learning and Development Director at Advanced People Strategies.

We all heard it and probably all rolled our eyes to it…’The only constant is change’.

With organisations needing to constantly adapt and evolve due to competitive forces, global challenges or political decisions how are leaders meant to keep up?

Development programmes can provide frameworks and information to help create knowledge. We often see comprehensive change programmes with teams of people lead by programme managers. Effective at reviewing processes and creating the project plan and driving timelines to enable delivery. New systems, processes and products emerge. There are the usual statistics that over 80% of change programmes fail. Kotter would say that we need to attend to eight areas with the final of these being anchoring changes firmly in the corporate culture.

Change management is probably the biggest challenge leaders face.

Resistance can be present as well as those ‘embracing’ change who may be overcommitting. As products and services are changing, are the leaders changing along with them? They are the role models of the business. Emerging talent will be copying what they do as they grow their careers. Are they modelling the right behaviours? Charles Brown former Chairman of AT&T recognised this when he said ‘I think we can do the internal job of changing without fear of failure, once we’re given some decent understanding of what is expected of us. But the complexity of trying to change ourselves, when we don’t know what the future rules are going to be, injects a degree of uncertainty that creates a lot of anxiety.’ Leading change is a key component of successful leadership.

Knowing who you are as a leader and being able to lead yourself effectively can make a huge difference within the organisation.

How do we support leaders from being resistant over overcommitting? Challenging them to recognise their behaviours, making them conscious of their impact on others helps them become the role models required to create or modify the corporate culture. There are several areas to address to do this including considering how feedback is collected and provided within the organisation, how leaders get to understand who they are and how to keep them conscious of how they impact others. Failure to do so may jeopardise their effectiveness.

So, although we talk about change management, we can teach people the relevant skills. We need to support the leaders to impact the culture of the organisation and learn to change themselves in ways that better serve others. Using the right tools and considering how leaders are coached impacts on more effective change management.

Hogan Assessments Managing Director Ryan Ross, Manager of Client Research Kimberly Nei, and Managing Director of Europe Zsolt Feher will be featured speakers at the European Association of Test Publishers Conference on September 26-28 in Athens, Greece. In addition, Hogan will serve as a Gold Sponsor for the event.

The three will speak on three different topics at the conference. Feher, Ross, and Nei will speak during an Ignite Session that will focus on the “State of Affairs in HR Data Analytics – Let’s Not Get Overshadowed by Digital Disruption and Rising Stars.” Ross will speak at a Breakout Session on “Noncognitive Assessment – Applications and Opportunities to Transform Testing.” The third and final session by Nei and Ross is a Breakout Session titled “Mythbusters – Fact or Fake News?” All Breakout Sessions provide a rounded perspective on a topic, and include multiple presenters from a single organization, across multiple organizations, or panel sessions specifically where the end users of tests and assessments are involved.

There are significant anticipated changes throughout the assessment industry in Europe due to the political, technological, and societal landscape across the continent. The E-ATP Conference aims to learn how to keep pace with the innovations emerging in the industry, revisit the core principles of assessment, and to lead the transformation in assessment.

For more information about the event, visit www.eatpconference.eu.com.

*This article, authored by Ben Dattner and Robert Hogan, was originally published in Harvard Business Review in 2011. It has been republished in the HBR 2018 Summer Issue.  

In his brilliant 1950 film, Rashomon, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa depicts the story of a rape and murder four times, from the perspectives of four characters. The message is clear: Different people can see the same events in dramatically different ways.

In the workplace this phenomenon is particularly evident when it comes to underperformance and failure. An outcome that an employee regards as satisfactory may be seen by his boss as entirely unacceptable. When a project is an unequivocal flop, colleagues disagree over the reasons why. These reactions, and their effect on workplace relationships, often become more problematic than the original event. As a result, how people respond to negative feedback is of great importance to managers and organizations and is a major determinant of career success.

Consider the case of a pharmaceutical company seeking FDA approval for a new use of an existing drug. (Some details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.) Wendy, a talented researcher, was put in charge of the large-scale data analysis required to file an appli cation. She considered several approaches and recommended the one she thought best balanced the need for accuracy and comprehensiveness with the imperative to complete the work quickly and on budget. Her boss, George—the company’s head statistician—agreed with the plan, and together they presented it to the vice president of medical affairs, Don. Although Don would have liked a more thorough approach, he recognized that it would be more expensive, and he signed off on the recommendation.

After months of work the analysis failed to demonstrate the efficacy of the drug for the new use, and the application to the FDA had to be scrapped. Reactions varied. Don blamed the statistics department, and especially George, for recommending the approach it had taken. George did not think that he and his team were at fault, and he was angry with Don for allowing financial pressures to influence their choice in the first place. The two men struggled to work together. Wendy, meanwhile, felt she had personally fallen short and began having trouble focusing on her other assignments.

How could three people have such different views of the same situation?

A Matter of Type

Personality psychology provides a research-based behavioral science framework for identifying and analyzing how people respond to failure and assign blame. Using data on several hundred thousand managers from every industry sector, we have identified 11 personality types likely to have dysfunctional reactions to failure. For example, there is the Skeptical type, who is very smart about people and office politics but overly sensitive to criticism and always on the lookout for betrayal; the Bold type, who thinks in grandiose terms, is frequently in error but never in doubt, and refuses to acknowledge his mistakes, which then snowball; and the Diligent type, who is hardworking and detail oriented, with very high standards for herself and others, but also a micromanaging control freak who infantilizes and alienates subordinates. These types represent roughly 70% of the U.S. population. (See the sidebar “Recognize Your Type.”)

The 11 types can be divided into the three broad categories proposed by the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig in the 1930s, which were based on a test that he had developed to assess anger and frustration. Some people are extrapunitive—prone to unfairly blaming others. Some are impunitive: They either deny that failure has occurred or deny their own role in it. And some are intropunitive, often judging themselves too harshly and imagining failures where none exist.

In our pharmaceutical example, Don, an Excitable type, exemplifies extrapunitive tendencies. He takes the statistics team to task instead of accepting any personal responsibility or attributing the failure to the drug itself. Extrapunitive responses are all too common in the business world. Seemingly every time executives testify before Congress—whether it’s Tony Hayward, then BP’s CEO, disavowing blame for the oil spill, or Richard Fuld, then Lehman Brothers’ CEO, disavowing blame for the financial crisis—they point fingers at any organization except their own. Interestingly, long before they found themselves in the hot seat, both Hayward and Fuld were faulted for other instances of mismanaging blame. (HBR tried to reach Hayward and Fuld to give them the opportunity to respond but received no reply.)

The chief statistician, George, a Bold type, was impunitive, denying that he and his team had anything to do with the bad outcome. One well-known executive who has been accused of this sort of behavior is Carly Fiorina, a past CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Disgruntled former subordinates have described her as a self-promoting attention seeker who ignored integration challenges and day-to-day operations following HP’s 2002 merger with Compaq and took no responsibility when the combined company failed to live up to its potential. When the HP board suggested that she delegate greater authority to her team and more power to the heads of key business units, she refused and was subsequently dismissed. (When HBR contacted Fiorina’s chief of staff about this article, she declined to comment.)

Though less common than extrapunitive and impunitive personality types, people with intropunitive tendencies can also be problematic. The researcher Wendy, a Diligent type, exhibited this behavior by taking on excessive blame. This may have been due in part to her gender: Because of their socialization and other cultural influences, women are more likely than men to be intropunitive.

The underlying theme of our research is that many managers perceive and react to failure inappropriately and therefore have trouble learning from it—leading to more failures down the road. Many of us have at some point assigned (or avoided) blame in a self-serving way, only to suffer negative fallout; on the flip side, we may take self-criticism too far, resulting in paralysis and stagnation. To foster and thrive in a productive work environment, we need to recognize and overcome these tendencies.

How to Change Your Stripes

Fortunately, managers at all levels of organizations, and at any stage of their careers, can fix their flawed responses to failure. Here are some key steps you should take:

Cultivate self-awareness.

First, it’s important to determine whether you fall into one of the three categories. Several personality tests can help you assess your interaction style. Although the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably the best known, others have more empirical support. One well-established model we’ve found particularly helpful is the Big Five, which measures openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, along with subfactors of these dimensions. It does a good job of illuminating how you deal with failure in yourself and others. For example, you may find that you score high on the achievement-striving subfactor of the conscientiousness dimension, indicating that you may become easily distressed if you don’t meet ambitious goals. Or you might score high on the angersubfactor of neuroticism, suggesting a tendency to disproportionately fault others for minor errors and to exaggerate their gravity.

Another useful exercise is to reflect on challenging events or jobs in your career, considering how you handled them and what you could have done better. You might ask trusted colleagues, mentors, or coaches to evaluate your reactions to and explanations for failures. Pay close attention to the subtleties of how people respond to you in common workplace situations, and ask for formal or informal 360-degree feedback; you may be surprised at what you discover.

For example, one media industry CEO we’ve worked with, an Excitable type, saw no problem with his habit of forcefully and publicly pointing out subordinates’ minor errors. During an executive-coaching process he learned that his employees perceived him as extrapunitive. He realized that they had a more hierarchical worldview than he did and that he had underestimated how criticism from him—the boss—might affect them. He also came to accept that small mistakes should be treated differently from big ones, and that feedback on them should be balanced with encouragement.

Self-awareness is also helpful for people in the other two categories. If you find that others often see failure where you don’t or if you have a hard time pinpointing times when you’ve failed, you might be impunitive (or at least risk coming across that way). At the other extreme, if you’re constantly anxious about failing or if colleagues often reassure you that things aren’t as bad as you think, you may be intropunitive.

Although not everyone has the time, inclination, or resources to get the kind of coaching or counseling necessary to surface and address deep psychological issues with respect to failure and blame, everyone can undertake and benefit from this sort of reflection.

Cultivate political awareness.

Even if you’ve analyzed your behavior and think that you act appropriately with respect to blame, your colleagues might disagree. As the media industry CEO learned, you must know your audience and recognize that each situation is different. Behavior that was appropriate in the past might be perceived as extrapunitive, impunitive, or intropunitive in a new role or company. Whereas self-awareness helps you understand what messages you’re sending, political awareness helps you understand what messages others are receiving. It requires that you know how your organization defines, explains, assigns responsibility for, and attempts to remedy failure.

Take the case of a COO who had recently joined a health care nonprofit. As part of a large-scale change effort, he was asked to lead a task force that would identify inefficient processes and make recommendations for improvements. Other members of the executive team were assigned to lead other groups. Because he was very busy with his day-to-day work, the COO and his task force fell behind. When the CEO held a meeting to discuss the various groups’ progress and share their findings, the COO, a Reserved type, simply described his team’s activities, making no mention of their missed deadlines and failure to deliver any results. This made the CEO angry; he perceived the COO’s behavior as impunitive and felt that it set a bad example for the other task forces. Fortunately, the CEO was not a blaming type. After the meeting he privately told the COO that although falling behind schedule might have been unavoidable, he had to take responsibility for the delay. The COO realized that the nonprofit’s culture was different from the cultures he’d experienced at other companies. In his previous jobs, leaders were expected to hide their shortcomings, not acknowledge them as a means of showing their commitment to improving. The COO had to learn how to criticize himself, appropriately and publicly, in order to succeed in his new job.

Political awareness involves finding the right way to approach failure within your specific organization, department, and role. An intropunitive person might be effective at a small, highly collegial company but have to change his ways at a larger, more competitive one, where rivals might take advantage. An extrapunitive boss who only slightly softened her criticisms when independently running a sales department might have to tone them down further when coleading a cross-divisional team.

Embrace new strategies.

Once you’re aware of your bad habits, you can move toward more-open, adaptive responses. The strategies needed can work for any of the dysfunctional types. The first is to listen and communicate. It sounds obvious, but most of us forget to gather enough feedback or sufficiently explain our actions and intentions. Especially when it comes to credit and blame, never assume that you know what others are thinking or that they understand where you are coming from.

The second is to reflect on both the situation and the people. At the end of each project or performance cycle, think about things that might have pushed you or others into extrapunitive, impunitive, or intropunitive reactions. How did you respond? How did your colleagues? Was everyone on the same page? If not, why? What effect did situational and interpersonal factors have on the outcome?

The third strategy is to think before you act. When a failure seems to have occurred, don’t respond immediately or impulsively. It’s not always possible to right the wrong, but it’s almost always possible to make things worse by overreacting in a highly charged situation. If you become extrapunitive, others may become impunitive. If you become intropunitive, others may pile on. Take the time to consider several possible interpretations of the event and to imagine various ways you might respond.

The fourth strategy is to search for a lesson. Mistakes happen. Sometimes a colleague or group of colleagues is at fault. Sometimes the responsibility lies with you. Sometimes no one is to blame. Look for nuance and context and then create and test hypotheses about why the failure happened, to prevent it from happening again.

When the talented chief technology officer of an internet company, a Skeptical type, discovered that his department’s high turnover rate was caused by what employees described as an extrapunitive leadership style, he resolved to use these strategies. Previously he would excoriate his team if projects ran late or did not achieve their goals, refusing to listen to any explanations. The problem, he now learned, wasn’t that his employees lacked competence; it was that they didn’t always understand his instructions and were afraid to request clarification. So his first step was to check in with them to make sure everyone knew what he wanted. If results were unsatisfactory nonetheless, his initial response was still to criticize—but now he also spent time analyzing how the people and the situation had contributed to what went wrong. He started taking “deep dives” into failed projects, assigning blame only after careful consideration. Because of this approach, staff members began to share more information with him, which helped everyone identify weaknesses and oversights that had affected results. They also grew more comfortable telling him about minor problems earlier, making the problems less likely to cascade. Morale and productivity improved, and turnover decreased.

Let’s look at how these strategies can benefit the other types. An executive who learns that he is coming across as impunitive, as the COO at the health care nonprofit did, can ask others for feedback about whether the quality, quantity, and timeliness of work products represent success, failure, or something in between. Someone with intropunitive tendencies might make a list of all the situational factors that contributed to poor outcomes. Wendy eventually realized that she was hurting her career by taking too much responsibility for failure. So she started communicating more closely with her colleagues at the outset of a task to inoculate herself against worrying later on that she had acted without support. She pushed others to do their homework, share their opinions, and raise any objections; she also paid attention to subtle signals that she lacked consensus. The next time a drug trial she was involved in failed, she thought carefully about the reasons, soberly considered her role, and decided not to blame herself.

How to Influence Others

Just as important as understanding your own tendencies is recognizing when your bosses, peers, or subordinates might fit into the categories we’ve outlined. Having insight into their motivational biases and emotional reactions to failure can help you give them feedback in the right way and at the right time—feedback that increases their self-awareness and political awareness and ultimately helps them change their ways. Of course, sometimes dysfunctional people cannot be influenced; if this is the case with your boss, your best option may be to seek other career opportunities inside or outside your organization. However, people often conclude too quickly that their bosses can’t change.

The chief of staff at an investment firm had an extrapunitive manager, a Cautious type, who was highly successful and widely respected in the industry but completely uninterested in personal improvement. Like the CTO described earlier, he gave little direction to his employees and then snapped at them when they failed to meet his deadlines or expectations. Although the chief of staff was not herself a victim of his outbursts, she sympathized with the junior executives who were. She identified one area of constant contention: questions about how to classify investments. The boss typically told staff members to “figure it out,” and the time they spent doing so often led to delays in their analyses. She came up with a solution (forming a committee to create guidelines, which would then go to the manager for approval) and waited for the right time—when he was in a good mood and not too busy—to present it. He agreed, the committee was appointed, and things went more smoothly. The chief of staff had helped her colleagues and protected her extrapunitive boss from himself.

It’s also possible to constructively influence people who have impunitive and intropunitive tendencies. Rather than criticizing his new COO publicly and making him defensive, the CEO at the health care nonprofit gave him supportive coaching. At the pharmaceutical company, George helped Wendy see the broader organizational context for the drug application’s failure. 

Handling failure and blame the right way is key to managerial success. We believe the taxonomy we’ve presented will not only help you see your own role and responsibilities more clearly but also help you better understand the perceptions of others. And we hope this knowledge will enable you to approach failure with an open mind, react to it in a balanced and strategic way, and, most important, learn and help others learn from it.

*This is a guest post authored by Rob Field, Learning and Development Director at Advanced People Strategies.

Leadership…

A pretty vast topic. The debates around effective leadership always evoke some pretty heated debate and numerous perspectives. We all have our stories of the successful and inspirational leaders we have worked for and with, the qualities they possess and how they have engaged those around them.

In leadership it can be easy to become caught up in status, power and control, however, for leaders, focusing on those around them and within their teams is crucial to success. Cheryl Williamson wrote in Forbes ‘You cannot be an effective leader if you feel you are better than your subordinates’.  Teams with these types of leaders tend to have higher turnover and experience lower productivity.

So for me, the question is – How engaged are your employees and teams? Would your business benefit from higher engagement?

With organisations constantly changing, the support for leaders can often be about developing the skills to remain agile, deal with change and remain effective.

Research is indicating that humble leaders are more effective. They give credit to the team, share success and are more coachable. A Catalyst survey in 2014 showed that humility is one of four critical leadership factors for creating an environment where employees feel included. It found that when employees observed altruistic or selfless behaviour in their managers — a style characterized by 1) acts of humility, such as learning from criticism and admitting mistakes; 2) empowering followers to learn and develop; 3) acts of courage, such as taking personal risks for the greater good; and 4) holding employees responsible for results — they were more likely to report feeling included. This was true for both women and men.

There is also a connection, and evidence, demonstrating that employees who perceive altruistic behaviour from their managers are more innovative, suggesting new products or ways of working. They were also more likely to be more engaged.

So whats the issue? Finding the humble! In an age of self-promotion, humble people will be hidden among the many. They aren’t charming their way to the front, regaling tales of their achievements to anyone who will listen. Humble leaders may get overlooked. They are more likely giving credit to the team for a job well done, sharing the success and being a good organisational citizen.

With all the upside, they are worth finding and investing in. Whether internal promotion or external hiring, it is possible to measure altruism and humility.

Curious?

You should be. It could add real value.

The test publishing industry is unregulated. As a result, many commercial test publishers ignore validity, and sell the psychometric equivalent of snake oil. However, when most reputable assessment vendors care only about their bottom line, they have little incentive to care much about the validity of their assessments. And, because of the high stakes involved in global employee selection and development, this is one of the most deceptive and harmful business practices of the 21^st century.

Simply put, valid assessments predict performance; assessments that lack validity cannot predict performance. In this new video, Bob Hogan expands on the importance of validity in assessments, and explains the steps necessary to establish validity.

*This is a guest post written by Joel A. DiGirolamo, Director of Coaching Science for the International Coach Federation.

I enjoyed reading the thought-provoking paper “New(ish) Directions for Vocational Interests Research”by Hogan and Sherman. It is jam-packed with concepts, models, and logic that offer fodder for many thought exercises.

I certainly agree with the assertion that “values are the real underlying subject matter of vocational psychology.” When looking more broadly, however, it seems to me that the following hierarchy exists:

Traits & Needs

↓

Values, Beliefs

↓

Attitudes & Interests

For example, imagine two individuals, Carrie and Linda, both with a trait or need to nurture. Now imagine that Carrie has a value or belief that strong security is necessary to nurture individuals. Linda, on the other hand, values inclusion in order nurture those on the periphery of a society. Taken to the next level, we can imagine that Carrie’s security value or belief could promote her taking on a conservative attitude and an interest in the military. Meanwhile, Linda’s inclusion value might cultivate a liberal attitude and an interest in protecting immigrants. Thus, we see that a common trait or need can manifest itself in significantly different behaviors. This example also illustrates Allport’s assertion that traits tend to be nondirectional and attitudes tend to be directional.

The statement, “In our view, people don’t have traits, they have goals, intentions, and agendas, and it is these motivational terms that explain their behavior—which traits describe,” greatly depicts the role of traits and the idea that motivation is really a moderator. We all have traits, needs, etc., but it is motivation that gets us off the sofa and is therefore a moderator toward action or behaviors.

Many theories and research studies related to interests and job satisfaction have been written over many decades. I believe there is a confounding factor in the motivation to work a specific job, however. As many describe, higher satisfaction is somewhat correlated with interests. Yet this doesn’t seem to account for those individuals who take specific jobs solely for the money they make. These individuals may be financially satisfied with their jobs but are not satisfying their intrinsic desires. I’ve always felt that individuals work either for meaning or money and that some are fortunate to derive both from their job.

In a related view, the table below is how I look at an individual’s job satisfaction in relationship to employer job satisfaction, which I am using as a proxy for job performance. In the top two quadrants, the employee may find meaning in their work and thus happy with their job even if they are not doing it well. The lower right quadrant may be a person who is working solely for money and thus unhappy with their job, but their employer is happy with what they are doing. The people in the lower left quadrant may be those individuals some refer to as unemployable. They’re both incompetent and unhappy.

As we look back at the material covered in the Hogan and Sherman piece, we can get a sense of deep understanding as to where interests that lead to job satisfaction come from. Backtracking from interests to values to needs and traits can bring greater understanding as to what may be driving an individual’s job satisfaction and possible conflicts therein. Returning to my example of the individual who takes a specific job simply for the money, we could easily imagine that this individual has a need for financial security. Perhaps they also have a trait of wanting to help people and have a good set of mathematical and financial skills. Maybe they have an interest in both financial work and helping others to become more financially stable. However, the only job they currently can find that they view as financially secure is one that does not help others, creating a possible internal conflict between the need for financial security and helping people. When queried as to their job satisfaction, it is easy to see how this internal conflict could leak out into conflicting measures of job satisfaction.

And so, we see the value this piece brings to bear; it highlights and takes a fresh, clear look at vocational interests in the context of the traits, needs, values, beliefs, attitudes, and interests. It is my hope that this piece enlivens and brings greater depth to the discussion on vocational interests.

Hogan European Summit

April is a hectic time of the year for the crew at Hogan Assessments, and this year was no different. In fact, our staff was widely represented in both the US and Europe during a week full of events.

The week began with a group of Hogan representatives traveling to Budapest, Hungary to attend the Hogan European Summit, which was organized by Hogan’s Managing Director of Europe, Zsolt Feher.

Held at the famous Gerbeaud Café in historic downtown Budapest, the event aimed to foster collaboration among our European distributors to facilitate growth across the continent and enhance Hogan’s brand visibility.

Dr. Hogan delivered the opening keynote address to set the tone for the Summit, which was followed by discussions regarding EU PR and marketing strategy by MITTE Communications, 360 and Global Talent Survey updates by Peter Berry Consultancy, an interactive strategy session, and product updates.

Hogan CEO Scott Gregory discussed absentee leadership on day two. This is a relatively new topic in the industry, and was thoroughly covered by Scott in an article he wrote for Harvard Business Review. The keynote was followed by sessions covering strategy for selection research and presentation, a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) update, distributor case study presentations, a Q&A session with Hogan Leadership, and an afternoon of sightseeing in Budapest.

We’re truly honored to have such a strong network of European distributors, and we look forward to future opportunities to bring everyone together in an effort to boost Hogan’s global presence.

ICF “Future of Coaching in Organisations” Conference

Several members of the Hogan team remained in Budapest for the International Coach Federation’s “Future of Coaching in Organisations” Conference held at the Akvárium Klub. The event, featuring Hogan as the primary sponsor, aimed to bring the future of coaching into focus, and identified which new trends, technologies, and tools will determine organizational development and coaching.

The event featured several world-renowned coaches, and included presentations from Hogan’s Dustin Hunter and Zsolt Feher, as well as a keynote address by Dr. Hogan on “Coaching the Uncoachable.” Overall, the event was a huge success, and offered Hogan Assessments the unique opportunity to develop an even stronger rapport with the international coaching community and the European market. On behalf of the team at Hogan Assessments, we would like to thank our friends at ICF for such an incredible experience.

Hogan Completes 10^th Consecutive Year as SIOP Platinum Sponsor 

Every year, Hogan Assessments is one of the most visible organizations at the annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Conference, and this year’s event in Chicago was no different.

Celebrating the 10^th consecutive year as the Platinum Sponsor, the team at Hogan was strongly represented with 20 accepted submissions, again making Hogan one of the top non-academic organizations with the number of speakers featured on symposia, panel discussions, and posters.

Hogan staff members across all departments put in hundreds of hours of work in the weeks and months leading up to the conference to ensure Hogan is positioned as the premier organization in attendance. We would like to thank all of them for their hard work and dedication to making this year a huge success.

We would also like to thank everyone who was able to attend the annual University of Tulsa Wine Reception. When Bob and Joyce Hogan founded the TU I-O Psychology program decades ago, they had no idea it would develop such a strong pipeline of prestigious psychologists from future generations, including Hogan’s new CEO, Dr. Scott Gregory. Being able to connect with TU alumni at SIOP on an annual basis during this reception is a tremendous honor.

In closing, we would like to congratulate Sara Weston, who was the lucky recipient of the Apple Watch we gave away at the conference for posting a photo of the Hogan booth. The campaign was a lot of fun for everyone involved and, although only one person got a watch, Hogan donated $5 the ASPCA for every entry. So, your entry helped support a fantastic cause!