*This is a guest blog post written by Nicholas Emler, Ph.D., a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Surrey.

Leadership was for too long grievously neglected by mainstream psychology, so it is good to see the topic more regularly getting serious scholarly attention; there is now a substantial body of informative research, in marked contrast to the situation 25 years ago. However, not all the scholarly attention has been beneficial. My concern on this occasion relates to some recent work (Antonakis, 2018) on the link between leadership and charisma.

Antonakis makes useful points in this article, noting that charisma has suffered from fuzziness of definition.  And his interpretation of charisma as persuasive signalling is an interesting route to rigour in research on charisma. However, the idea that successful leaders use rhetorical and presentational devices to enhance their persuasive impact on audiences is not new (see Atkinson, 1984) and many of the insights of this earlier work have clearly been absorbed by professional politicians. Witness the now ubi quitous use of projection screens to allow speakers apparently to maintain eye contact with audiences while actually reading from a script.

Antonakis correctly observes that a leader judged charismatic by one audience can be seen as a dangerous demagogue by another but this does beg a very large question. Bad leadership can do immense damage, far beyond the effects of even the most energetic criminal individual. Promoting charisma as a desirable (and trainable) quality – the line taken by Antonakis –  does nothing to address this. Indeed, quite to the contrary. Archie Brown, in his excellent The Myth of the Strong Leader, observes that charisma “is often dangerous and frequently overrated”. And the evidence that he is correct – on both points – is beginning to stack up. Boards of publicly traded companies have for some years supposed that they should appoint CEOs with charisma. The people they appoint following this dictum may deliver short-term profits but in the longer run they create chaos and ruin.

Having charisma and being persuasive can get you elected or promoted but does nothing to guarantee that you have either good judgment or the moral qualities needed successfully to meet the challenges of leadership. This relates to an important distinction, now recognised in the leadership literature, but neglected in Antonakis’s article, between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. Qualities of the person associated with one are barely related to qualities associated with the other. Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, among the qualities that research is beginning to identify as predictive of effectiveness is humility (Owens, Johnson, & Mitchell, 2013; Vera, & Rodriguez-Lopez, 2004). Humility goes with recognising one does not have all the answers – necessarily true of anyone providing leadership to a complex enterprise – and being willing to seek and listen to advice. Hitler, Musssolini, and the reverend Jim Jones may all have had charisma but none was burdened with humility (and the same looks to be true of some current world leaders).

Persuasive signalling matters for the reception and impact of one’s message but surely what should matter far more is the content of the message.

References

Antonakis, J. (2018) Moving psychology forward – with charisma.  The Psychologist, March, 44-47.

Atkinson, M. (1984). Our masters’ voices: The language and body language of politics.  London: Routledge.

Brown, A. (2014).  The myth of the strong leader: Political leadership in the modern age.  London: The Bodley Head.

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

Vera, D., & Rodriguez-Lopez, A. (2004). Humility as a source of competitive advantage. Organizational Dynamics, 33(4), 393-408.

*This article was originally published in the Competency Issue of Talent Quarterly earlier this month, and was authored by David Hoff, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Leadership Development at EASI Consult. Visit Talent Quarterly’s website to purchase the full issue as well as all previous issues.   

IN LAST YEAR’S BULLSHIT ISSUE (TQ 14), W. Warner Burke, Ph.D., wrote a column about his work researching and defining learning agility. If step one was introducing the world to learning agility, then step two is showing how it can be put to practical use in organizations. It’s time to take that step.

Building on the work of University of Michigan professor D. Scott DeRue, who identified the learning agility dimensions of speed and flexibility, Burke pinpointed seven others in his Talent Quarterly article: performance risk taking, interpersonal risk taking, collaborating, information gathering, feedback seeking, experimenting, and reflecting.

Burke and DeRue differentiated between learning agility and ability. While ability consists of horsepower or intelligence, agility is the versatility to access capabilities for solving problems in situations in which you don’t know what to do. Ability is certainly important—to a point. But then agility steals the show.

Motivation impacts learning agility. You can have the capability, but not the interest, to demonstrate it. Context affects the degree to which agility is demonstrated. Some contexts or environments support learning agility, and others stifle it. Lastly, defensiveness is the enemy of learning agility. Once the “buts” start, the gift of feedback stops being given.

So how do you then apply learning agility to support development? By beginning with selection and continuing through new employee orientation, training and leadership development, performance management and development, and coaching.

The data collected from these individually focused efforts can be aggregated to promote decision-making and action at the team, department, division, and even organization levels. I’d like to focus on three applications using learning agility as part of the solution: orientation, coaching, and succession planning.

1. Orientation

It’s been well documented that new employees decide whether they’re going to stay with their employer within their first 90 days of employment. Problem is, most organizations do a poor job of engaging their new employees on day one, failing to tell them, “We want you,” “We feel honored that you selected us,” and “We want this to be a mutually beneficial relationship.”

I’m not talking about the balloons and company T-shirt. I’m suggesting that, from the jump, we share with our new employees the information we learned during the selection process, including any testing and structured interview results.

At a high level, we should tell them, “This is why we selected you.” It’s also a great time to say, “Here are a few things we found during the selection process that we think could be strengthened.”

Imagine if an employee heard this on the first day of their new job: “As part of our session today, we’re going to ask you about your learning agility. We’re going to talk about what learning agility is, along with the information you provided us. We’re going to put together your selection information with your learning agility results and you’re going to sit with your supervisor and talk about your first 6 to 12 months here, as well as some projects we would like you to undertake.”

Or this: “Most importantly, we want to talk with you about those projects in the context of areas we think you can improve, along with the learning agility dimensions that can be strengthened.”

This conveys that you’re glad to have your new employee on board, you want to engage them as quickly as possible, and their continuing development with the company begins now. Not a bad opening message, right?

2. Coaching

Companies approach coaching in a variety of ways. In this example, we’re talking about skilled or certified people (internal or external) who are working with a group of predetermined high-potentials. The coaches will meet with their high-potentials over the course of 6 months either on a regular schedule, or around key events or projects in the HiPos’ lives.

The engagement will begin with data collection. This could consist of a cognitive ability test; a personality test; a competency 360 questionnaire (if the company has one); a series of interviews with some combination of the boss, direct reports, and peers; or any of the three ways of collecting information on the person’s learning agility (asking them, observing them, or testing them).

This information will then be combined into an individual report, which the coach will share with the high-potential. The conversation that ensues is for the high-potential to understand the information, and if anything is factually incorrect, then the coach would correct that.

From that point, the coach and the high-potential would schedule a meeting with the HiPo’s supervisor. The purpose? For all three individuals to agree on the objectives of the coaching engagement. They’ll agree on the timing of a “close-out” meeting, where they review the degree to which the coaching objectives have been accomplished. The high-potential can share with the boss what he learned from the assessment report.

The conversation should include what the high-potential’s performance objectives are for the coming year. Ideally, the discussion would include, at a high-dimension level, their learning agility strengths and development areas. You want to talk about the high-potential’s development areas. This will be a focus of the coaching meetings, and something we want the supervisor to know and support.

Let’s say the high-potential employee needs to successfully launch a new product and gain 1 percent market share in the next 12 months. He’s going to need the help of many support groups to get this done. His learning agility information indicates he’s high in speed, but low in reflecting, feedback seeking, collaborating, and interpersonal risk taking.

In the meeting with the coach, the employee is getting ready to conduct a new product kickoff meeting. They talk about how he can include some of the learning agility information to ensure a more successful launch. The HiPo created a list of all the groups that needed to be included in the launch, met with them, and collected input on what needed to be done and whether he had missed anyone. That added a few people to his original list.

He and the coach talk about how he’s going to announce and build feedback seeking and reflecting into his ongoing monthly meeting with the product launch team. But prior to the next monthly product launch meeting, the high-potential tells his coach that one of the support groups hasn’t honored its agreement. The HiPo and the coach then talk about how to approach this person and get his support in the future. That’s interpersonal risk taking.

The coach and high-potential continue to iterate before and after launch meetings, then conclude with a close-out meeting with the supervisor. This last meeting is mostly a formality, though; after all, the boss has been observing the HiPo’s progress over the previous 6 months.

3. Succession Planning

When organizations are trying to prepare for future openings in critical jobs due to promotions, retirements, and voluntary and involuntary turnover, the people being reviewed haven’t previously done the job being discussed. As we look at candidates for an open position, we need to look at what they’ve done (performance) and what they might do (potential).

In this case, many companies use an assessment tool called a 9 Box, where one side is performance (the X axis in a matrix from low to high) and the other is potential (the Y axis from low to high). These organizations do a great job in describing past performance, but struggle with how to measure potential and, as a result, sometimes use it interchangeably with performance.

But loop in learning agility and now you can measure potential using the DeRue/Burke dimensions. Potential can be quantified and plotted from 0 to 100 percent on the Y axis. This, along with the performance information on the X axis, will array your talent across the matrix.

If you want to better understand the needs of a candidate from the potential perspective, you’d start by looking at their lowest dimension scores. Let’s say on the performance side, you realize this person has never had an international assignment. The lowest ratings on potential or learning agility are in the areas of flexibility, performance risk taking, and collaborating. Your task is to then integrate the learning agility dimensions with the international assignment.

Typically in a succession planning situation, that candidate is assigned a mentor. The mentor incorporates into his or her discussions how the overall assignment is going, as well as how the candidate is addressing the learning agility dimensions involved.

The mentor is also responsible for reporting back to the succession planning group how the candidate has performed on that particular assignment, and whether he’s now ready for a bigger role.

Learning agility can be a powerful tool in your talent management toolbox. When leveraged properly, it’ll help you develop your people—and help them optimize their performance and unlock their full potential.

David Hoff is chief operating officer and executive vice president of leadership development at EASI Consult, where he leads organization transformation projects utilizing assessment and development expertise. He spent 17 years at Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. in various positions, including director of international human resources.

*Photo by Marcus Benedix on Unsplash

*This article was originally published in the Competency Issue of Talent Quarterly earlier this month. Visit their website to purchase the full issue as well as all previous issues.

IN THIS SPECIAL ESSAY, Jorge E. Fernandez, a consultant with the Hogan Coaching Network, examines mercurial Apple founder Steve Jobs using the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), which describes the dark side of personality—qualities that emerge in times of increased strain that can disrupt relationships, damage reputations, and hinder peoples’ chances of success.

By assessing dark-side personality, you can recognize and mitigate performance risks before they become a problem. Here, Fernandez tracks the major steps of Jobs’s storied career, from Apple’s humble beginnings to the company’s unprecedented comeback two decades later, and all the sabotaging and backstabbing in between.

Introduced in 1997, the HDS is the only personality assessment that identifies critical blind spots that lead to career derailment. How might Jobs’s career have progressed if the inventory existed in the 1970s? Here’s what Jobs’s trajectory—and the HDS—can teach you when it comes to developing the next great leaders.

I’m probably the first person ever to compare Steve Jobs to Billy Joel, so here goes nothing: In his 1989 hit “I Go to Extremes,” the Rock and Roll Hall-of- Famer succinctly captured the unpredictable quality of the artistic temperament when he sang, “I don’t know why I go to extremes / Too high or too low, there ain’t no in-betweens.” Much like the protagonist in Joel’s song, the Apple cofounder’s professional life stands out for its sharp ups and downs, with few in- betweens. (Nailed it.)

Jobs once said that he liked “living at the edge of the humanities and technology.” Indeed, he found the navigation of that intersection highly stimulating and very fruitful, but it was also far from straight. There were jagged edges to Jobs’s personality that, yes, drove him to extremes. He experienced uncommon success and failure. This begs the question: What propelled the rises and precipitated the falls?

Robert Hogan’s socioanalytic theory postulates that we all strive to get ahead, get along, and find meaning. Therefore, what we all have in common is the need to compete, the need to cooperate, and the need to make sense of our lives. Where we differ is how we go about meeting these needs inside and outside of work.

In organizations, it can be hard to find meaningful work and harder still to reconcile the tension between winning and relating. How we deal with competing tensions impacts our job performance.

Toward that end, Robert and Joyce Hogan designed the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) to measure working adults’ characteristic behavior under unusual circumstances, like when facing heavy workloads, tight deadlines, shifting priorities, new competitors, and changing technology.

The assessment aims to predict how others see us when we’re on our worst behavior. Our counterproductive conduct is often triggered by anxiety, apathy, boredom, or fatigue. More importantly, we all develop particular strategies for coping with difficult situations with varying degrees of success.

Here are the 11 personality-based risk factors measured by the HDS:

• Excitable: behaviors ranging from enthusiasm to explosiveness
• Skeptical: behaviors ranging from perceptiveness to suspiciousness
• Cautious: behaviors ranging from prudence to passivity
• Reserved: behaviors ranging from calm to noncommunicative
• Leisurely: behaviors ranging from agreeableness to stubbornness
• Bold: behaviors ranging from con – dent to arrogant
• Mischievous: behaviors ranging from adventuress to reckless
• Colorful: behaviors ranging from motivating to distracting
• Imaginative: behaviors ranging from creative to confusing
• Diligent: behaviors ranging from conscientiousness to meticulousness
• Dutiful: behaviors ranging from ac- commodation to vacillation

The construction of Steve Jobs’s HDS profile is reverse-engineered from non-fictional accounts of his life story. Jobs was unpredictable, erratic, and an emotional roller coaster, which points to a high risk score in excitable. What those who worked closely with Jobs would have noticed most was his emotional explosiveness. Ironically, this same quality also made possible the contagious passion he had for his work. He often acted in an unforgiving, uncompromising manner.

Above all else, Jobs had to feel in complete control. This means a high risk score in skeptical. Collaborators had to live with Jobs’s suspiciousness and argumentativeness, but it also enabled keen perceptiveness and perseverance. Temerity and incivility were distinct characteristics of Jobs’s behavior; therefore, cautious was a low risk factor. Jobs was clearly an abrasive loner, which means high risk on reserved. But his reserved nature also enabled great powers of concentration and task orientation.

Jobs didn’t suffer from conflict aversion, which indicates low risk of leisurely behavior. An enfant terrible, Jobs is a high risk on bold, but his boldness also brings forth unusual confidence and initiative. He was as original as he was impractical (high risk on imaginative), extremely meticulous (high risk on diligent), and positively unaccommodating and defiant of authority (far from dutiful). In sum, he was an intensely driven man with a paradoxical nature and distinctly Jekyll and Hyde qualities.

When you go to extremes—there’s Joel again—you almost become a caricature of yourself. All nuances are lost. And, quite ironically, your unique excellence becomes your fatal aw. The Greeks had a name for this kind of metamorphosis: areté hamartia. To avoid your genius from becoming your demon, finding a niche is crucial. As educational psychologist Lee Cronback once put it, “If for each environment there is a best organism, for each organism there is a best environment.”

In other words, you should aim to find a place where your personality can prosper. Jobs’s genius and demon sent him on a whirlwind career tour.

The Atari Beginnings: Bold and Mischievous

Jobs was among the first group of employees at Atari. Hired as a technician, he struck chief engineer Al Alcorn as very bright and enthusiastic about technology. He quickly managed to improve the video games … and rub many of his coworkers the wrong way. (It wouldn’t be the last time.) To keep the peace, Jobs was assigned to work at night and later as an independent consultant. Incidentally, on one of those consulting jobs he joined forces with his close friend and future Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

During the collaboration, Jobs artificially imposed a deadline for project delivery to suit his own purposes and neglected to tell Wozniak that there was a bonus involved for designing the game with a minimum of chips. (Wozniak met both criteria, but never saw the bonus.)

In a brief period, Jobs demonstrated his inability or unwillingness to get along with others as well as his facility for manipulation and deviousness. His obnoxious and offensive behavior would have gotten him fired at Atari and probably many other outfits, but company founder Nolan Bushnell saw Jobs’s entrepreneurial potential and found ways to work around his abusive behavior.

The Early Apple Days: Skeptical and Diligent

From 1976 to ’78, Jobs and Wozniak collaborated successfully on the Apple I and II, with Wozniak bringing his technical gifts as an engineer to the mix and Jobs contributing his design savvy. In addition to the two Steves, two Mikes also played important roles at Apple: Mike Markkula, the first major Apple investor and chairman, and Mike Scott, Apple’s president. Markkula was allergic to conflict and needed Scott to manage Jobs, but Jobs had to be in total control of his destiny and thus was allergic to authority. It was a recipe for disaster.

Naturally, Jobs clashed with Scott over everything from product quality to, yes, employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak and #2 to Jobs, who demanded to be #1. Scott’s solution? Give Jobs badge #0. The more substantive, but no less dramatic, confrontations were product-centered: Scott felt perfectionism shouldn’t push out pragmatism. Jobs’s relentless aesthetic perfectionism pulled him in the opposite direction.

The First Brush with Failure: Excitable and Diligent

By 1980, Jobs was looking to fashion his own machine. As it so happened, John Couch, a former Hewlett-Packard engineer, was running the “Lisa” project for Apple. Originally aimed at the corporate market to fill a void left by the failed Xerox Star, Jobs envisioned the Lisa as the equivalent of a Volkswagen: an inexpensive and user-friendly product for the masses. Guess what happened next?

Couch and his team of engineers deeply resented Jobs’s incessant meddling and barrage of insults, Markkula and Scott orchestrated a restructuring in response to Jobs’s maddening behavior, and Jobs was given the title of “non-executive chairman of the board,” a public relations role without any operational responsibilities.

The Birth of the Macintosh: Excitable and Mischievous

Jobs originally hired Jef Raskin to write the manual for the Apple II. Raskin would later become the manager of Apple’s publications department, but what he really wanted to do was build a cheap computer for the general public. So he convinced Markkula to put him in charge of a small development project: the Macintosh.

Meanwhile, Jobs was actively looking for vindication after being booted from the Lisa project, so he set his sights on the Macintosh. Jobs was fascinated by Raskin’s vision of a truly personal computer for the everyman, but Raskin was cost-conscious and didn’t believe passion for the product should be the primary focus. Once again, these incompatible values led to disruptive battles.

Things got so difficult, in fact, that Raskin wrote a memo to Scott titled “Working for/with Steve Jobs.” Raskin asserted that he liked Jobs, but found him an impossible collaborator. “He’s extraordinarily seductive,” Raskin wrote. “He would have made an excellent king of France.”

More truth bombs: “He is a dreadful manager … Jobs regularly misses appointments … He does not give credit where due … He is often irresponsible and inconsiderate … He does not keep promises.”

The power struggle between Raskin and Jobs forced Scott and Markkula to intervene once again—but in a twist, this time they sided with Jobs. (Raskin ended up working for Canon, where he built the unsuccessful Canon Cat.)

With Raskin gone, Jobs would take full command of the Macintosh division. A renegade artist at heart, he regularly used maxims like “Don’t compromise” and “It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy” to motivate the Mac team. Jobs believed in feeding everyone’s competitive fire by finding a foe to wage a war against, like IBM, Xerox, and even the Lisa division. He often crossed the line between inspiration and intimidation. As Bud Tribble, a software designer and colleague of Herzfeld on the Mac project, said, “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he is not around, but it makes it really hard to have realistic schedules.”

As a result, the Mac was completed woefully behind schedule and well over budget. In fact, the Lisa was already one year ahead of the Mac, causing Jobs to lose a $5,000 bet to the Lisa’s project leader. He was such a bad loser, however, that on the occasion of the Lisa’s launch, he deliberately and publicly stated that the Mac and the Lisa would be incompatible. Machiavelli would have been proud.

In 1983, Jobs hooked in John Sculley, a marketing executive from Pepsi, with a simple challenge: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” When Sculley became Apple’s CEO that year, he merged the Lisa and Macintosh divisions with Jobs in command. Jobs immediately declared many of the Lisa team members failures before cutting their jobs.

To be fair, the Lisa was a great machine—it was just overpriced, incompatible with the Apple II and IBM computers, and incapable of finding a market. Not that the Macintosh was an instant success: Though the technology was dazzling, the computer was slow and susceptible to overheating, and didn’t sell especially well upon release.

When Jobs went into blame-storming mode, Sculley was tasked with managing his mood swings. In response, Jobs turned against his CEO, going so far as to plot a boardroom coup. The failed plot led to Sculley stripping Jobs of his duties—again—and banishing him to a ceremonial role in an empty building that Jobs subsequently dubbed “Siberia.”

A Labor of Revenge: Skeptical and Mischievous

In 1985, Jobs left Apple and started NeXT Inc., where he hoped to create a computer for the higher-education market alongside a group of key former Apple employees. At Apple, Jobs was a division leader, but now he was in charge of the whole company. Without any checks on his power, he ran amok, paying $100,000 to a design guru to create the NeXT logo and completely rebuilding the company’s brand-new headquarters (twice), among other questionable decisions. In Jobs’s eyes, all things at NeXT had to be elegant and cutting-edge; the inordinate value he placed on aesthetics left little or no room for practicalities.

His punishing management style, meanwhile, remained intact. According to NeXT employees, he was still unable to keep his opinions to himself, and he continued to put people down to show he was superior. His extraordinary attention to the smallest details tormented his employees and predictably led to delays in completion and cost overruns. He eventually had to turn to outside investors to keep the company afloat.

In the final analysis, NeXT was a technical and artistic triumph, but a financial disaster. One of those triumphs? The NeXTSTEP software, which turned out to be Jobs’s ticket back to Apple.

The Hobby: Imaginative and Bold

Executives at NeXT condescendingly referred to Jobs’s other entrepreneurial venture, Pixar, as “the hobby.” Before it became a massively successful animation studio, Pixar was a tightly knit group run by two highly capable computer scientists with an interest in art: Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith. When Jobs purchased the outfit in 1986—he was enamored with computer graphics— both men made it a point to keep the new owner and banker at a distance.

To drive revenue, Jobs wanted to sell Pixar’s computers to the mass market. When he opened sales offices in several major cities to no avail, he turned his attention to Pixar’s software, RenderMan, aiming to simplify it for the everyman. The Pixar team tried to dissuade him, indicating the product was too sophisticated.

They were right: RenderMan was indeed too expensive and difficult, so it never took flight.

Smith saw Jobs as a master manipulator and frequently clashed with him over various decisions. After resigning from Pixar, Smith went on to start a company called Altamira, which was later acquired by Microsoft.

Despite all of Jobs’s bold plans, Pixar, like NeXT, continued to bleed money. The financial picture was so bleak that Jobs nearly sold the company to Microsoft, but had a change of heart when he saw the first completed scene of Toy Story in 1994, a year before its release. It was a wise decision.

A Return and Labor of Love: Mischievous and Colorful

In 1996, Apple CEO Gil Amelio knew the Mac operating system needed a major overhaul. So he took a big, prohibitively expensive step to acquire NeXT for its powerful software, absorbing Jobs in an advisory role as part of the deal. The move unwittingly resulted in Amelio’s demise: Jobs secretly sold the Apple stock that he had acquired with the sale ofNeXT,breaking the promise he made to Amelio to hold off for a minimum of 6 months. When Apple’s stock predictably plummeted to the point where the company was facing bankruptcy, Amelio was fired in the summer of 1997. In swooped Jobs to save the day as an advisor, a dozen years after being exiled.

Before Jobs reclaimed his CEO title, however, he wanted to gauge whether Apple could even be saved. His assessment led him to conclude the company had too much inventory, too much middle management, too many factories, and ineffective marketing. So he dismissed the board that had presided over the company’s deterioration, brought inventory down to just four products, sold a number of factories, laid off thousands of middle managers, and secured a $150 million investment from Microsoft to remedy the cash crisis.

Jobs’s swiftness and laser-sharp focus were instrumental in saving Apple. His actions led to profits just one year after assuming command. For him, it was all about getting back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution.

Character, Context, and Competence

Jobs’s professional life illustrates that competence is a byproduct of a mixture of character and context. You can argue he was most successful when his back was against the wall: once when Apple was still a tiny startup fighting for survival, and again when he played the part of the cash-strapped underdog striving valiantly to infuse a moribund company with his ferocious entrepreneurial spirit.

Two executives in particular complimented Jobs beautifully during Apple’s renaissance: Jonathan Ive and Tim Cook. Ive, who was Apple’s head of industrial design, predated Jobs’ second coming. He is as nice as Jobs was mean, and his approach to design is as analytical as Jobs’swas intuitive, but both men were highly visual and fervently believed that complexity must be understood and simplified. Their collaboration led to an extraordinary array of elegant solutions.

While Jobs made it a point to call Apple’s products revolutionary, the company actually didn’t invent the computer, portable music player, smartphone, or specialty retail store. Instead, its products were evolutionary; all were great refinements of cruder versions that others had rushed to market.

In 1998, looking for someone to build a system like Dell’s, Jobs met Tim Cook. The ex-IBM industrial engineer knew a great deal about manufacturing and sup- ply chains, and his role became implementing Jobs’s intuition, which he did with admirable efficiency and frugality. Cook is as poised as Jobs was petulant, and as low-profile as Jobs was visible. More importantly, he freed Jobs of all operational duties and allowed him to concentrate on more creative, strategic aspects of the business.

In Ive and Cook, Jobs had lieutenants who acted as faithful disciples and successfully edited the extraneous. Remember: Jobs was notoriously impulsive and intuitive. Despite his outward audacity, he was always worried about things going wrong. He was a person constantly reaching for the stars, needing others to keep his feet on the ground. His supporting cast tried to keep him as centered as possible.

But when Jobs wasn’t in startup or turnaround mode, he tended to act imprudently. In the midst of Apple’s transformation, he indulged in irregular financial practices that in 2007 occasioned a full SEC investigation concerning backdated stock options.

The SEC absolved Steve Jobs but formally charged Fred Anderson, Apple’s former chief financial officer, and Nancy Heinen, the company’s former general counsel. Anderson and Heinen settled the charges against them without declaring any wrongdoing, but clearly felt scapegoated.

Joe Nocera, who covered the mess for the New York Times, wrote, “Rarely have so many avoidable problems been created by one man’s obsession with his own image. Then again, this is Steve Jobs we are talking about.” It was another episode where Jobs’s contempt for authority and immovable will created an environment conducive to solid professionals acting against their better judgment, and could have very easily—and deservedly—derailed him as well.

At NeXT, Jobs found himself in full command and with ample resources, which led to frequent overindulgences. And instead of conjuring up ideas for electronic products for the mainstream consumer, he was largely constricted to an educational market that was very conservative and with limited resources.

At Pixar, Jobs was an owner and financier. He had no hand in developing the hardware or software and was a stranger to the movie industry. Without the ability to see himself as the prototypical customer, his instincts betrayed him, and Pixar’s anti-autocratic work culture mostly deflected Jobs’ dictatorial ways. Still, his eye for computer graphics helped him spot a good thing when he saw it—Toy Story—and he ultimately brought his cold, calculating instincts to the negotiating table to orchestrate Pixar’s eventual sale to Disney.

By the time he returned to Apple, Jobs understood the importance of surrounding himself with people who weren’t afraid to say no. Cook recalled: “I realized really early that if you didn’t voice your opinion, [Jobs] would mow you down. He takes contrary positions to create more discussion because it may lead to a better result. So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”

At Apple, you had to be able to take a stand, endure sharp attacks, and always remember who was king. Cook, who succeeded Jobs as Apple’s CEO after
his death in 2011, accepted that. “Some people resent that Steve gets credit for everything,” Cook said, “but I’ve never given a rat’s ass about that.” No wonder Adam Lashinsky, author of Inside Apple, claims it takes an egoless fanatic to prosper at the company.

Jobs was a renegade artist who saw the world as a hierarchy, with him on top and everyone else below. He viewed people as either useful or useless to him. His shocking lack of concern for relationships seriously hampered his ability to get along with people of all ranks, especially those in authority.

ROBERT HOGAN HAS SAID THAT THE best leaders “get along to get ahead.” The Level 5 leader (resolved and humble) that Jim Collins discovered while studying corporate transformations supports Dr. Hogan’s point. Jobs certainly knew how to get ahead; in fact, he was virtually unstoppable—to his detriment. And when he didn’t have any constraints, he would overdo everyt

hing and fizzle out (NeXT) or promote an irrelevant vision (Pixar). It wasn’t until he came back to Apple that he regained his stride in full.

The most salient thing about Jobs’s dark-side profile is how clear and well defined it is. To bring it all back to Billy Joel, there are only high scores and low scores, with nothing in between. What leaps out is an intensely driven man with minimal self control. Jobs was fiercely independent, defiant, and prone to abrasive and abusive behavior if anyone dared to get in his way.

He built an organization in his own image. Apple was a company of paradoxes; it was Bohemian and Puritanical, and Jobs was, too. It was innovative, efficient, strategic, and tactical, just like him. The heaven of technology and the humanities could only be paved through Jobsian hell.

Most organizations classify career advancement as transitioning into a series of people leadership roles. But, what does that mean for an organization’s high performers whose strengths are not aligned with the abilities to manage themselves and others effectively?

For instance, some leaders are all about results. Take Oracle CEO, Safra Catz, for example. She is widely known as an aggressive businesswoman who aims to win at all costs. On the other hand, someone like Andre Young, AKA Dr. Dre, is considered by his peers to be an innovative thought leader who focuses on the big picture. Both have experienced a tremendous amount of success in their careers, but they did so with very different approaches. 

Hogan’s Leader Focus Report offers organizations a solution designed to help determine the leadership style employees display, and what leadership role might be the best fit for them. This report simplifies and provides insight into six leadership dimensions that influence leadership style and effectiveness:

• Results Leader — Key focus is on winning. They set high goals for themselves and others, and may sacrifice relationships to achieve outcomes.
• People Leader — Key focus is on relationships. They are skilled at building and maintaining relationships with others, but may struggle at handling conflict and holding staff accountable.
• Process Leader – Key focus is on implementation. They focus on creating, following and enforcing policies, but may resist change and innovation.
• Thought Leader – Key focus is on ideas. Skilled in idea generation and strategic problem-solving, but may lack the focus to follow through on implementation.
• Social Leader – Key focus is on people. Skilled at communicating, networking and developing connections, but may not listen effectively.
• Data Leader – Key focus is on information. Strong analytical leadership style, but may rely too heavily on numbers and resist intuitive decision making.

These six dimensions outline how a leader manages self, career, and relationships, priorities on which a leader will focus, and how he or she will define success. Grounded in decades of global research on leader performance, the Leader Focus Report is designed to help an organization’s leaders understand their reputation and unique brand using data rather than intuition.

Click here for more information, or contact a Hogan consultant today at 918.749.0632.

A young friend recently remarked that the worst boss he ever had would provide him with feedback that always consisted of “You’re doing a great job.” But they both knew it wasn’t true — the organization was in disarray, turnover was excessive, and customers were not happy. My friend was giving it his all, but he needed more support and better feedback than he received. He wanted a leader who would be around when he needed them, and who would give him substantive advice, not platitudes. As a measure of his frustration, he said, “I would rather have had a boss who yelled at me or made unrealistic demands than this one, who provided empty praise.”

Researchers have studied managerial derailment — or the dark side of leadership — for many years. The key derailment characteristics of bad managers are well documented and fall into three broad behavioral categories: (1) “moving away behaviors,” which create distance from others through hyper-emotionality, diminished communication, and skepticism that erodes trust; (2) “moving against behaviors,” which overpower and manipulate people while aggrandizing the self; and (3) “moving toward behaviors,” which include being ingratiating, overly conforming, and reluctant to take chances or stand up for one’s team. The popular media is full of examples of bad leaders in government, academia, and business with these characteristics. However, my friend was describing something arguably worse than an incompetent boss. His manager was not overtly misbehaving, nor was he a ranting, narcissistic sociopath. Rather, his boss was a leader in title only — his role was leadership, but he provided none. My friend was experiencing absentee leadership, and unfortunately, he is not alone. Absentee leadership rarely comes up in today’s leadership or business literature, but research shows that it is the most common form of incompetent leadership.

Absentee leaders are people in leadership roles who are psychologically absent from them. They were promoted into management, and enjoy the privileges and rewards of a leadership role, but avoid meaningful involvement with their teams. Absentee leadership resembles the concept of rent-seeking in economics — taking value out of an organization without putting value in. As such, they represent a special case of laissez-faire leadership, but one that is distinguished by its destructiveness. 

Having a boss who lets you do as you please may sound ideal, especially if you are being bullied and micromanaged by your current boss. However, a 2015 survey of 1,000 working adults showed that eight of the top nine complaints about leaders concerned behaviors that were absent; employees were most concerned about what their bosses didn’tdo. Clearly, from the employee’s perspective, absentee leadership is a significant problem, and it is even more troublesome than other, more overt forms of bad leadership. 

Research shows that being ignored by one’s boss is more alienating than being treated poorly. The impact of absentee leadership on job satisfaction outlasts the impact of both constructive and overtly destructive forms of leadership. Constructive leadership immediately improves job satisfaction, but the effects dwindle quickly. Destructive leadership immediately degrades job satisfaction, but the effects dissipate after about six months. In contrast, the impact of absentee leadership takes longer to appear, but it degrades subordinates’ job satisfaction for at least two years. It also is related to a number of other negative outcomes for employees, like role ambiguity, health complaints, and increased bullying from team members. Absentee leadership creates employee stress, which can lead to poor employee health outcomes and talent drain, which then impact an organization’s bottom line.

If absentee leadership is so destructive, why don’t we read more about it in the business literature? Consider a story I recently heard about the dean of a well-known law school: Two senior, well-regarded faculty members called the provost to complain about their dean because, they said, he wouldn’t do anything. The provost responded by saying that he had a dean who was a drunk, a dean who was accused of sexual harassment, and a dean who was accused of misusing funds, but the law school dean never caused him any problems. So, the provost said, the faculty members would just have to deal with their dean.

Like the provost in this example, many organizations don’t confront absentee leaders because they have other managers whose behavior is more overtly destructive. Because absentee leaders don’t actively make trouble, their negative impact on organizations can be difficult to detect, and when it is detected, it often is considered a low-priority problem. Thus, absentee leaders are often silent organization killers. Left unchecked, absentee leaders clog an organization’s succession arteries, blocking potentially more effective people from moving into important roles while adding little to productivity. Absentee leaders rarely engage in unforgivable bouts of bad behavior, and are rarely the subject of ethics investigations resulting from employee hotline calls. As a result, their negative effect on organizations accumulates over time, largely unchecked.

If your organization is one of the relatively few with effective selection and promotion methods in place, then it may be able to identify effective and destructive leaders. Even if your organization isn’t great at talent identification, both types of leaders are easy to spot once they are on the job. They also produce predictable organizational outcomes: Constructive leadership creates high engagement and productivity, while destructive leadership kills engagement and productivity. The chances are good, however, that your organization is unaware of its absentee leaders, because they specialize in flying under the radar by not doing anything that attracts attention. Nonetheless, the adhesiveness of their negative impact may be slowly harming the company.

The war for leadership talent is real, and organizations with the best leaders will win. Reviewing your organization’s management positions for absentee leaders and doing something about them can improve your talent management arsenal. It’s likely that your competitors are overlooking this issue or choosing not to do anything about it, like the university provost. Doing nothing about absentee leaders is easy. Just ask any absentee leader.

This article was originally written by Scott Gregory for Harvard Business Review on March 30, 2018.

*This article was written by Rob Field, Learning and Development Director at Advanced People Strategies.

When organizations are working to identify new leaders, too often they gravitate toward those who are charismatic, narcissistic, and inappropriately self-confident. These individuals tend to emerge because they are well-liked and masters in the art of office politics. However, decades of data and research prove that people with these characteristics are extremely ineffective leaders, and can ultimately destroy the organizations they have been chosen to serve.

On the contrary, leaders with humility combined with the appropriate amount of self-confidence have proven to be extremely effective in leadership roles because of their ability to build and maintain high-performing teams. Unfortunately, they are often overlooked by their superiors due to their inability to emerge in most organizational settings.

In this video, Bob Hogan discusses the importance of humility in leaders and how Hogan Assessments is preparing to help organizations across the globe to identify future leaders who are humble, competent, and effective.

It’s that time of year again! On April 19-21 in Chicago, I-O experts from Hogan’s Research and Consulting divisions will showcase advances in personality research at the 33rd Annual SIOP Conference. Here’s a detailed schedule of all sessions, including symposia, panel discussions, and poster sessions:

Thursday, April 19

Mobile Assessment: Practical Considerations for Implementation
Jennifer Lowe
12:00pm
Chicago 6

Test publishers and an employer discuss strategies for use of mobile assessments. Topics include demographic group differences for mobile versus desktop and implications of this, demonstration of novel, mobile-friendly response formats, and design considerations to optimize candidate experience across devices. Audience will participate by sampling assessment experiences “live” via mobile device.

Measurement Issues and Impacts of Dark Personality
Brandon Ferrell
12:00pm
Sheraton 3

Dark side traits have attracted a large amount of research attention. Yet, measurement of these traits is more difficult, relative to other personality traits. This symposium focuses on the measurement of dark side personality from different approaches, providing guidelines for developing or choosing dark personality measures in future research.

Where I-O Meets IT: Securing Talent Data in the Age of Breaches, Hacks, and Leaks
Jocelyn Hays, Ryan A. Ross
1:30pm
Chicago 9

This session will explore the role that I-O psychologists play in safeguarding talent data within organizations. The panelists will address questions related to physical security concerns and how the risk of data breaches can be mitigated. In addition, issues related to privacy and how talent data can and should be shared within organizations and across national borders will be discussed.

Does This Really Work? Practical Ways to Retain Desirable Employees
Karen Fuhrmeister, Kimberly Nei
5:00pm
Ontario

This session will cultivate a discussion around retention issues different industries face and how strategies from each industry might inform and improve the retention strategies of other areas. The panelists will discuss real world situations and provide advice from professional consultant perspectives.

Friday, April 20

Are the Robots Taking Over? Assessments in the Digital Age
Darin Nei
8:00am
Gold Coast

Organizations across all industries are being transformed by digital technologies. This panel assembles assessment practitioners to share perspectives on changes in assessments: (a) assessing differently with new techniques, (b) new digital methods for assessment research and validation, and (c) what to assess to support the changing workplace.

Investigating the Importance of Ambition in Personality Assessment
Matt Lemming, Kimberly Nei
8:30am
Riverwalk

Three studies are presented examining the value of Ambition as a higher-order personality factor. These studies focus on relationships between Ambition and (a) scales from multiple FFM inventories, (b) overall job performance for 7 job families, and (c) ratings of specific work behaviors. Results suggest that Ambition helps improve prediction and interpretation in organizational settings.

Dark Side Personality Difference in Managerial Hierarchy
Matt Lemming
8:30am
Riverwalk

Using dark side personality characteristics, the authors examined derailing profile differences between managers and executives using the Hogan Development Survey. Findings show some commonalities yet also provide evidence for customizing profiles for both groups. Practical implications from a coaching and development perspective are discussed along with directions for further research.

Using Personality to Predict Team-Relevant Competencies
Matt Lemming
8:30am
Riverwalk

The intersection of teams and personality research produced a diverse body of literature. Yet limited research exists on the personality characteristics of strong team builders. This study focused on synthetic validity meta-analyses to distinguish the personality profiles of competent team builders from team workers using the Hogan Personality Inventory and the Hogan Development Survey.

Challenges, Traits, and Best Practices in Navigating High Potential Programs
Brandy Agnew
10:00am
Chicago 9

Relatively little is known about the impacts of high potential (HiPo) programs’ impact on their participants. This symposium is intended to shed light on the potential negative impact of these programs on HiPo individuals, personality factors that are indicative of HiPo developmental readiness, and best practices in the development of global HiPo programs.

Critical Job Family Competencies: Sales Versus Customer Support
Karen Fuhrmeister, Kimberly Nei
1:00pm
Riverwalk

This study used data-driven best practices to identify the most critical competencies for 2 job families: sales and customer support. Although subject matter experts rated some competencies as critical across the job families, key competencies were unique to each job family.

A Personality-Based Job Analysis of Politicians: The Public’s Perspective
Michael Tapia
1:00pm
Riverwalk

Politicians represent their public constituents to make important decisions at the local, state, and federal levels of government. A personality-based job analysis was conducted and citizens were asked to rate the characteristics and competencies important for these roles. Ratings based on political affiliation and present what the public describes as a successful politician were compared.

Employee Retribution: When Work-Family Boundaries Go Awry
Dena Rhodes
1:00pm
Riverwalk

This poster investigated work interference with family (WIF) as a full mediator between segmentation/integration value congruence and unethical work behavior (UWB) intentions. Also explored was whether conscientiousness moderated the WIF–UWB intentions relationship. Findings revealed that low-conscientious employees experiencing higher levels of WIF showed greater intentions to engage in UWB.

Identifying and Developing Ethical Leaders: Challenges and Solutions
Darin Nei, Kimberly Nei
4:00pm
Sheraton 2

Identifying and developing ethical leaders continues to be a large area of concern for organizations. This symposium presents ways in which companies can select and develop ethical leaders including using 360 feedback, personality measures, and measures of motives and values.

How to Build a Personality Assessment Ninja Army
Jackie VanBroekhoven Sahm
5:00pm
Sheraton 2

Personality assessment training is an important yet seldom discussed part of the field. The training has serious implications on the appropriate use of the assessments and serves as a major source of business revenue. Come hear the journey, strategy, and challenges that 4 experts are tackling as they build their own army of personality assessment ninjas. 

Saturday, April 21

Measure It Again! Consideration for Reassessment Practices
Darin Nei, Michael Tapia
11:30am
Chicago 8

The purpose of this panel is to provide practical considerations for best practice recommendations with regards to the reassessment of candidates when making personnel decisions. Due to the variety of assessment types, it is difficult to provide a single response to questions/requests to reassess. The panel will provide insight on how to determine if reassessment is needed and/or appropriate.

A Cross-Cultural Conundrum: Applying Western I-O Around the World
Michael Sanger
12:30pm
Chicago 9

I-O psychologists working internationally face challenges in adapting their Western knowledge, training, and experience to firms located in other countries, often with little formal guidance. This panel brings together I-O practitioners with extensive international experience to discuss their insights, challenges, and best practices when implementing Western I-O around the world.

Genes and Ants: Meta-Heuristic Algorithms for Scale Length Optimization
Brandon Ferrell
3:00pm
Riverwalk

Conventional scale reduction strategies often fail to consider multiple psychometric criteria. Computer science offers algorithms for exploring item combinations to identify optimal solutions. This study compares the psychometrics of multiple shortened scales across 3 algorithms: removing low factor loadings (i.e., conventional), genetic algorithms, and ant colony optimization.

Dark-Side Personality and Leaders’ Ability to Leverage Workplace Diversity
Brandon Ferrell, Stephen Nichols
3:00pm
Riverwalk

To understand relationships between dark-side personality and managers’ ability to promote strong diversity climates, a meta-analysis of 4 Hogan Development Survey studies from the Hogan archive was performed. Two scales, Bold and Excitable, hinder leaders’ ability to leverage diversity in their organizations.

Implications of Curvilinear Relationships in Personality Assessment
Kimberly Nei
5:00pm
Ontario

This session will cultivate a discussion around retention issues different industries face and how strategies from each industry might inform and improve the retention strategies of other areas. The panelists will discuss real world situations and provide advice from professional consultant perspectives.

* This article originally appeared on Business Wire.

A recent study conducted by Hogan Assessments Chief Science Officer, Dr. Ryne Sherman, shows that personal values were an even stronger predictor of support for President Donald Trump than political affiliation or ideology in the 2016 US presidential primary.

The study examined data gathered from 1,825 individuals who completed the web-based Trump Values Similarity Test, a research version of Hogan’s Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory, measuring the following 10 scales: Recognition, Power, Hedonism, Altruism, Affiliation, Tradition, Security, Commerce, Aesthetics and Science.

“Values are the key drivers of human behavior,” says Sherman.“They motivate us and represent our philosophy of life. Although it’s unlikely that any single study could definitively identify all of the reasons Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, the data in this study suggest that personal values may have played an important role.”

What the study determined is that people who supported Trump were more likely to have a values profile characterized by low Altruism combined with high Power, Commerce and Tradition. This means they have little interest in supporting social welfare programs, a strong desire to be in control, a strong desire to make money, a preference for financial risk taking and a preference for strictly adhering to social conventions.

The first page of the Trump Values Similarity Test asked respondents to indicate their age, gender, ethnicity and zip code, along with three questions regarding political attitudes (Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, and for or against Trump). The second page included the assessment. The results were then compared to an assessment simulation completed by Sherman. This was done prior to the launch of the Trump Values Similarity Test, so there was no way for the criterion profile to be influenced by previous results or post-election dissonance.

Using a bivariate correlation where 0 indicates “no relationship” and 1 means “perfect linear relationship”, the Trump Values Similarity Test scores correlated to 0.64 with Trump support, while political ideology correlated to 0.61 and party affiliation correlated to 0.60. Although this does not show a wide margin among the three areas measured, it does suggest that values were a better predictor of who would support Trump than party affiliation and political ideology.

In addition, an analysis done by Nate Cohn of The New York Times provided compelling evidence that the biggest difference maker in the 2016 presidential election was white, working class voters in key swing states, particularly Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, who voted for Barack Obama in 2012, but switched to Trump in 2016.

This is a group with similar values to Trump, and his campaign messaging was tailored to influence and mobilize these voters. He talked often about how hard work pays off (low Altruism), winning (high Power), making America great again (high Power and high Tradition), law and order (high Tradition) and renegotiating trade deals to make Americans rich (high Commerce). It is reasonable to hypothesize that emphasizing these values that white, working class Americans hold in high regard, Trump was able to win over their support in key states and secure his victory.

“When you couple this data with data reported elsewhere, it is not unreasonable to speculate that Donald Trump’s campaign messages tapped into the core values of white, working class voters in battleground states, ultimately swaying their votes and tilting the election in his favor,” says Sherman.

*In this guest post, Melvyn Payne, Development Director at Advanced People Strategies, takes a look at the challenges facing Talent Management.

It is no surprise to see hard-working, collaborative individuals with great social skills emerging as potential leaders and being nominated for talent development programmes. In fact, it makes a welcome change to some of the overly ambitious, pushy individuals who feel they deserve a space at the top table but do not always demonstrate the capabilities to be effective.

So why is it that many of these apparently talented individuals subsequently have problems, or even fail, when they take on more responsibility or lead a team?

Perhaps we should start by considering why they are nominated in the first place. Their willingness to take on work and commitment to delivering high quality output for their boss often means they are some of the highest performers in the team.

They tend to be valued by their colleagues and their manager as they are typically modest about their own achievements and avoid playing politics – they tend to be someone everyone enjoys working with.

When times are tough, their manager knows that, if asked, they will be willing to put in even more hours and go the extra mile to keep stakeholders and clients, or customers, happy. What’s not to like?

It seems natural then for an ambitious manager, who themselves may be keen to progress, to assume others are like them and push forward this talented team member to take on more responsibility, stretch themselves, and be rewarded with a place in the talent programme.

However, imagine the talented team member does not like being in charge or having lots of responsibility and that their passion at work comes from a desire to simply help and support others. Perhaps they have no interest in status for its own sake and when the boss says it is time to attend a talent programme, being co-operative, they may find it hard to say ‘no’.

Subsequently, when pushed to make independent decisions, take initiative or stretch people, our talented individual may find it hard to make the tough call, or prefer not to be the one who is responsible for challenging others. Under the pressure of a more senior role, the day to day strengths may suddenly become barriers to being effective.

As leaders, other than helping talented individuals to learn strategies to adapt their behaviour as they climb the ladder, do we always spend enough time considering what motivates their behaviour and what they really want from their career – or do we assume they all want to be the CEO just like us?

For more information about Advanced People Strategies, visit www.advancedpeoplestrategies.co.uk.