Socioanalytic theory draws on key ideas of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and George Herbert Mead to explain why people act as they do. All three writers noted that humans evolved as group living animals; we also know that all groups contain status hierarchies and myths about their origins and purpose. This suggests that the big problems in life concern: (1) Getting along with other people; (2) Acquiring status and power; and (3) Finding one’s place in the group. In modern life, individual differences in the ability to solve these three problems translate into individual differences in career success. Successful people live longer, have healthier lives, and are better able to care for their dependents—and that is the definition of biological fitness. Thus, Socioanalytic theory is about fitness and career success.

Socioanalytic theory defines personality from two perspectives: (1) Identity; and (2) Reputation.  Identity concerns who you think you are; reputation concerns who we think you are. Research on identity has produced few useful generalizations; in contrast, research on reputation has been highly productive; e.g., the Five-Factor Model—a taxonomy of reputation—is a useful way to organize personality research findings. Past behavior predicts future behavior; reputation is a summary of past behavior; thus, reputation is the best possible data source for predicting future behavior.

Research in Socioanalytic theory focuses on four broad areas: (1) Personality and occupational performance; (2) Personality and leadership effectiveness; (3) Personality and managerial incompetence; and (4) Personality and effective team performance (team research historically ignored effectiveness). Occupational performance, leadership effectiveness, and managerial incompetence can be predicted with valid personality measures.  Team effectiveness depends on putting the right people (defined by personality) in the right positions (defined by team role).

Socioanalytic theory argues that social skill is the key to career success—because social skill translates identity into reputation. That is, people who are socially skilled are better able to earn reputations that are consistent with their identities (i.e., become in the eyes of others the persons they want to be). Socioanalytic theory also maintains that feedback from valid personality assessment can create “strategic self-awareness” (understanding how one impacts others). Strategic self-awareness allows ambitious people to maximize their career potential and minimize their own intra- and inter-personal shortcomings.  Thus, strategic self-awareness increases the likelihood of career success. Successful careers lead to better individual outcomes than unsuccessful careers.

Developed in 1980, the Hogan Personality Inventory, which describes the bright side of personality, has aged like a fine wine. With a commitment to validity and reliability, Hogan’s flagship assessment is continuously updated and analyzed by our industry-leading research division.

Whether your goal is to find the right hire or develop stronger leaders, assessing bright-side personality gives you valuable insight into how people work, how they lead, and how successful they will be. Simply put, the bright side is who you are when you are at your best.

“The bright side of personality is you when you’re keeping your real self under control,” says Bob Hogan. “It’s you when you’re a smoothly functioning hypocrite.”

In this video Bob Hogan discuss the bright side of personality and how some people have more attractive bright sides than others, which allows them to get along, get ahead, and have more successful careers.

Hogan was the first personality assessment provider to recognize the value of assessing derailers, or dark side personality, with working adults. First launched in 1995, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) measures 11 derailing tendencies that can impede career success and interpersonal effectiveness. In 1998, we were the first test publisher to develop a web-based assessment platform to administer the HDS. After we fully integrated the system to score assessment responses for personnel selection and employee development in 2001, our online platform became the most popular way to complete our assessments. As a result, we hit a new milestone as 2017 ended, surpassing over 2 million HDS assessments on our core platform. Put another way, we’ve administered the HDS using this one platform to more people than the population of Paris, France.

Looking Back

As the popularity of the Internet and the success of our online business grew, so did HDS usage. In 2001 we used our platform to administer the HDS to less than 1,000 people. By 2014, annual HDS administrations surpassed 200,000 individuals. It took 13 years to cross the 1 million mark, but only 5 to cross 2 million.

Looking Ahead

HDS usage since 2014 suggests we will continue to surpass marks set in previous years. At the current rate of growth, we should exceed 3 million administrations in the fall of 2020. Furthermore, as our clients, partners, and global distributors increasingly recognize the impact of derailers at work, we plan to hit that number even sooner.

The Bottom Line

The HDS remains the global standard for assessing personality derailers in normal working adults. Organizations recognize this fact as evidenced by increasing demand over the last 17 years, and data suggest that trend will continue. When organizations around the world want to hire the right people, develop talented employees, build great leaders, and impact their bottomline, they ask for the HDS.

“Why can’t they just act like adults!”

“It’s like herding cats!”

Although teams are our default organizational unit, team leaders often struggle to get individuals to cooperate and coordinate. Partly, that’s down to the fact that each individual has their own agenda for getting ahead, which they balance with getting along with everyone else.

Getting along is the hard part. We became hard-wired through evolution to prefer our own kind and to distinguish friend from foe. Although we are inclined to cooperate, we are also hard-wired for competition and war, which makes coordinating with others tricky. Science is now telling us more about how to manage people and teams to activate neural pathways for either trust and collaboration or conflict and competition. Here’s how to harness our neuropsychology to build better teams.

Keep teams small

There is a right size and a wrong size for teams. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos thinks it’s small – he has the “2-pizza rule” – no meeting should take place with more people present than can be fed from 2 pizzas. The late Harvard professor Richard Hackman agrees, remarking, “My rule of thumb is no double digits. Big teams usually end up wasting everybody’s time.” Bottom line: keep teams between 5- 10 people.

The reason smaller teams work is to do with the limits to our ability to hold and sustain good working relationships. Although research strongly suggests that the human brain got bigger and smarter as we learned to cooperate, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar concluded that we have real cognitive limits. 150 people is about as large as anyone’s social circle can meaningfully be, but a group of around 5-10 people was an optimum working group. As the number of people in a team increases, the number of connections rises exponentially – by the time there are 15 people on the team there are over 100 possible interactions to deal with:

Build cohesion, trust and, safety

Google spent years pursuing the idea that good teams came from having the brightest and most skilled people on board. But they were wrong.

Studying hundreds of Google teams revealed that one of the most critical factors differentiating good from poor teams was how safe they were for people to be open and share ideas. Underpinning psychological safety in teams is the neuroscience of trust.

Paul Zak of Harvard identified oxytocin as a critical precursor to feelings of trust and trustworthiness. Oxytocin is sometimes administered to new mothers to stimulate bonding with babies – and Zak found that at work raising oxytocin levels reduces social distance and fear of others. His lab has spent years looking at promoters and inhibitors of oxytocin production in the workplace:

Zak reports that promoting trust is good for business: staff in high-trust organizations are more productive, collaborate better with their colleagues, suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives.

Harness mood for good

One of the more remarkable findings in the last 25 years has been the discovery of mirror neurons in the brain. Put simply, mirror neurons react when we see another person have an experience – as if it were ourselves having that experience. Although there is a lot of scientific debate about their direct impact on our behavior, it is commonly understood to be critical to our sense of empathy and understanding, as in, we can feel what the other person is experiencing.

Mirror neurons suggest that emotions don’t just come from inside us (“I feel excited”), they can also be produced unconsciously from seeing someone else feel excited or pleased. That matters, because researchers have learned a lot about the ripple effect that passes emotions through a team, and generates a collective emotional state. Teams respond consciously or unconsciously to how other team members are feeling, and to the emotions of the team leader. Since humans tend to put more weight on negative events and feelings than good, leaders who display bad moods, or who create stress and unhappiness in others, will impact the team and lose follower regard.

Acting positively, and supporting an upbeat climate in the team, will increase engagement and boost productivity.

Choose diversity carefully

Suzanne Bell is a prominent teams researcher who helps NASA choose the mix of personalities for space missions. Her work suggests that personality – how you are deep inside – will impact team performance, especially in combination with others. Having conscientious, detail-oriented people on a team is good news, as is having people on board who are warm and agreeable. Having worrying, negative types is not so good.

Yet a mix of backgrounds, personalities, qualifications and genders can have useful effects if the task is right. R&D and design teams benefit from having a mix of backgrounds; having different personalities helps entrepreneurial teams.But humans have trouble working with those different from ourselves, and sometimes negative effects from mixing people up are seen.

Today, Hogan announced that Scott Gregory will assume the role of CEO, effective March 1, 2018. Current CEO, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has resigned and will leave the company on February 28, 2018.

“Tomas’ tireless support of the business has been superb,” said Robert Hogan, Founder and President. “He will remain a close friend and valued member of the extended Hogan family. He is an important thought leader with whom we expect to partner on future research, presentations and projects,” Hogan said. “We are grateful for his many contributions to the business and wish him great success in his next venture.”

Gregory, who completed his Ph.D. under Robert and Joyce Hogan at The University of Tulsa, was one of Hogan’s first employees. He has extensive experience working with global companies, including 12 years as the Vice President of Talent Management and Organizational Development at Pentair. He also was a consultant for Personnel Decisions International and Hogan’s partner, MDA Leadership Consulting, and taught I/O Psychology at Macalester College and St. Olaf College.

Gregory rejoined Hogan in 2013, and was elevated to partner and Vice President of Consulting in 2016, leading Hogan’s domestic and international consulting teams. Throughout his career, he has consulted for half of the Fortune 100, and worked extensively with personality assessment in North and South America, Australia, Asia and Europe.

“Scott is uniquely positioned to become Hogan’s next CEO,” said Hogan. “He has a thorough understanding of every type of client organization Hogan serves, deep knowledge of our assessments and research dating back to his work with us during Hogan’s early years, and he exemplifies the level of quality and customer service for which we are known. His contributions to the business, passion for Hogan and commitment to continuous improvement make him the obvious choice for the future of Hogan.”

This article was originally authored by Geoff Trickey for PCL in January 2018.

The use of personality questionnaires has increased quite dramatically over recent years. Test development, publication and usage have benefitted considerably from the opportunities provided by the internet: once a process that relied very much on the professional expertise of the psychologists, personality went online in 1999 and the genie was out of the bottle. Now readily accessible on both the test development side and the test user side, a highly competitive marketplace has developed, bristling with a bewildering array of products used by people with very varied levels of psychological insight.

There are positive benefits from this process of commoditization, but there are also concerns. The relationship between personality theory, personality research, test development, test publishing, sales and test usage is now weighted heavily towards the commercial end of that pipeline. The question is: have the links with psychology, the ‘psycho’ element in ‘psychometrics’, been strained almost to breaking point?

Background

The study of personality has a very long pedigree that is easily traced back to the ancient philosophers. Its mission is close to the most fundamental questions about our existence and about human nature. These are not merely interesting esoteric issues; differing views on personality have considerable consequences. They have a moral dimension too because they influence our understanding of personal responsibility, our beliefs and principles and, by that route, they impact on fundamental ideas about what is right and what is wrong. They also influence public policy. For example, different assumptions about the influence of Nature and Nurture account for fault lines in political and public policy debate about key issues; everything from education to justice, retribution, correction and rehabilitation.

History

The evolution of personality assessment reflects many different schools of thought. Each approach was predicated against the insights of their creators, their understanding of human nature and their definition of personality. Theory preceded measurement. From Galen to Jung, Rorschach to Murray, Cattell to Hogan; personality theory and personality research came first. It provided the platform of distinctive beliefs upon which these thought leaders based their various methods of assessment. These were typically people, prominent in their field, making a major contribution to psychological theory and debate. Their approach to personality assessment was the legacy of a lifetime of enquiry and theoretical development. Their rationale was explicit, reflected in an extensive body of research, in their publications and, of course, in their assessments.

The contribution of psychology towered in its significance over the practicalities of assessment. But there was never consensus. Different theorists argued their case, set out their stall, won adherents to their cause and challenged the status quo – that is how advancement in science works. At the point of delivery, the test user knew and understood what the author was attempting to do. Familiarity with the theory provided the contextual framework for the interpretation of results and the generation of appropriate inferences and predictions.

Today

When he asserts that “personality theory and personality assessment were separated at birth”, Bob Hogan is alluding to the loss of this connection. All too often the crucial question of ‘what exactly is this personality test measuring’ seems to be taken as a given. Unexplained reference to ‘personality’ just doesn’t cut it.

The nature of personality, its structure, its content and its significance can be conceptualized in so many different ways; are we referring to traits, dispositions, instincts, values, temperament, preferences, attitudes? How influential is it? Can it be changed? Can it be managed? Is it genetic? Is it shaped by learning, by religious belief, by culture by experience? How does it relate to performance in sports or at work? How does it influence a biographical trajectory? What part does it play in personal relationships? Does it shape behaviour? Does it merely reflect the behavioural consistencies of individuals? Is it deterministic or do we have free will?

Even the current ‘gold standard’ of robust Five Factor Model credentials leaves all these questions unanswered. Without an explicit theoretical framework, simply claiming to measure ‘personality’ doesn’t give any clue about what the results actually mean; nor what implications, recommendations or decisions can reasonably be drawn from a test result. Measurement, stripped of theory is ‘dust bowl empiricism’. Its interpretation relies on whatever assumptions the user brings with them.

Somehow, our obsession with statistical analysis threatens to eclipse the primary purpose; that of understanding human nature. Cattell makes an important point:

“…..lest there may seem to have been overemphasis on statistics – let it be said that ideal prediction and treatment practice requires both psychological understanding … and statistical understanding”.

Current trends in personality assessment seem to paper over the question of psychological insight. Big data is the extension of this mind set.  Assigning numbers to everyday behaviours, utterances or decisions may tell us something about the people they are attributed to, as do any of our observations of others, but any inferential interpretation beyond the blatantly obvious relies on assumptions about human nature – the issue that it singularly fails to address. Psychometrics without the psychology is just playing with numbers; and numbers without any clear rationale wield a very dubious authority.

The Future of Psychometrics?

It’s perfectly acceptable to define personality in different ways and to operationalise those views through questionnaires, gaming methods or big data. What is highly questionable, though, is to purport to measure something for which there is no clear rationale and therefore no clear meaning and no clear implications for decision making. Any survey, word check list, group of statements or questions can be metricated statistically using item analysis, scale development techniques and norm tables. But, for them to have any depth of meaning, they need to have been shaped, from conception through to delivery of results, by the insights of the creator and developed with the specific intention of operationalizing those insights into real world outcomes.

Most organizations across the globe make it a top priority to identify and develop high potential employees for leadership roles. Unfortunately, organizations large and small have struggled to recognize those with the most potential and, in many cases, select employees with very little potential at all.

This is largely due to biases in the identification process. Those with charismatic personalities who are likable and good at office politicking most often emerge as leaders. The problem is that the vast majority of these individuals lack the personality characteristics that translate to leader effectiveness. Thus, it should be no surprise that a Gallup poll in 2015 showed that 68% of US employees were not engaged or actively disengaged at work.

In this article, recently published in the Winter 2018 issue of People + Strategy Journal, Robert Hogan, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, and Derek Lusk address the crucial differences between leader emergence and leader effectiveness, and make practical recommendations for HR practitioners to create and implement successful HiPo identification programs.

The war for talent is more fierce than ever, and there is a growing belief that the people who have the highest potential are also your most agile learners. However, defining learning agility, and determining who has more of it, has remained a challenge until recently.

The new book, Learning Agility: The Key to Leader Potential, authored by David Hoff, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Leadership Development at EASI Consult, and W. Warner Burke, Professor of Psychology at Columbia University and developer of the Burke Learning Agility Inventory™ (Burke LAI), effectively defines learning agility, and explains how to measure and apply it in organizational settings.

“Learning agility is one of the hottest topics in talent management and leadership development today,” says Allan Church, PepsiCo Senior Vice President of Global Talent Assessment & Development. “Hoff and Burke’s book on the topic provides a new framework and way of thinking about the construct that is just what the good doctor ordered. Whatever your interest in learning agility, this is a must-have resource and represents a leap forward for the field.”

Learning agility is not a new concept, but it took years of research to prove that it really does exist, and can be quantified on an individual level. That research led to the development of the Burke LAI, which offered the first reliable, theoretically grounded way to measure learning agility. And, now that learning agility can be measured, individuals and organizations need to know how to develop it.

“I’d argue that learning agility is one of the most exciting, game-changing concepts in the field of talent management today,” says Hoff. “Those of us who want to stretch ourselves at work can examine our strengths and take concrete action to develop our weaker skills. By doing so, we can reach our untapped potential.”

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, CEO of Hogan Assessments and Professor of Business Psychology at University College London and Columbia University, considers learning agility to be of the utmost importance for all leaders.

“Learning agility is critical for today’s leaders: if leaders can’t learn from experience and acknowledge past mistakes to avoid repeating them, they will become a liability,” says Chamorro-Premuzic. “This book, by true experts in the field, is an authoritative volume that will help both scholars and practitioners understand the importance of learning agility in the workplace and how we should assess and develop it.”

Learning Agility: The Key to Leader Potential is on sale now, and can be purchased on Amazon or at www.learningagilitybook.com.

Groups are the default human working unit. For most sorts of jobs, people tend to cooperate and collaborate to get the work done. Even when the job doesn’t need collaboration we still prefer to do it in proximity with others – think brew clubs or cruise ships.

When the job requires cooperation, people are selected into teams primarily on the basis of their functional skills. A surgical team is based on the specialist skills of nurses, anaesthesiologists, and surgeons for example.

However, a large body of research has shown that selecting people purely on the basis of functional skills is no guarantor of an effective, cohesive team; deep-level characteristics like personality and values also emerge as essentials for developing social cohesion and enhancing performance (Bell, 2007). You can put world-class talent together on a team, and it may still fail to perform as a cohesive unit. The Cleveland Cavaliers are a case in point, and research on NBA teams shows that adding talent can lead to worse performance (Swaab, Schaerer, Anicich, Ronay, & Galinsky, 2014).

A moment’s thought makes this point clear: working with a skilled colleague who is also irascible, disorganized and uncaring makes it harder to connect as a group and introduces transaction costs in maintaining group harmony. The current US White House contains the most publicly visible example of this principle in action. In fact, the only way to create a team that’s worth more than the sum of its individual contributors is to select members on the basis of personality, soft skills, and values.

When a majority of team members share the same values, the team bonds more easily. In a study of university students, teams with members who shared significant personal values, like tradition, power, or altruism, reported more cohesion when compared to their less similar counterparts (Woehr, Arciniega, & Poling, 2013). A series of studies in the British National Health Service showed that teams whose values were congruent identified more strongly as a group and were more innovative (Mitchell, Parker, Giles, Joyce, & Chiang, 2012). Because values are a guide for behavioral choices, group members who share similar values are more likely to agree about group actions, and vice-versa. In this way values determine the group’s culture, and offer insight to the weight the team will place on decision choices.

The Hogan research team recently explored the link between the kinds of specialist skills people display and the values that the team holds. This relationship has big implications for predicting how teams will approach particular tasks and behave on the job, such as pursuing results, being commercially minded, or valuing innovation.

For example, manual work teams are more likely to contain members whose personalities could be described as pragmatic: tough minded and practical (Hogan Assessment Systems, 2016). Importantly, we found that these teams are also more likely to share values concerned with intuitive decision making, self-reliance and low levels of social interaction (lower Affiliation).

In contrast, teams that contain members who are creative (that is, who demonstrate high levels of openness to ideas and curiosity) are also much more likely to share values relating to analytical thinking, commerciality, and achieving results – think advertising agencies.

Teams which comprise results oriented individuals, such as leadership teams (Winsborough & Sambath, 2013), are more likely to share values related to power, commerce, and affiliation, and less likely to endorse values related to security and altruism. We can confidently predict that the culture of these teams will be assertive, confident, socially outgoing, and independent.

When assembling teams there is always a tradeoff between the skills needed to get the job done and the emergent personality of the group. Our new research shows that the kinds of people on the team determines its culture, decision making styles, and likelihood of bonding.

Bell, S. T. (2007). Deep-level composition variables as predictors of team performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(3), 595–615. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.3.595

Hogan Assessment Systems. (2016). Hogan Team Report Technical Manual. Tulsa, OK.: Hogan Assessment Systems. http://www.hoganteamreport.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/01/Team_Report_Tech_Manual_V2.pdf

Mitchell, R., Parker, V., Giles, M., Joyce, P., & Chiang, V. (2012). Perceived value congruence and team innovation. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85(4), 626–648. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02059.x

Swaab, R. I., Schaerer, M., Anicich, E. M., Ronay, R., & Galinsky, A. D. (2014). The Too-Much-Talent Effect: Team Interdependence Determines When More Talent Is Too Much or Not Enough. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1581–1591. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614537280

Winsborough, D. L., & Sambath, V. (2013). Not like us: an investigation into the personalities of New Zealand CEOs. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 65(2), 87–107. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033128

Woehr, D. J., Arciniega, L. M., & Poling, T. L. (2013). Exploring the Effects of Value Diversity on Team Effectiveness. Journal of Business and Psychology, 28(1), 107–121. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-012-9267-4

In the 1970s, only 8 percent of S&P 500 CEOs were recruited externally. That number grew to 22 percent in 2014. Yet, outsiders are almost 7 times more likely to be dismissed within a short tenure than homegrown CEOs. No matter how much a board learns about an outside candidate, executive stakeholders simply have a better understanding of an internal contender’s strengths and weaknesses, especially as they relate to the specifics of the current business landscape and strategic objectives. As a result of the inherent “information misalignment,” the chance of making a mistake is much higher for a CEO hired from outside the company.

Most stakeholders will admit that they know this already. But what they won’t admit is that the expressed need to bring in an outside CEO is evidence that neither the board, the current (or previous) CEO nor the chief of human resources successfully performed one of their most crucial, shared responsibilities: building a sustainable leadership pipeline that readies executives and potential executives to advance at all levels of the organization.

There is good reason effective succession planning eludes so many otherwise functional companies. Making inferences about future performance, the variance of organizational politics and a tendency to devote limited (if any) focus to assessing “hidden potential” often hinder otherwise valiant efforts. For example, there are several reasons an individual may be nominated to participate in a succession plan, but far too often these individuals are identified because they are socially skilled, confident and interested in influencing others and moving up the corporate ladder. However, just because an individual is rewarding to deal with, doesn’t mean that the organization should devote resources to his/her development.

When it comes to desired leadership outcomes, emergence does not necessarily equal effectiveness. If beating the competition remains the ultimate goal, an organization’s leadership pipeline needs to be filled with those who can successfully lead high performing teams. Accurately identifying top talent must involve science in the form of objective, relevant validated data. Despite guidance from the academic and business literatures, some companies still base these important decisions on politically fraught processes, or confound successful emergence with effective leadership. But clarity is not unattainable. According to various studies, successful managers tend to spend their time managing up by networking and politicking, whereas effective managers spend their time managing down by taking care of subordinates and driving team performance. Rarely do the two groups overlap.

What’s more, there is a common misunderstanding amongst most executives that all individuals considered for a succession plan should be able to effectively lead people, as opposed to advancing as a leader of processes or thought (i.e. subject matter expert), for example. Tech companies in the Fortune 100 have pioneered the notion that not everyone makes a great people leader. In addition to the typical “high potential” evaluation models, organizations like Microsoft and Cisco smartly consider other “leadership” skillsets that lend themselves to domains such as operational efficiency or innovation. In other words, insisting on professional people-leadership development for an individual who lacks the interest or compulsion to guide others toward stretch goals only sets up that valued employee for inevitable failure.

Well validated personality assessments give a preview into which path forward is most conducive to an individual’s inherent behavioral patterns and latent interests. Those who have the proclivity to impose structure and the drive to keep things predictable will demonstrate behaviors conducive to process leadership. Those who have the propensity to seek inspirational ideas and who also emphasize the importance of imagination will likely have an easier time in a thought leadership role. And the working styles of those compelled to stay knowledgeably up-to-date as well as demand sound rationales to determine courses of action will be more conducive to data-dependent jobs. Having such information available in easy-to-understand terminology can help stakeholders vested in the organizational well-being leverage employees’ natural tendencies for more informed and specific succession planning.

Our business landscape continues to shift and evolve at an ever-faster rate. People represent the difference between an organization’s success and failure. The stakes of correctly identifying and developing the next generation of leaders could not be higher. Focusing on specific, differentiating options for advancement early in the careers of valued employees will only serve to benefit the organization. Basing the related evaluations of potential on objective data-driven metrics will help HR overcome the ultimate challenge: keeping the pipeline from entry level all the way to the CEO flush with options for filling vacancies.

This article originally appeared in Human Resource Executive. Photo credit by Lou Levit on Unsplash.