If you went to a concert to see Lorde and instead Ed Sheeran emerged on stage, you might be pleased to see him, but disappointed because Ed Sheeran is not Lorde and is never going to do the version of Green Light you thought you’d be watching.

The fact that Ed Sheeran is not Lorde demonstrates the economic principle of fungibility. If something is fungible, it means it can be exchanged for a good of equal value. Money is said to be fungible, because it can be exchanged easily for goods of the same value. Around the world, $4-5 can be swapped for a Big Mac. However, Lorde is not fungible.

Although this seems to be common sense, the many incompetent managers, team leaders, or coaches in the world completely fail to understand it. They look at the members of a team in the same way they see batteries in a torch or a tool: a technical skill that can simply be exchanged. While a football team requires a striker, a wing, and a goal-keeper, competence is all that is needed to change out one player for another using this line of thinking (fungibility). But that’s incorrect. Players are more than mere functional capability, and arrive on the field with personalities, styles, and preferences. Messi is not Neymar and both are very different players to Wayne Rooney.

Scientific evidence indicates quite clearly that individuals’ personalities play a significant role in determining the performance of the team they play with. Personality impacts team performance as much or more than pure technical skill and, when combined, team members’ personalities operate like the different functions of a single organism. A meta-analysis showed that team members’ personalities influence:

• cooperation
• shared cognition
• information sharing
• overall team performance

There are often substantial compatibility differences between people on the team, regardless of how similar their expertise or technical backgrounds. Suzanne Bell, a psychologist working on the Mars project for NASA, points out that astronauts are intelligent, they’re experts in their technical areas, and they have at least some teamwork skills, but “what’s tricky is how well individuals combine.”

People aren’t fungible because they play two roles in a working group: a functional role, based on their formal position and technical skill, and a psychological role, based on the kind of person they are.

Because so many teams miss the psychological synergy required to perform, my colleagues and I developed a method to look at teams as a function of their psychological roles, exposing the deep dynamics of the group. We found team members occupy one of five roles:

• Results.Team members who naturally organize work and take charge tend to be socially self-confident, competitive, and energetic. 
• Pragmatism.Team members who are practical, hard-headed challengers of ideas and theories tend to be prudent, emotionally stable, and level-headed. 
• Innovation. Team members who naturally focus on innovation, anticipate problems, and recognize when the team needs to change tend to be imaginative, curious, and open to new experiences.
• Process.Team members who pay attention to details, processes, and rules tend to be reliable, organized, and conscientious.
• Relationships.Team members who naturally focus on relationships, are attuned to others’ feelings, and are good at building cohesion tend to be warm, diplomatic, and approachable.

Looking at the balance of roles in a team offers an extraordinary insight into its dynamics and can predict the probability of success or failure for an assigned task. For example, a finance team was charged with rolling out a novel business reporting product for transforming the culture of a government agency. But, the percentage of players in each role showed the team was doomed from its inception:

• 17% of team members were considered results-oriented (low)
• 100% of team members were considered pragmatic (high)
• 0% of team members were considered innovative (low)
• 50% of team members were considered process-oriented (good)
• 0% of team members were considered good relationship builders (low)

This team failed because no one played the relationship-building role, the team lacked internal cohesion, and they failed to establish any connection with the frontline leaders who were required to take on the team’s new accounting process. With low-results role players and a team full of pragmatists, the group moved slowly, reluctantly, and waited to be told what to do.

The mix of the right personalities can make the difference between a competent performance and a great one. A Lorde single featuring Ed Sheeran might be a good example.

My new book on teams is “Fusion: The Psychology of Teams.”

When Frederick Taylor published his pioneering principles of scientific management in 1912, the repetitive and mundane nature of most jobs required employees to think as little as possible. Breaking down each task into basic components and standardizing workers’ behaviors to eliminate choice and flexibility could help managers turn employees into productive machines, albeit with alienated spirits.

Fast forward to the present and we see that most jobs today demand the exact opposite from employees: the capacity to keep learning and developing new skills and expertise, even if they are not obviously linked to one’s current job. As academic reviews have pointed out, people’s employability – their ability to gain and maintain a desired job – no longer depends on what they already know, but on what they are likely to learn.

In other words, higher career security is a function of employability, and that in turn depends on learnability. Thus Eric Schmidt notes that a major pillar in Google’s recruitment strategy is to hire “learning animals,” while EY recruiters observe that “to be a standout, candidates need to demonstrate technical knowledge in their discipline, but also a passion for asking the kind of insightful questions that have the power to unlock deeper insights and innovation for our clients.”

Sadly, most organizations have yet to wake up to this reality, so they continue to pay too much attention to academic qualifications and hard skills, as if what entry-level employees had learned during university actually equipped them for today’s job market. Although learnability does boost academic performance, just because someone is job-ready when they obtain their educational credentials does not mean that they are also learning-ready.

For starters, workplace learnability is far less structured and formulaic than college learnability, and employees must juggle the tension between the demand for the short-term efficiencies of productivity with the long-term quest for intellectual growth. For all the talk of lifelong learning – as well as billions of dollars spent on training every year – scientific studies suggest that most organizational training programs have no long-term effects on people’s job performance.

So how can managers do a better job of fostering learnability in the workplace? We suggest starting with three things:
Select for it. Don’t waste training budgets on employees who haven’t demonstrated learnability, even if those employees are otherwise skilled, collaborative, and productive. To maximize the benefit of limited training investments, focus on employees with higher learnability: curious and inquisitive individuals who are genuinely interested in acquiring new knowledge. Just like some people are more likely to benefit from coaching than others – because they are humbler, more open to feedback, and ambitious – certain individuals are more trainable than others because of their hungry mind.

Nurture it. Managers who want their employees to learn new things will encourage that behavior by doing it themselves. We are all time-deprived, but high learnability people make the time to learn new things. What is the last book you read that opened your mind? (Simply reading the articles your Facebook friends share doesn’t count.) When did you last devote time to study another industry? When was the last time you spoke to someone about stuff outside your area of expertise? How hard do you try to break up your default routine at work? How often do you ask “why”?

Paradoxically, instant access to information may suppress our natural curiosity and appetite for knowledge. It is to our learnability what fast food is to our diet: a ubiquitous vice with no nutritional value and the potential to make healthy food tasteless. High learnability enables people to dive deeper to translate information into actual expertise. It is the key intellectual differentiator between those who can go online and those who become smarter in the process.

Reward it. If you want to change people’s behavior, you should show them that you mean it. It is not enough to hire curious people and hope they display as much learnability as you do. You should also reward them for doing so.

One of the best ways to reward high learnability is to provide new and challenging opportunities for those individuals where they can continue to be stimulated to exercise their learnability and be rewarded by broadening their expertise and increasing their value to the company and themselves. Another suggestion is to promote people only if they have acquired sufficient expertise in other jobs in the organization, not just their own.

Or you could give awards for individuals who organize events or activities to promote learnability in the company: e.g., running internal conferences, bringing external speakers, and circulating information that is intellectually stimulating and has the potential to nurture people’s curiosity. Even simpler habits, such as writing a blog, sharing articles on social media, or recommending books and movies, can be rewarded.

Though people differ in their natural curiosity and learning potential, the context will also determine how much learnability people display. Executives and senior leaders should be tasked with enhancing employees’ learnability throughout the organization. Since leaders play a major role in shaping the climate of teams and culture of organizations, they will act as either catalysts or blockers of employees’ learnability.

This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review on July 18, 2016 by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Mara Swan.

Although we live in an age that glorifies innovation, there is a big difference between theoretically advocating for it and being able (or willing) to actually implement it. None of this is really new. From Schumpeter’s classic definition of innovation as “creative destruction” to recent portrayals of innovators as disruptors or constructive nonconformist, we have known for years that the people and processes that enable innovation are often undesirable, not least because of the ubiquitous human fear of the unknown. As Slavoj Žižek points out, few things are as violent – psychologically speaking – as change, and the violence of change is what makes people cling to the familiar, even when they hypothetically embrace change. Indeed, whether the goal is to change oneself or one’s environment, most people don’t want to change – what they want is to have changed. “Take this pill and you’ll be smarter, slimmer, happier, richer” – everybody would sign up for that. Now if the deal is to follow a specific set of instructions that may or not, after a great deal of effort, suffering, and persistence, create the desired change, then the uptake will be rather smaller.

Traditionally, there have been three major levels of explanation to understand the determinants of change, including innovation (the implementation of original and useful ideas into new products, processes, and services that enhance organizational effectiveness). The first and most widely discussed is strategy and it concerns the business plan for innovation – hire MBAs or McKinsey consultants and they will help you pick a recipe from their innovation cookbook, with detailed instructions and a stepwise approach based on data-driven management theories. The second, more metaphysical, is culture, and, according to Peter Drucker, it “eats strategy for breakfast”. Culture comprises the explicit and implicit rules dictating the dynamics of social interaction in organizations. It includes the organization’s code of conduct and dictates what gets sanctioned and rewarded, or, to borrow Google’s expression, “how we do things around here”. While both strategy and culture are no doubt pivotal to predict and manage organizational innovation, they are actually the product of a third variable, namely talent. Indeed, strategy and culture don’t emerge out of the blue – they result from the leaders of the organization, and talented leaders are better at creating a culture and strategy to harness innovation, as opposed to destroying it.

Yet in every organization the main challenge for those interested in pushing forward an innovation agenda is to work with people who resist it. This is not only true for leaders – when they have to get buy-in from their executives and boards – but also employees. Regardless of how senior you are, and what role you occupy, you will only be able to contribute to innovation if you can overcome the barriers and hurdles put in place by those who are eager to maintain the status quo, and what makes this challenge so difficult is that these innovation killers are often utterly unaware of their resistance to change. It is always easier to fight a rational enemy, and delusion inhibits rationality.

Personality research provides a useful theoretical model for understanding innovation from a people perspective, and that includes a range of practical recommendations for dealing with anti-innovation personalities. Sadly, most writings in this area have focused on the qualities of individuals with great innovation potential (the bright side of innovation), and to a lesser degree on the problematic or undesirable characteristics of these creative personalities (the dark side of innovation). However, given that innovators are far less represented in organizations (and societies) than conformists, and that only a minority of organizations succeed in their innovation efforts, it makes sense to devote more attention to the profile of blockers than enablers of innovation.

So, what are these blockers typically like, and how should one deal with them? Here are four valuable lessons from science:

Threat-detection mode: One of the most common reasons for resisting innovation is the unconscious bias to attend to (and prioritize) potential threats over and above rewards. In contrast, innovation is a reward-seeking activity, as evidenced by the higher risk tolerance, optimism, and opportunism of successful entrepreneurs, who are naturally prone to distort reality so as to ignore the potential threats underlying change and disruption. As a result, innovators are often unable to enthuse threat-sensitive people with their ideas and ventures. It is as if they spoke a completely different language to innovation killers. Indeed, to tell someone who is on threat-detection mode that pursuing X or Y could be exciting, original, or innovative, is like trying to cheer up someone with depression; it is as ineffective as trying to persuade natural innovators that their plans are risky or unfeasible. Thus if you want to convince innovation killers of the need to innovate, you are better off using a threat-based strategy: “if we don’t innovate, we are going to shrink, lose market-share, or die”. Note that people are generally more worried about losing what they have than gaining something they don’t.

Passive resistance: Another common feature of innovation killers is that they are quite good at avoiding over conflict. Instead of confronting innovators, they specialize in passive avoidance or resistance, which results from their leisurely personality style (a dark side trait). This is why innovation killers may pretend to agree with your innovative ideas while being not just disinterested, but also appalled by them. Their polite and cordial fake attitude is an effective strategy for boycotting ideas behind your back, and they effectively play on the enthusiasm of innovators who are so enamored with their own ideas that are easily fooled into thinking that others are equally keen on them. Thus the best way to deal with innovation killers is to disbelief in their apparent cooperativeness and acceptance, and assume that they are just faking interest. But instead of challenging or confronting them so they reveal their true attitudes, make them agree, document their approval in writing, and they will be forced to carry on pretending that they are in favor. In short, instead of exposing their passive insubordination, force them to keep faking it, until your ideas are executed and implemented.

This article was originally published by Forbes on May 23, 2017, and it was authored by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

Technology has turned HR into a data-driven game. This does not mean intuition is waning, but rather that a larger number of practitioners are likely to experience some shame or guilt if they admit that they are ‘playing it by ear’. The recent rebranding of talent management as ‘people analytics’ has arguably enhanced the status of HR.

The hope here is that HR can empower organisations with robust tech and data to turn the art of people management into a science: an objective, defensible and replicable process with a clear ROI.

That said, there is still room for improvement, as most technological innovations have yet to be rigorously scrutinised or effectively applied. The HR tech world is replete with shiny new objects, including some that warrant a considerable amount of optimism, even among cynics. However, at this stage there is no indication that these toys are more effective than applying well-established scientific principles. This is perhaps clearest in talent identification. Consider these salient examples:

Gamification. Although the application of game-like features to talent identification tools has enhanced user experience, enabling organisations to tap into a much wider candidate pool and turning recruitment upside down (from B2C to C2B), it is hard to get carried away. First, most assessment games look like 1980s arcade games.

If you look at what goes on in the real gaming industry, where it is increasingly hard to see the difference between a game and a 3D movie, gamified assessments seem to belong to a prehistoric era.

Second, most gamified assessments are either good-looking IQ tests or glorified situational judgment tests. However, they are less valid than traditional (non-gamified) tests of the same type. Third, the cost of gamified assessments is much higher than traditional ones, so you end up spending more on less accurate tools.

A more hopeful path may be to mine data from existing gamers – who play real videogames – to assess their job-related potential. There are now more gamers in China than people in the US, and hardcore gamers spend an average of 20 hours a week playing. Imagine a future in which companies send avatars to recruit Grand Theft Auto players as heads of sales because of their kick-ass aggression.

Big Data. There is now so much data available on people that we probably don’t need to gather any more. Internal company data, such as email content or metadata, can be used to monitor people’s performance, engagement, and identify their potential. The opportunities are even bigger online where our digital exhaust is as vast as it is underexploited. If only algorithms could access people’s browser history, Amazon purchases, Spotify playlists, Facebook and Twitter feeds (as in programmatic marketing), we would probably ‘know’ them better than the average manager does. However, there is no evidence this approach can predict work-related behaviours better than established selection methods, which also represent more ethical (and legal) alternatives. There is big a difference between what we could and should know about people.

Digital interviewing. A final area of technological disruption is in interviews, which are still the most widely used selection tool in the world. Today it is possible to interview anyone, and analyse their answers and behaviours, without the need for human intervention. Questions can be asked by avatars, and speech- and video-mining algorithms can translate interviewees’ behaviours into valid predictors of future performance, eliminating unconscious biases while reducing time and cost.

The problem, however, is most interviewers can’t ignore their intuition. It’s like having self-driving cars; people still put their hands on the steering wheels because they have more faith in themselves than in technology.

In short, when measured against intuition HR tech is making the industry smarter. But it has yet to reach the level of rigour of scientifically defensible methods.

This article was originally published by HR Magazine on January 10, 2017 and is authored by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

Among the various core ingredients of talent and career success, few personal qualities have received more attention in the past decade than emotional intelligence (EQ), the ability to identify and manage your own and others’ emotions. Importantly, unlike most of the competencies that make it into the HR zeitgeist of buzzwords, EQ is no fad.

In fact, thousands of academic studies have demonstrated the predictive power of scientific EQ assessments vis-à-vis job performance, leadership potential, entrepreneurship, and employability. Moreover, the importance of EQ has been highlighted beyond work-related settings, as higher scores have been associated with relationship success, mental and physical health, and happiness.

All this is good news for people with higher EQ. But what can those with lower scores do to improve their intrapersonal and interpersonal skills? Is it possible to increase your own and others’ EQ beyond its natural levels? While Goleman and other popular writers argue that (unlike IQ) EQ is malleable and trainable, EQ is really just a combination of personality traits. Accordingly, it is not set in stone; it is largely heritable, shaped by childhood experiences, and fairly stable over time.

This does not mean that the effort put toward sculpting emotionally intelligent behaviors is a waste of time. It simply means that focus and dedication is required. The same goes for helping others to act with EQ when they are not naturally inclined to do so. Here are five critical steps for developing EQ:

Turn self-deception into self-awareness. Personality, and thereby EQ, is composed of two parts: identity (how we see ourselves) and reputation (how others see us). For most people there is a disparity between identity and reputation that can cause them to ignore feedback and derail. Real self-awareness is about achieving a realistic view of one’s strengths and weaknesses and of how those strengths and weaknesses compare to others’. For instance, most people rate their own EQ highly, yet only a minority of those individuals will be rated as emotionally intelligent by others. Turning self-deception into self-awareness will not happen without accurate feedback, the kind that comes from data-based assessments such as a valid personality tests or 360-degree feedback surveys. Such tools are fundamental to help us uncover EQ-related blind spots, not least because other people are generally too polite to give us negative feedback.

Turn self-focus into other-focus. Paying due attention to others is tantamount to career success. But for those with lower levels of EQ, it’s difficult to see things from others’ perspectives, especially when there is no clear right or wrong way forward. Developing an other-centric approach starts with a basic appreciation and acknowledgement of team members’ individual strengths, weaknesses, and beliefs. Brief but frequent discussions with team members will lead to a more thorough understanding of how to motivate and influence others. Such conversations should inspire ways to create opportunities for collaboration, teamwork, and external networking.

Be more rewarding to deal with. People who are more employable and successful in their career tend to be seen as more rewarding to deal with. Rewarding people tend to be cooperative, friendly, trusting, and unselfish. Unrewarding individuals tend to be more guarded and critical; they are willing to speak their minds and disagree openly but can develop a reputation for being argumentative, pessimistic, and confrontational. Although this reputation helps enforce high standards, it’s only a matter of time before it erodes relationships and the support for initiatives that accompany them. It’s important that these individuals ensure an appropriate level of interpersonal contact before tasking someone or asking them for help. Proactively and frequently sharing knowledge and resources without an expectation for reciprocity will go a long way.

Control your temper tantrums. Passion and intense enthusiasm can easily cross the line to become moodiness and outright excitability when the pressure’s on. Nobody likes a crybaby. And in the business world, those who become particularly disappointed or discouraged when unanticipated issues arise are viewed as undeserving of a seat at the grown-ups’ table. If you’re one of many people who suffer from too much emotional transparency, reflect on which situations tend to trigger feelings of anger or frustration and monitor your tendency to overreact in the face of setbacks. For example, if you wake up to a bunch of annoying emails, don’t respond immediately — wait until you have time to calm down. Likewise, if someone makes an irritating comment during a meeting, control your reaction and keep calm. While you cannot go from being Woody Allen to being the Dalai Lama, you can avoid stressful situations and inhibit your volatile reactions by detecting your triggers. Start working on tactics that help you become aware of your emotions in real time, not only in terms of how you experience them, but, more important, in terms of how they are being experienced by others.

Display humility, even if it’s fake. Sometimes it can feel like you’re working on an island managed by six-year-olds. But if you’re the type of person who often thinks, “I’m surrounded by idiots,” then it’s likely that your self-assured behaviors are seen as being arrogant, forceful, and incapable of admitting mistakes. Climbing the organizational ladder requires an extraordinary degree of self-belief, which, up to a certain point, is seen as inspirational. However, the most-effective leaders are the ones who don’t seem to believe their own hype, for they come across as humble. Striking a healthy balance between assertiveness and modesty, demonstrating receptiveness to feedback and the ability to admit one’s mistakes, is one of the most difficult tasks to master. When things go wrong, team members seek confident leadership, but they also hope to be supported and taught with humility as they work to improve the situation. To develop this component of EQ, it is sometimes necessary to fake confidence, and it’s even more important to fake humility. We live in a world that rewards people for hiding their insecurities, but the truth is that it is much more important to hide one’s arrogance. That means swallowing one’s pride, picking and choosing battles, and looking for opportunities to recognize others, even if you feel you are right and others are wrong.

While the above recommendations may be hard to follow all the time, you will still benefit if you can adopt them some of the time. Much as with other coaching interventions, the goal here is not to change your personality but to replace counterproductive behaviors with more-adaptive actions — to build new habits that replace toxic tendencies and improve how others perceive you. This is why, when coaching works, it invalidates the results of a personality test: Your default predispositions are no longer evidenced in your behaviors.

This article was originallypublished in Harvard Business Review on January 9, 2017, and was authored by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Michael Sanger.

There is a well-known story about a cleaner at NASA who, when asked by JFK what his job was, responded “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.” This anecdote is often used to show how even the most mundane job can be seen as meaningful with the right mindset and under a good leadership.

Today, more and more employees demand much more than a good salary from their jobs. Money may lure people into jobs, but purpose, meaning, and the prospect of interesting and valuable work determines both their tenure and how hard they will work while they are on the job. Finding meaning at work has become so important that there are even public rankings for the most meaningful jobs. Although there are many factors determining how appealing jobs tend to be, those that contribute to improving other people’s lives are ranked top (e.g., health care and social work). Interestingly, meta-analytic studies indicated that there is only a marginal association between pay and job satisfaction. A lawyer who earns $150,000 a year is no more engaged than a freelance designer who earns $35,000 a year.

Research consistently shows that people experiencing meaningful work report better health, wellbeing, teamwork and engagement; they bounce back faster from setbacks and are more likely to view mistakes as learning opportunities rather than failures. In other words, people at work are more likely to thrive and grow when they experience their job as meaningful. This is why businesses with a stronger and clearer sense of purpose tend to have better financial performance. Unsurprisingly, the most successful companies in the world are also the best places in the world to work.

Over the past few decades, a great deal of research has shown that leaders play a significant role in helping employees understand why their roles matter. Furthermore, the leadership characteristics that enable these cultures of meaning and purpose to engage employees are a reflection of a leader’s personality — which has been proven to have a strong impact on team and organizational performance.

In particular, research suggests that there are four key personality characteristics that determine leaders’ ability to make other people’s jobs more meaningful, namely:

They are curious and inquisitive. Studies show that people tend to experience work as meaningful when they feel like they are contributing to creating something new — especially when they feel able to explore, connect and have an impact. Curious leaders help people find meaning at work by exploring, asking questions, and engaging people in ideas about the future. In a way, curious leaders help employees find something meaningful by providing a wider range of possibilities for how work gets done, as opposed to being very prescriptive and micromanage people. Curious leaders are also more likely to get bored and detest monotony, so they will always be looking for people to come up with new ideas to make their own experience of work more interesting.

They are challenging and relentless. One of the greatest problems organizations must solve is the inertia and stagnation that follow success, or even its anticipation. Research shows that optimistic people who expect to do well don’t try as hard as people who expect to struggle or fail. Leaders who remain ambitious in the face of both failure and success, and who push their people to remain dissatisfied with their accomplishments, instill a deeper sense of purpose in their teams and organizations. As a result employees feel a sense of progress, reinvention, and growth, which in turn results in a more meaningful and positive work experience.

They hire for values and culture fit. Research shows that people only find something valuable if it aligns with their core needs and motives. This is why the fit between an individual’s personal values and the culture of the organization they work in is such an important driver of their performance. In fact, you are better off not hiring the best, but instead people who are a good fit for your organization. Values function like an inner compass or lens through which we assign meaning to the world. Leaders who pay attention to what each individual values are more likely to hire people who will find it easier to connect with their colleagues and the wider organization, all of which help to drive a sense of meaning.

They are able to trust people. Most people hate being micromanaged. Overpowering and controlling bosses are serious source of disempowerment for employees. This drains the impact from the work they do and makes them feel worthless. In stark contrast, leaders who know how to trust people are more likely to give them room to experiment and grow. In particular, they help people mould their roles — something researchers call job crafting. Employees who customize their job tend to feel a much greater sense of importance and value because they feel that their manager actually trusts them.

Note that all the above four qualities ought to exist in concert. A boss who is relentless but not trusting might seek to “keep people on their toes” by being erratic or unpredictable — a sure way to hurt performance and morale. A boss who is challenging but not curious may come across as a bully, while a boss who’s trusting but not challenging will seem like a pushover. In short, there is a clear difference between making work meaningful and making it fun or easy, just like there is a big difference between an engaged and a happy employee. Whereas engagement results in enthusiasm, drive, and motivation— all of which increase performance and are therefore valuable to the organization — happiness can lead to complacency. To be a good leader, focus on helping employees find meaning in their achievements, rather than just enjoy their time at the office.

This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review on August 9, 2017, and was authored by Lewis Garrad and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

*This article was originally published for The Association for British Psychology.  

Has your empathy and compassion ever led to anxiety about what others think of you? Has your competitive nature ever made enemies? Has your persuasiveness ever led to manipulation? We all possess dark side traits which may have helped us achieve success in the past but if we don’t keep these traits in check, they’ll eventually catch up and may well lead to detrimental outcomes. Given the topical nature of toxic leadership and scandalous behaviour, we found ‘The Dark Side’ to be a fitting theme for the Association for Business Psychology (ABP) conference this year in October.

As an ABP Committee member, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of interviewing the one and only Dr. Robert Hogan, who started Hogan Assessments with his wife Joyce in1987 and put dark side traits on the map. We discussed the dark side of personality, what it is and why it’s crucial for organisations to pay attention to.

Personality has a very real impact on organisational outcomes—bad managers lead to toxic environments that kill engagement and negatively impact productivity. Managerial failure is easy to identify, but the ‘why’ is much more difficult to uncover. Thanks to organisational research from psychologists, we can identify these traits very early on and either develop leaders to manage their dark side, or simply find another place for them (i.e outside of the organisation).

Dark side traits are those which exhibit when a strength is overused (e.g persuasiveness becomes manipulation), or when stress, boredom or fatigue leads to certain—sometimes extreme—behaviours that can derail a career. Popular discourse and plenty of past research has largely focused on ‘bright side’ traits like engagement and motivation but it’s important to recognise the other end of the spectrum.

In this brief exchange, I ask Dr. Hogan all about the dark side of personality. Fun fact: it was Dr. Hogan who coined the term ‘dark side’ after reading an article about psychological phenomena that seemed as “bizarre as the dark side of the moon”. This article inspired him to reference our extreme personality traits as the “dark side of personality”.

Skye Trubov: What is the dark side all about?

Dr. Hogan: The dark side is all about failed managers: why they fail, how they create alienation and destroy engagement and productivity of companies. There are significant consequences associated with the dark side. We break it down into three main factors, the first is intimidation and bullying, the second has to do with charm and seduction, the third [category] is something like false compliance and antisocial behaviour.

ST: Why is it important?

Dr. H: There are real financial consequences that show the impact of bad leadership. Academic research has focused mostly on good qualities of leadership by examining the qualities that make a strong leader, so [I said] we know about the good ones, what about the bad ones? How many bad ones are out there? Turns out there’s a whole lot more out there than anyone would have imagined. When I started looking into this concept 20 years ago, I did a bit of research to conclude that the incompetency of management in the corporate world is 60-70%, which both aligns with average rate of disengagement, which is about 75% based on surveys, and also greatly contradicts the professional estimates of 3% to 5% – so what we need to focus on is A) what is the base rate in organisations, and B) what causes that? ST: Do you see an industry or a business unit with managers that demonstrates these dark traits more than others?

Dr. H: The answer is sort of. You cannot have a military career without something called dutiful and diligent [which are two out of the eleven subscales measured in the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) used to determine dark side traits]. You can’t have a career in sales without high scores on colourful and mischievous and you can’t have a career in banking without high scores on the sceptical, cautious and reserved scales. So, different roles might draw people who specialise in different areas of the dark side.

ST: It’s not too difficult to spot dark side traits in managers… Do you think some people are just jerks or can we boil it down to personality? How much can we attribute circumstance and environment to one’s behaviour?

Dr. H: I’m an old-school Freudian and I think early on experience really matters and all these dark side characteristics had a path at some point. They’re patterns of behaviours that are learned. These features can provide positive feedback and therefore reinforce these behaviours. Even into adulthood. I call these short-term wins and long-term losses. In any single interaction or meeting, these dark side traits will give you a reaction but this accumulates over time, like radiation. [does this last sentence add much?]

ST: How do you see assessment changing in the next 5 years?

Dr. H: I think delivery vehicles will change but there are two real issues: change v. improvement. I think improvements will come as a result of regular progressive advancements but change will come in the form of delivering an assessment on a [mobile] phone or doing personality assessment by reading facebook etc. so two issues: how will it change and how will it improve? It will change in superficial and glittery ways and it will improve systematically and incrementally, one item at a time.

ST: How do you see all of this influencing HR? What’s their responsibility?

An essential point for understanding leadership [is] to manage the talent in a way that’s leading to organisational productivity. The data show clearly that every financial outcome of an organisation can be tied back to engagement, and bad leadership destroys engagement and flexibility. If I were in HR, that would be my sole focus. At an innate level, I would implore HR people to pay attention to data as opposed to tracking fads.  [The industry is] unbelievably ridden with fads.

ST: Where do you see the ABP offering value to organisations?

I see the ABP offering value as a clearing house of organisational trends and clearing out the crap of fads claiming to be psychology.

ST: Finally, what are your dark side traits?

MINE?! Oh jeez. Let’s just say that I really struggled writing the bold or narcissism items. The sceptical and paranoid items I wrote in one setting and didn’t have to revise a single item.

Dr. Hogan is speaking as a keynote at the Association for Business Psychology Conference on 12-13 October in London. Visit the ABP website for more details on tickets and award/speaker slot submissions (deadline 12 June) – submissions are free and open to anyone.

In business, sustainable growth is no certainty, and often takes several years to accomplish. Even at Hogan, the business did not experience rapid growth until more than a decade after the company was founded. This is what makes Hogan’s European distributor Awair’s story so incredible. In just five years – three as a Hogan distributor – the company has experienced rapid, yet smart, organizational growth and success.

Although the company was founded in Italy, Awair has since expanded across Mediterranean Europe to establish and maintain a presence in Spain and France. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Roman history. They are most definitely experts in geographic expansion.

As part of our Distributor Spotlight Series, our friends at Awair have offered to tell their story so that we can share it with the masses. In it, one can easily understand what has made their organization so successful, and why the future is even more promising due to their stellar leadership and expertise.

“All roads lead to Rome,” as our wise ancestors said. For Hogan, the road took a while to complete, but then the old motto proved trustworthy, and Hogan Assessments finally landed in Italy with Awair in 2014. Now, they are there to stay – and to make an impact.

Awair is a fast-growing consulting company which stands out as the one-stop-shop for assessments. Established in Milan in 2012, it is a young organization, yet firmly grounded on the distinctive competences of its founders, each of them with over 20 years of professional background. 

“We serve multinational corporations, as well as large and medium domestic companies, head hunters, recruiters, and professional coaches. Our partnership with Hogan gives us a competitive advantage for the depth and scope of the analysis we can carry out, a great value added that our clients do acknowledge,” says Massimo Meroni, Awair Co-founder.

Francesca Antonini points out that Hogan’s and Awair’s DNAs are effectively compatible, “At Awair, we believe that business success depends on becoming aware – at personal and organizational level – of one’s own strengths and challenges. We help organizations realize this through a highly specialized and customized use of Hogan instruments.”

Gianfranco Gennaro brings his clear vision on the organizational priorities related to people development: “Awair designs and implements development centres that integrate Hogan tools to reach the expected goals and the best fit with the organizational culture.”

Awair is the ideal partner to accomplish organizational transformation. Andrea Facchini, the most recently appointed Partner, has no doubt: “We are passionate to help organizations implement successful programs of talent management and simplify transformation as well as leadership development. We provide coaches, consultants and HR specialists with personalized training and Hogan certification programs.”

Awair’s enthusiasm for Hogan products only equals its natural ambition for international expansion. Today, the company is proud to distribute Hogan tools and know-how in France and Spain as well, through its newly-founded local offices in Paris and Barcelona.

Gilles Dacquet and Ernest Sant are Awair’s French and Spanish Partners, respectively. The whole international team agrees that: “Taking personality assessment at the heart of performance improvement programs is still a great challenge in Mediterranean countries – and one we are glad to embrace and sure to win – together with Hogan – because the potential is huge.

Results are already there to be seen. Overall, in less than three years since the first workshop took place in Milan, almost 300 professionals have completed their Hogan certification program with Awair

Among Awair’s success stories with clients, the collaboration with insurance leader Generali Group must be mentioned. Hogan tools are part of Generali’s wide range of development offering to its executives and talents. Hogan helps executives enhance their levels of self-awareness, thus maximising its potential impact. Anna Chiara Lucchini, Head of Group Academy and Leadership Development at Generali Group summarizes the partnership: “The Awair team was very effective in gaining trust on the field and tailoring the solutions and processes on our needs, as well as available to adapt to our compelling deadlines and requests. Thanks to their deep knowledge and expertise, our executives and managers reported a positive and enriching development experience.”

Conventional wisdom suggests that the most charismatic leaders are also the best leaders. Charismatic leaders have, for instance, the ability to inspire others toward higher levels of performance and to instill deep levels of commitment, trust, and satisfaction. As a result, they are generally perceived by their subordinates to be more effective, compared with less charismatic leaders.

But our research shows that while having at least a moderate level of charisma is important, having too much may hinder a leader’s effectiveness. We conducted three studies, involving 800 business leaders globally and around 7,500 of their superiors, peers, and subordinates. Leaders occupied different managerial levels, ranging from supervisors to general managers. Our paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

First, it’s important to understand what charisma is. Traditional models of charismatic leadership state that charisma is not a personality trait, but simply exists in the eye of the beholder. In other words, charisma is attributed to someone, as opposed to being grounded in one’s personality.

However, the observation that people tend to agree in their perceptions of others’ charisma levels suggests that it is not only a matter of attribution, and that this agreement might result from a personality-based foundation underlying these perceptions. So the first goal of our research was to establish a measure of charismatic personality.

We gave leaders the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), a personality inventory specifically designed for work applications, and looked at how they scored on four personality tendencies: bold, colorful, mischievous, and imaginative. More-charismatic leaders score high on these traits, which is reflected in their high self-confidence, dramatic flair, readiness to test the limits, and expansive visionary thinking.

Next, we conducted a study to confirm this cluster of traits as a valid measure of charismatic personality. Using a sample of 204 business leaders, we showed that charismatic personality related to subordinates’ perceptions of charismatic leadership. So leaders with a highly charismatic personality, as measured with HDS charisma, were also perceived to be highly charismatic by their subordinates. Using an archival data set from 1998 on a sample of 156 people, we further showed that HDS charisma levels could be predicted by people’s charismatic behaviors (for example, being energetic, assertive, and generating enthusiasm).

Our second goal was to investigate the relationship between charismatic personality and leader effectiveness. In a second study, 306 leaders (65% of them men) provided HDS self-ratings of their charismatic personality, while their coworkers provided ratings of their overall effectiveness using a 10-point rating scale, where 5 is adequate and 10 is outstanding. Taken together, 4,345 of their coworkers participated in this study: 666 superiors; 1,659 peers; and 2,020 subordinates. An average of 14 people rated each leader in terms of overall effectiveness.

Consistent with our expectations, we found that as charisma increased, so did perceived effectiveness — but only up to a certain point. As charisma scores continued to increase beyond the 60th percentile, which is just above the average score relative to the general population of working adults, perceived effectiveness started to decline. This trend was consistent across the three observer groups (subordinates, peers, and supervisors).

We also asked the leaders to evaluate their own effectiveness. As shown below, the more charismatic the leaders were, the higher they rated their own effectiveness. This discrepancy between self-perceptions and observer ratings is in line with other research demonstrating that leaders with high self-esteem typically overrate their performance on a variety of criteria.

In a third study, we tested whether the effects of charismatic personality on effectiveness could be explained by looking at specific leader behaviors. To test this, we asked 287 business leaders (81% men) to rate their charismatic personality, and an average of 11 coworkers — including supervisors, peers, and subordinates — to rate each leader in terms of overall effectiveness. Additionally, coworkers now also rated leaders on two pairs of opposing leader-behavior dimensions: the extent to which they were forceful and enabling (tapping into the interpersonal behavior dimensions, or how they led), and the extent to which they were strategic and operational (representing the organizational dimensions, or what they led).

Although we did not find significant relationships between charisma and the interpersonal behavior dimensions, we found that highly charismatic leaders were perceived to engage in more strategic behavior and less operational behavior. But how can this explain lower effectiveness ratings for the most charismatic?

One explanation is that the costs associated with the desired trait (charisma) eventually come to outweigh its benefits. For highly charismatic leaders, we expected that the costs associated with a lack of operational behavior would come to outweigh the benefits delivered by strategic behavior when a certain level of charisma is exceeded. And that’s exactly what we found: Highly charismatic leaders may be strategically ambitious, but this comes at the expense of getting day-to-day work activities executed in a proper manner, which can hurt perceived effectiveness. They failed, for example, in managing the day-to-day operations needed to implement their big strategic vision and in taking a methodical approach to getting things done in the near term. Further analysis showed that for leaders with lower levels of charisma, the opposite was true: They were found to be less effective because they lacked strategic behavior. For example, they did not spend enough time on long-term planning, and failed in taking a big-picture perspective, questioning the status quo, and encouraging innovation.

In terms of practical implications, our findings suggest that leaders should be aware of the potential drawbacks of being highly charismatic. Although it’s difficult to draw a precise line between “just enough” and “too much” charisma, these are a few traits to look out for that can influence one’s effectiveness. Self-confidence, for instance, may turn into overconfidence and narcissism in highly charismatic leaders, while risk tolerance and persuasiveness may start to translate into manipulative behavior. Further, the enthusiastic and entertaining nature of charisma may turn into attention-seeking behaviors that distract the organization from its mission, and extreme creativity may make highly charismatic leaders think and act in fanciful, eccentric ways.

For those whose charisma may be above optimal, coaching and development programs aimed at managing potential operational weaknesses, enhancing self-awareness, and improving self-regulation can be useful. Highly charismatic leaders would also benefit from receiving feedback from their coworkers on their effectiveness. That way, any gap between their perception and the perceptions of others will become clear. In contrast, coaching programs for leaders low on charisma might focus more on boosting their strategic behavior.

In sum, we found support for the idea that a leader can be too charismatic. Our findings suggest that highly charismatic leaders are perceived to be less effective, not for interpersonal reasons like self-centeredness but for business-related reasons that specifically relate to a lack of operational leader behavior.

We do want to point out that we didn’t include situational factors in our study, which could influence the strength and shape of the relationship between leader charisma and effectiveness. Under certain conditions, such as in low-stress situations, this relationship may be strictly linear (“the more charisma the better”). However, we believe that high-stress and high-pressure situations are rather typical for a “normal” leadership context, enhancing the likelihood of finding a too-much-of-a-good-thing effect. Additional studies will be important to further investigate the specific conditions under which charisma is desirable or not.

This article was orginally published in Harvard Business Review on September 26, 2017, and was authored by Jasmine Vergauwe, Bart Wille, Joeri Hofmans, Robert B. Kaiser, and Filip De Fruyt.

Externally recruited CEOs are almost seven times more likely to be dismissed within a short tenure than those who are promoted from within the organization. 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 current business landscape and strategic objectives. In 2014, 78 percent of S&P 500 CEOs were sourced internally; most companies are paying attention to building a sustainable leadership pipeline that readies executives and potential executives to advance. But when succession plans are enacted, those high potential managers entering the executive ranks typically face a set of challenges uniquely appropriate for a coach to tackle.

MANAGING FORMER PEERS

When one suddenly becomes the superior to team members with whom she or he was engaging in daily banter just yesterday, the phrase “with friends like these…” can quickly become a go-to yoga mantra.  Former peers can serve as high potential destructors if one doesn’t work fast to shore up engagement levels and reinforce team cohesion. What a coachee might not realize is that the characteristics which helped her or him get along with lateral colleagues are not the same ones these very same people will come to expect out of their newly crowned leader. To adulterate the classic adage: what got you there…might not work once you’re there. For example, although the occasional emotional display can be seen by peers as a ding to one’s reputation in terms of composure, once those peers are direct reports, those displays affect a new manager’s reputation in terms of integrity, people skills, strategic acumen and ability to engage others. On the flip side, those who are highly ambitious and sociable tend to be rated lower on themes like integrity, composure and people skills by peers. Yet, direct reports simply see these characteristics as engaging. When a coach is privy to these data, it is easier to contextualize the recommendations as a manager transitions to a new role.

WORKING WITH BIG EGOS (AS EQUALS)

Confidence got you noticed. The farther you scale the hierarchy, the higher that confidence likely becomes, as does the confidence of those around you as they too strive toward the top. Confronting a room full of egos set up as equals presents quite the debacle for a newly anointed executive looking to quickly establish credibility. Do I punch the biggest ego in the face, so to speak, and demand respect from the rest of the tribe? Do I hide in the tall grass and await the perfect time to pounce on an opportunity to showcase my killer instincts? Do I model the most respected of the village and wait for the others to implicitly label me as a leader? Understanding the nuances of the team culture will be key to determining the most effective way to address this scenario. What works in a climate defined by getting ahead can fail miserably in a place where getting along is the ultimate goal and vice versa. A more immediately implementable approach would be to evaluate the roles each executive peer prefers to play. Guiding a coachee on how to identify who tends to focus on results, processes or relationships, and who tends to be the pragmatists versus the innovators can help the coachee anticipate the positions these stakeholders are likely to adopt in the future (so as to better support or more intelligently refute each). Doing so also helps the coachee identify gaps or blind spots in the group perspective that are conducive to the coachee quickly adding value.

FARTHER INTO THE MATRIX

“It’s a trap!” Disagreements among senior leaders are nothing new. Neither is the common challenge of managing upwards. But in the upper echelons of an organization, compulsions to influence, command and control can go into hyper drive. Initial reporting into this stratum of political jockeying may lead a new executive to unknowingly agree with each of the opposing forces; a deferential approach in this context cultivates perceptions that the coachee lacks passionate points of view and is weak at defending the team that reports to her or him in the face of undeserved criticism. It’s important for the coachee to have time during the coaching engagement to organize and practice articulating their business philosophies and to come up with strategies to defend them during pressurized circumstances. Parameters for picking and choosing battles should also be discussed.

It’s easy to see how the challenges described above can force anyone to take pause and consider the downsides of their ambitions. But these obstacles are much easier to surmount if the candidate is prepared beforehand with a solid lineup of internal and external (i.e., a coach) resources that support sustainable success.

This post originally appeared on the International Coach Federation blog on August 21, 2017.