Here’s a little punk-rock music history for you:

Prior to his 2009 conviction for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, Phil Spector was one of music’s most accomplished producers – crafting the legendary “wall of sound” that defined 1960s pop music. When Spector paired with the Ramones to produce their 1979 album End of the Century, it was widely considered a meeting of some of the greatest minds in music.

However, the partnership was anything but harmonious. Spector was a maniacal producer, constantly remixing songs and reportedly holding the band at gunpoint while he forced guitarist Johnny Ramone to play the opening chord of “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” hundreds of times. The result? An album that cost more than $700,000 (about $2.4 million today) and is considered by critics, fans, and the band itself to be the Ramones worst work.

What does any of this have to do with anything? It illustrates three ways that companies typically mismanage their creative employees.

1. Holding them hostage – OK, so your managers probably aren’t brandishing firearms at their employees (we hope), but they may not be giving them the space they need to be creative.

Giving people freedom and flexibility enhances creativity 
at work. Don’t constrain your creative employees; don’t force them to follow processes or structures. Let them work remotely and outside normal hours; don’t ask where they are, what they are doing, or how they do it.

2. Surrounding them with too many other creative people – Creative people don’t play well together; 360° data demonstrates that innovative individuals are driven by the desire for success and control and display above-average drive and competitiveness. When two of these personalities collide, they tend to compete for ideas or keep them to themselves.

Spector had his vision for the album, and the Ramones had theirs. Forcefully combining the two resulted in a lack-luster end product.

3. Putting them under bad managers – Research shows that about 75% of managers have no business being in charge of others, and nothing kills creativity like a crappy boss. This could account for an Adobe survey in which only one in four respondents said they were living up to their creative potential.

Whether or not Spector actually held the band at gunpoint, the Ramones all expressed disappointment in the songwriting on End of the Century.

Want to know more about managing your creative employees? Check out our complimentary eBook, 5 ways to Manage Creativity and Drive Innovation.

For me, nothing is better than a good Bill Murray movie – especially the underappreciated 1981 classic Stripes. In case you aren’t familiar, here is the plot synopsis on Rotten Tomatoes.

One of my favorite characters in the film is Sgt. Hulka, the hard-assed drill sergeant that makes Murray’s boot camp experience a living hell until he is unwittingly injured on the artillery range.

Hulka’s particular brand of abuse is funny and relatively mild – limited to pushups and latrine duty – but according to a Jan. 6 story on NPR, the non-fictional U.S. Army has a real and decidedly unfunny problem with its leadership.

The story details the results of the military branch’s investigation into last year’s rash of suicides and suicide attempts among soldiers stationed in Iraq. According to the report, many of the 30 who attempted or completed suicide last year had one thing in common: toxic leaders.

The corporate world is no stranger to toxic leaders; most people have worked for one at some point in their careers. Under the strain of a combat deployment, however, toxic leaders actions can push already fragile soldiers over the edge.

“Oftentimes platoon leaders will take turns seeing who can smoke this guy the worst. Seeing who can dream up the worst torture, seeing who can dream up the worst duties, seeing who can make this guy’s life the most miserable,” says [researcher Dave] Matusda. “When you’re ridden mercilessly, there’s just no letup, a lot of folks begin to fold.”

Thankfully, the Army is taking aggressive steps to fix their leadership problem, instituting anonymous 360 reviews for more than 1,000 commanders by next year as well as kicking out several officers. Check out the full story over at NPR.

Hiring managers live in the most technologically advanced age yet. We’ve gone digital – our complete work and life experience all neatly splayed out on LinkedIn and Facebook. So why has recruitment not progressed beyond the interview? In his latest blog for The Guardian, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic offers 4 reasons the digital age has yet to revolutionize recruitment.
 
Reason 1: “You can only predict what you can measure.” Many companies rely on gut instincts in their hiring process which leads to what Chamorro-Premuzic calls “a game of untested predictions, which turns recruitment into a leap of faith.” If companies want a more reliable hiring system, they should take advantage of measurement tools that process the mass of data available in the digital age. Hogan’s assessment suite uncovers the hidden attributes of the shy researcher and removes the mask of charm from a less-skilled candidate so employers can make more informed hiring decisions through psychometric assessments.
 
Check out reasons 2, 3, and 4 which deal with crowdsourcing talent, data scraping, and gamification in the full blog post.

I can think of few more noble/worthy causes than breaking the cycle of poverty through improving childhood educational outcomes. Here in Oklahoma, much of that work is being done through an organization called Tulsa Educare, a research-based program that brings the best early childhood practices to underserved and at-risk populations. Tulsa Educare is the first program of its kind to be implemented on such a large scale, and as such has been making news – the New York Times recently featured Tulsa Educare and suggested it as a model for a nation-wide program.

Like an organization, Educare’s success comes down to its leadership and its teachers, and for the past three years, Hogan has had the great fortune of working with the organization on a philanthropic basis to provide tools to help them select teachers and train their management teams. And, we are currently working on a criterion study that will help pinpoint the personality characteristics typical of an exemplary Educare teacher.

Personally, the Educare program strikes a chord. It aligns with my background in educational psychology and my prior work with the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Human Services. And, as a new father, I understand the desire to provide our kids with every advantage. Hopefully someday access to free early childhood education will be available to every family in the U.S. Until then, we at Hogan are happy we’re able to help.

Are you good at reading people? How about reading your boss? In his Huffington Post article “Reversed Leadership: How to Manage Your Boss,” Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic offers a crash course in behavioral analysis.
 
Is your boss the quiet type? Impulsive? Creative? A hedonistic workaholic? Once you’ve profiled him like the BAU squad in Criminal Minds, check out Chamorro-Premuzic’s advice for how to get around his quirks and idiosyncrasies. “Figure out who he is, what he wants, and why he does what he does; work out the bright- and the dark-side aspects of his personality. Then, adjust your behaviors to fit with his style, values, and interests,” suggests Chamorro-Premuzic. Check out the full article and learn a few helpful tips on dealing with your boss.

What do Ron Johnson, Robert Nardelli, and Jack Griffin all have in common? All are smart, talented individuals who were hired to repair struggling companies and failed. Each shared a common thread: their ability to lead was undermined by a misalignment of values.

Values, a powerful, inherent part of who we are, shape the choices we make, impacting our careers in four ways:

Drivers Values are key motivators that determine what we strive for and hope to attain

Fit Values determine how well we fit within an organization’s culture

Leadership Style and Culture Values determine what we find rewarding and what we dislike

Unconscious Biases Unconscious biases occur when we project our values onto others

Learn more about how these four aspects of values are affecting your leadership style and how to avoid making a values misstep in our ebook Buyers’ Remorse.

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology posed this question using standard game theory – strategic decision making – in a recent social experiment. In the experiment, two people interact, each with the option of competing or cooperating. If both cooperate, both win; if one competes while the other cooperates, the selfish person wins even bigger.

Participants were provided information regarding the other person’s reputation as either selfish or cooperative. As expected, if a person expected to interact with someone with a reputation for selfishness, he or she would behave selfishly, but if a person expected to interact with someone with a reputation for cooperation, he or she would tend to cooperate.

The real kicker, however, concerned a particular wrinkle. In some cases, researchers would provide participants with both data regarding the other person’s performance and description of that person’s reputation. Participants invariably trusted the reputation rather than the data.

What does this mean? That reputation trumps fact in some cases. That’s why self-awareness and reputation management are essential to the success of our daily interactions. To learn more about how reputation can affect every aspect of your work relationships, check out our ebook Who Are You?

For most people, there is a vast disparity between identity (how you see yourself) and reputation (how others see you). This disparity causes them to overestimate their strengths, ignore feedback, deny their shortcomings, and, ultimately, damage their reputations.

Take Michael Scott from The Office, for example (possibly the worst offender of this disparity). Reputation descriptor that comes to mind? Clueless. How would he describe himself? Well…

How his coworkers would describe him? Impulsive, poor attention to detail and social cues, terrible listener, offensively insensitive…the list goes on. While his staff is consistently loyal, most employees wouldn’t put up with a boss this unaware.

Ideas worth spreading. TED’s tagline has been sending thrill-chills down the spines of knowledge-hungry dilettantes and the curious erudite alike. TED, one of the most well-established non-profit organizations that pedestals the pursuit of knowledge, showcases some of the greatest minds in the Technology, Entertainment, and Design sectors. In one short, neatly packaged talk, presenters share their current and sometimes futuristic perspectives on fascinating and ground-breaking ideas. Topics have ranged from enlightening Americans on the origin of General Tso’s chicken to proposing a self-repairing underwater architecture to keep Venice from turning into an Atlantis, and featured speakers from Malcolm Gladwell to Bill Gates.

On October 8th, one of Hogan’s own, Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, joined the ranks at TED@NYC with a presentation based on his latest book, Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt.

Photo by Ryan Lash

 

Cheers to you, Tomas!

I watch too much TV.  From my morning dose of sports and news to my evening schedule of news and comedy, the part of my day not spent at work is often spent in a familiar bluish glow. My wife has her dramas, I have my comedies, and with three kids we also have to endure our fair share of animation. So you probably think this blog is about my moment of clarity and a thoughtful effort to break this addiction to TV. Nope. Not a chance. BACK OFF.

At a recent dinner with friends, we saw a commercial advertising the premier of one of the fall’s new shows. Each fall TV schedule brings a few original ideas and a lot of garbage, and unfortunately the show we saw advertised fell into the latter group. So we started talking about how a few bona fide gems make it to air amidst a tidal wave of the mediocre and downright awful, and I considered what role personality and leadership play in this puzzle.

As with any industry, some television execs see their purpose as advancing their own agenda.  When this self-centered view is combined with a lack of self-awareness about one’s personality, what ultimately appears on millions of televisions is often uninteresting, dated, and quickly cancelled. However, when executives focus on creating and sustaining high performing teams and on proactively managing their own personalities, the products they create can be truly creative, thought-provoking, and starkly original.

Few of us work in jobs where our products are viewed and judged by millions of people, but each of us is responsible for producing something. Once we prove that we are able to meet the technical demands of our jobs, what determines our success or failure is our personalities and how we lead others. If we are actively involved in managing our personalities at work, we are better prepared to produce the next big hit in our own jobs. If not, we may create the next big miss.