Through natural selection, psychological mechanisms have evolved to solve adaptive problems. In other words, the brain is not a general purpose apparatus, every animals’ brain is the result of its evolutionary history—and even though we’d like to think otherwise, humans are no different. Buss (1995) elucidated this point by noting, “all humans have a nature—a human nature that differs from cat nature, rat nature, and bat nature. That nature requires particular forms of environmental input for its development”. For this reason, animals with genetic similarities and environmental pressures have similar natures.

Human nature shares commonalities with many other social primates. Take chimpanzees for example. In the context of violent warfare (the wild), chimpanzees live in groups, have status hierarchies, and display cultural differences between groups (just like our organizations do). Given this, what factors are most important to the survival of a chimp in the wild? Quite simply, survival depends on being in or choosing a strong group, getting along within the group, and being at the top of the group’s hierarchy. So, if you see two ingratiating chimps grooming each other, they’re trying to get along. And, if you see chimps displaying aggressive behaviors (within or between groups), it’s likely they’re fighting for dominance, resources, and ultimately survival.

Humans have similar evolutionary consistent underlying motivations, and they’re posited by the three components of socioanalytic theory: (1) getting along with others, (2) getting ahead within the hierarchy, and (3) finding meaning and purpose. Similar to chimps, we want to get along with others and fear rejection. We want to obtain status and fear losing power and control of resources. And third, we want to find meaning in life and fear unpredictability and losing control. These motivations drive human behavior, and social interaction (in humans and chimps) involves negotiating for these things—and it’s our personalities that determine if we get them.

Personality, though, is about individual differences. There are two components of personality—the view you have of you (identity) and the view others have of you (reputation). Identity, or what you think about you, is formed through feedback from others, and it determines your values and the roles you’ll play. Human behavior is a function of identity, and identity varies between people. Some people have a stronger need than others to get along, get ahead, and find meaning.

Reputation, or what others think about you, concerns how we present our identities to the world. Since the people around you give you your underlying needs (status and acceptance), your reputation is vastly consequential. For instance, if a group converges in perceiving you as untrustworthy, you will likely be removed from the group (regardless of your identity), resulting in various negative outcomes such as loneliness (loss of acceptance), depression (loss of status and control), and diminution of resources. Due to the objectivity (lack of psychological biases) of reputation, it is easier to study than identity, and a better predictor of job performance and life outcomes (salary, popularity in school, etc…).

Aristotle once said, “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”  Humans are largely unconscious of their underlying motivations, identity, and reputation—but we can become conscious through strategic self-awareness. Strategic self-awareness has three components: knowing your identity (this is what Aristotle was after), knowing how your identity transfers to reputation, and knowing your reputation. This knowledge is achieved through assessment, feedback, and coaching. Here at Hogan, we want you to know how we see you, because that is what determines your success or failure in work and life.

In the end, from generation to generation, and from social primate to social primate, we’re all just in the game of life searching for love, glory, and meaning. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “And so it goes…”

Earlier this month, Hogan’s Global Alliances team was proud to host nearly two dozen individuals from around the world for the first edition of Hogan University, later coined Hogan U. Held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Hogan headquarters reside, the event featured three days of presentations, training sessions, and interactions with the Tulsa staff. As always, there were several opportunities for great food, drinks, and conversation to please all of us with high Hedonism and Affiliation scores.

Hogan U was created to accelerate the Hogan-related learning and orientation of our international distributors’ high-potential employees. The curriculum focuses on several primary interests from our distributor network, including direct selling techniques, marketing and social media tactics, competency-based solutions, and new Hogan products.

Further, the event provided significant takeaways for the Hogan team itself. For me, time with our global network always confirms an important perspective: each of our international distributors faces unique challenges in their respective territories; however, every market has an appetite for the use of personality assessments to predict performance. Our team is tasked with the challenge, albeit exciting, to understand each market intimately and address various challenges, all the while knowing that the need for valid, predictable personality assessments is everywhere.

We are thrilled that our international guests embraced the event whole-heartedly and received some great pieces of information to take back to their home countries and organizations. Personally, I’m also delighted our guests enjoyed Tulsa’s southern charm, honky-tonk and all.

For pictures of the Hogan U Welcome Reception and conference, please see our Facebook page.

It’s safe to say that Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, which operates more than 400 companies, knows how to run a company.

Even so, it is rare to hear even the most successful of business leaders state something so perfectly as Branson did when he declared in a recent LinkedIn blog post: “The first thing to look for when searching for a great employee is somebody with a personality that fits with your company culture. Most skills can be learned, but it is difficult to train people on their personality.”

We’ve been preaching the gospel of fit – the extent to which a person’s personality aligns with a particular job, position, or organization – for a while, but there’s nothing like hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth.

For more of Branson’s tips for managing his people and running an empire, check out Inc’s video series here.

Did you know that trust in one’s superior predicts the entire range of desirable organizational outcomes: productivity, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment? Good leaders can build trust by embodying four essential qualities: integrity, judgment, competence, and vision.

Personality predicts leadership style, which in turn, directly impacts employee engagement. Companies whose employees are engaged show higher returns on assets, are more profitable, and yield nearly twice the value to their shareholders compared to companies characterized by low employee engagement. Disengagement, on the other hand, results in an estimated $300 billion in lost productivity in the U.S. each year!

Because leadership can make or break an organization, it’s imperative we find out all we can about what it means to be a good leader. So, let us share with you What We Know About Leadership and discover the answer to organizational success.

Do you get belligerent when things go wrong? Do you find yourself drunk with arrogance? The parallels between the dangers of over intoxication and leadership derailment are uncanny. Recently I shared a few crafted libations with partners from across our global network, and we discussed the dearth of available cocktails that pointedly appeal to an individual’s dark side. So naturally, we came up with the following menu of customized personality enhancers. It offers a number of options for entertaining that special boss or client, or for when you’re just looking to imbibe something that will reveal to your friends and colleagues who you really are.

The Excitable
This hot headed variant of the “Prairie Fire” is one part Tennessee whiskey, one part Tequila, and served in a generous shot glass with a habanero sauce floater. Once a few of these spicy voice amplifiers burn passed past your esophagus, you’ll notice a sudden increase in passionate pontification as well as chest hair. Professional swimmers and fans of the unbuttoned collar beware.

The Skeptical
Looking for a drink that arouses suspicion? Nothing says ‘whaddya think you’re lookin at’ better than this dubious brew. It’s the perfect prop for sitting at the end of a dark bar in sunglasses while you ponder the phrase ‘how are you doing tonight’ and if it was meant as an insult. The recipe is proprietary…just to get you started on the right foot.

The Cautious
Should you or shouldn’t you? Why not? After all it’s only a virgin Margarita in a plastic cup filled halfway. And if you’re not sure you’ll like it, start slow. Just a tip of the glass is enough to get a little loosened up.

The Reserved
Aged scotch, neat. Need we say more?

The Leisurely
We’ll get back to you on this one soon.

The Bold
If you’re out to show off your worth, this ‘cocky-tail’ is the one for you. We take the classic self-promoting energy drink and vodka mix and add an obnoxiously awesome protein powder. Guaranteed to inspire clever pick up lines, this drink is only appropriate for those who can handle an attitude that oozes bestness.

The Mischievous
Want to cleverly hide that ‘only-live-once’ attitude? Need to keep from looking like a bottomless lush without sacrificing a good buzz? Well if you’re searching for a drink that sneaks up on you, you’ve come to the right place. We amended the recipe for a Long Island Iced Tea to also include absinthe and a special brand of moonshine. We know it’s a bit much, but come on, it’s only one drink…

The Colorful
If sticking out from the crowd is what you’re after, try this outstanding social lubricant. Available in three inspired hues, this special blend of apple schnapps, blue curacaos and grenadine mix is poured into a fishbowl decorated by Asian cocktail umbrellas and tiny, unbelievably sharp cherry swords. Garnished with a cornucopia of fruit, you are sure to be remembered.

The Imaginative
We thought to ourselves, what if we combined one liquor from each country we do business with, in even parts, but we locally sourced the bottles so as to ensure the end-result’s genuine nature, and once we got the ingredients delivered, then we could experiment with recipes until we discovered the secret formula to a truly global cocktail.

The Diligent
Mastery of the measuring cup is a lost art. But we’re going to revive it with this methodically tested formula. Featuring meticulously coordinated flavors, we combine 1.42 oz of coconut rum and 37.26 oz. of cola for a thoroughly good time.

The Dutiful
Just have whatever your companion is having; as long as it would be okay with them to do that. Otherwise find out what they recommend for you.

Derail responsibly.

Sometimes effective leadership is as hard to come by as buried treasure. But don’t worry; we’re here to give you a map wherein X marks the spot for leadership mastery.

We define leadership as the ability to build an effective team, so a good leader must be someone others are willing to follow. There are four essential characteristics people look for in a leader:

• Integrity
• Judgment
• Competence
• Vision

Bad leaders, on the other hand, are ineffective and ultimately will fail because they are unable to build or maintain a functioning team. Some shared qualities of bad leaders include being arrogant, manipulative, emotionally volatile, and micromanaging.

So how can you ensure that your leadership style belongs in the first category and not the latter? Rodney Warrenfeltz, managing partner at Hogan, has built a four domain competency model for organizational success. The fourth domain, leadership, provides sample competencies such as providing direction, support, and standards for accomplishment and communicating a compelling vision.

Check out our whitepaper, What We Know About Leadership for more about the leadership domain and unearth organizational effectiveness.

Life is determined by the decisions you make; from the mundane to major life choices. When it comes to decision-making, everyone is different. There are individuals who prefer to act swiftly and seem to generate their plan midstream, while others appear to become paralyzed by what could go wrong. 

Our decisions are influenced by our personality, values, biases, emotions, and past experiences. Chances are, the people you work with are different from you in what influences their decisions. These differences can lead to conflict among colleagues, teams, and direct reports, thus causing delays and impeding progress. So, how can you ensure decisions are made in a timely manner and everyone is on board?

1. Know yourself. The first step in understanding the decisions you make is to have self-awareness. How do you make daily decisions, are you strategic or pragmatic? How does stress affect your process, do you become stuck or reckless? Does the decision you are trying to make align with your values?
2. Know your team. Do you know what is important to the person or group with whom you are working? What information have they requested in the past to make a decision? Are they currently under stress or will your request cause additional stress. Understanding that your colleague’s decision-making style can change under stressful conditions will help alleviate frustration on your part.
3. Communication. Individuals with a more direct communication style can feel as if you are trying to butter them up for a bad idea. Where individuals who tends to provide a lot of explanation, examples, and niceties might feel as if someone who communicates differently is not providing enough explanation. Pay attention to how others communicate with you. Use their communication style to relay your idea.
4. Political Savvy. As hard as it can be to navigate the political landscape of a corporation, it can be even harder getting ideas off the ground and making decisions. Becoming more adept and learning about what drives those individuals you work with can help you present information in way that speaks to their values and how they prefer to make decisions.

Driving change and influencing decision-making requires energy, savvy, and a lot of hard work.

“Happy are they who can hear their detractions and put them to mending”
 - William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

If Shakespeare is right then no one can perform optimally without feedback. Yet according to the revered American psychologist Abraham Maslow most of us are torn about giving and receiving critical feedback. He referred to this as “the need to know and the fear of knowing.”  Managers especially have a hard time obtaining useful feedback. In power relationships such as between the boss and the bossed people will not speak “their truth” if they believe it will come back to bite them. Therefore, in my experience the best solicited feedback is confidential feedback. To maintain the confidentiality you need an unbiased third party to do the surveying.

Beyond confidential feedback, managers, if they are to improve, need what my colleague Robert Hogan calls Strategic Self-Awareness. Allow me to explain; things that are known to us and known to others is public knowledge. What is known to us and unknown to others is private knowledge. The fascinating knowledge is the information that is known to others but unknown to us, commonly referred to as blind spots. When that information is revealed to us, those are illuminating moments that facilitate dramatic change. These blindside moments are sometimes hurtful but always instructive. What is unknown to us is usually well-known to others. To see ourselves as others see us is strategic self-awareness.

Through the use of assessment tools (personality tests, 360 evaluations) managers can systematically enhance learning and gain self-awareness. However, not all assessment instruments are equally effective in building strategic self-awareness. Firstly, the assessment should be designed for the workplace. This means that managers are profiled and compared to other managers along dimensions that are relevant to job performance.  

Secondly, the assessment should be able to detect two types of performance problems: deficiencies when managers display too little of an important leadership behavior and excesses when managers apply a particular behavior too much. Deficiencies normally fall in the category of public knowledge. However, excesses which ironically are strengths overused constitute blind spots. Feedback delivered in terms of too little/underdoing and too much/overdoing makes it instantly clear what you (the manager) needs to do to improve. Regrettably, most leadership assessment operates on the assumption that more is better.

First Seek Feedback, then Feed Forward

We all require feedback to determine where we stand, to establish the direction we are headed and to measure our progress along the chosen developmental path. Feedforward, the brainchild of renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith comes in the form of ideas you can put into practice in the future. Simply put feedback is about yesterday and feedforward is about tomorrow. The procedure is easy to implement: Describe your developmental goal in a one to one dialogue with anyone you know, ask for two suggestions and end by saying thank you. No evaluation or discussion around the ideas put forth are permitted by the solicitor of ideas. The beauty of feedforward is that it does not arouse defensiveness. In fact, it is energizing and forces us to follow-up: by asking, listening and enlisting others in our initiative for personal change. So remember first seek feedback then feedforward.

Guest author: Jorge Fernandez

“Happy are they who can hear their detractions and put them to mending”
 – William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

If Shakespeare is right then no one can perform optimally without feedback. Yet according to the revered American psychologist Abraham Maslow most of us are torn about giving and receiving critical feedback. He referred to this as “the need to know and the fear of knowing.”  Managers especially have a hard time obtaining useful feedback. In power relationships such as between the boss and the bossed people will not speak “their truth” if they believe it will come back to bite them. Therefore, in my experience the best solicited feedback is confidential feedback. To maintain the confidentiality you need an unbiased third party to do the surveying.

Beyond confidential feedback, managers, if they are to improve, need what my colleague Robert Hogan calls Strategic Self-Awareness. Allow me to explain; things that are known to us and known to others is public knowledge. What is known to us and unknown to others is private knowledge. The fascinating knowledge is the information that is known to others but unknown to us, commonly referred to as blind spots. When that information is revealed to us, those are illuminating moments that facilitate dramatic change. These blindside moments are sometimes hurtful but always instructive. What is unknown to us is usually well-known to others. To see ourselves as others see us is strategic self-awareness.

Through the use of assessment tools (personality tests, 360 evaluations) managers can systematically enhance learning and gain self-awareness. However, not all assessment instruments are equally effective in building strategic self-awareness. Firstly, the assessment should be designed for the workplace. This means that managers are profiled and compared to other managers along dimensions that are relevant to job performance.  

Secondly, the assessment should be able to detect two types of performance problems: deficiencies when managers display too little of an important leadership behavior and excesses when managers apply a particular behavior too much. Deficiencies normally fall in the category of public knowledge. However, excesses which ironically are strengths overused constitute blind spots. Feedback delivered in terms of too little/underdoing and too much/overdoing makes it instantly clear what you (the manager) needs to do to improve. Regrettably, most leadership assessment operates on the assumption that more is better.

First Seek Feedback, then Feed Forward

We all require feedback to determine where we stand, to establish the direction we are headed and to measure our progress along the chosen developmental path. Feedforward, the brainchild of renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith comes in the form of ideas you can put into practice in the future. Simply put feedback is about yesterday and feedforward is about tomorrow. The procedure is easy to implement: Describe your developmental goal in a one to one dialogue with anyone you know, ask for two suggestions and end by saying thank you. No evaluation or discussion around the ideas put forth are permitted by the solicitor of ideas. The beauty of feedforward is that it does not arouse defensiveness. In fact, it is energizing and forces us to follow-up: by asking, listening and enlisting others in our initiative for personal change. So remember first seek feedback then feedforward.

Guest author: Jorge Fernandez

Middle managers are perhaps the most maligned individuals in the corporate world. Most view them as roadblocks whose sole purpose is to prevent efficiency or innovation. And when business consultants come in, middle managers are the first to go.

At Hogan, we think middle managers get a bum rap. Rather than the useless bureaucrats they are made out to be, middle managers can be the key to an effective organization.

A recent article on Slate illustrates my point.

If there was ever an easy example of how layers of ineffective middle managers can break down organizational effectiveness, it’s the U.S. government and its public-facing agencies (think the IRS, the passport office, etc.). Five minutes in the DMV is all it takes to send the most levelheaded among us into a white-hot rage.

But a recent article titled “The Most Efficient Office in the World” describes a Manhattan passport office that not only received rave reviews from the authors’ friend, a management consultant, but from the general public as well (the site has a startling 4.5 stars on Yelp).

What is the secret to this lowly agency’s runaway customer satisfaction? Its manager, Michael Hoffman:

[Hoffman] faces the same combination of constraints that many middle managers in the corporate world do. He has to deal with some amount of standardization… [and] he receives visits from his supervisors at the State Department and the regional passport headquarters, who evaluate him based on performance metrics like cost savings and the rate at which passport applications are processed.

But Hoffman also has a great deal of discretion in how the place is run: the layout of the various waiting rooms, the particular queues that move people through the application process (Hoffman has chosen four: one for appointments, one for walk-ins, a special-requests line, and one for applicants with complicated cases), and the color of the walls (they’re currently a dull institutional blue; he’s planning on painting them a cheerier yellow). And it’s his job to motivate and manage his workforce. He promotes high-performing agents and disciplines—or in extreme instances even fires—lower-performing ones. He’s been given enough autonomy within the context of a federal bureaucracy to make the passport experience in New York terrible or fantastic, and… Hoffman, a modest and unassuming mid-level bureaucrat with a fondness for baseball, has just done a great job of using his power to make the office run really well.

If Hoffman can take a model of inefficiency and turn it into a place of which people are at least tolerant, imagine what a manger of his caliber could do with the resources of a private corporation.

Want more information on mid-level managers? Check out our latest ebook, Four ways you’re failing you’re middle managers, and why it’s killing innovation.