In the workplace, one rotten apple can spoil the whole bunch, especially when the bad apple is in a leadership position. Passive-aggressive leaders create toxic work cultures that reward compliance and punish dissent or criticism, even if it is constructive.

In their 2005 Harvard Business Review article, The Passive-Aggressive Organization, authors Gary Neilson, Bruce Pasternack, and Karen Van Nuys describe a healthy organizational culture as one in which “managers have access to good, timely information, the authority to make informed decisions, and the incentives to make them on behalf of the organization, which promptly and capably carries them out.”

Unfortunately, in a Booz Allen Hamilton survey of more than 30,000 people around the globe, only one in five respondents described their organizations that way. The largest number of respondents described their workplace as passive-aggressive.

For decades, Hogan has helped organizations find and develop C-suite talent. Now, we’re excited to introduce a report series designed for the middle – the on-the-ground managers responsible for bridging top management with staff and delivering organizational results.

The Insight series provides organizations with scientifically validated information about an individual’s strengths, performance risks, and core values. Used as a feedback tool for selection or development, the easy-to-understand series gives emerging and mid-level managers the self-awareness needed to perform effectively. Based on Hogan’s trademark assessments, the three-part series includes reports derived from the Hogan Personality Inventory, Hogan Development Survey, and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory.

Learn more about the Hogan Insight Series or download a sample report.

Do Creative People Make Good Leaders?

Companies have spent millions of dollars designing complicated competency models, fruitless training programs, and elaborate perks to select, develop, and retain their middle managers. But when you boil it down, only three things really matter:

Can they do the job? In the modern economy, mid-level managers are often required to motivate employees and harness increasingly scarce resources to achieve a common goal. When it comes to selecting individuals to promote into middle management, it’s critical to find people with the correct skill set.

Will they enjoy doing the job? Happy, engaged managers make for happy teams and higher organizational performance. Some experience a natural urge to lead, others don’t. And when the latter gets promoted, companies often lose a high-performing employee and gain a mediocre manager.

What will get in their way? The same bold, assertive, risk-taking behavior that can help launch individuals’ careers can become debilitating weaknesses under the pressure of middle management. For these behaviors, knowledge and skills training is not enough – they need to develop the proper self-awareness and leadership behaviors for their mid-level management role.

Find out Hogan’s solution to these questions as well as four reasons your middle management may be underperforming in our ebook, 4 Ways Companies Are Failing Their Middle Managers And Why It’s Killing Innovation.

“You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.”
– Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and bestselling author

Unfortunately, many companies spent the past decade diverting resources from middle management, creating a talent vacuum that has proved difficult to fill. Without proper development, a company’s most valuable assets – their people – can derail and fall short of performance expectations. There are four ways companies get managing their middle managers wrong:

1)     They promote the wrong people. Many organizations rely on performance appraisals and supervisor nominations to identify and promote talented individuals rather than objective measures.

2)     They don’t effectively train them. Most companies focus their development efforts at the extremes of their management hierarchies rather than honing in on the central figures – the middle managers.

3)     They stress them out. The shift to more flat organizational structures has placed the lion’s share of pressure and accountability on the shoulders of middle managers.

4)     They let them disengage. In a 2007 study, 41% of HR leaders said engagement among mid-level managers had dropped noticeably over the previous 18 months.

How can organizations turn their underperforming middle managers into a group of competent, engaged leaders? Find out in our ebook, 4 Ways Companies Are Failing Their Middle Managers And Why It’s Killing Innovation.

The Hogan Personality Inventory is measure of personality assessment that provides leaders the strategic self-awareness they need to get along and get ahead. Raw scores on HPI subscales, available in many of Hogan’s reports, allow interpretation above and beyond main scale scores.

The HPI subscales are valuable tools for coaches and feedback providers. They provide an abundance of nuance for interpreting results. Subscales allow the interpreter to find distinctions among average scores and identify differences among individual with similar scale scores. Although main scale score interpretation is valuable alone, users will find that supplementing that interpretation with subscales increases the power of the instrument across applications.

For assistance interpreting the HPI subscales, download our white paper.

The relationship between employees and their bosses, as well as that between followers and leaders, is one of the most studied and discussed topics in business and psychology. Yet, it remains one of the least understood. Hogan conducted a survey of 1,000 respondents examining the relationship between employees, bosses, and personality.

Rate of Bad Managers
Research shows us that more than roughly 60% of people currently in a leadership position will fail, usually due to flaws in interpersonal behavior that prohibit them from forming and maintaining a high-functioning team. Our survey results support this research – the average respondent would be willing to work for fewer than half of their former bosses (around 45%).

Respondents were most likely to describe bad bosses as:

As job level increases, there are no significant differences in terms of how people describe bad bosses.

Great bosses, on the other hand, were most likely to be described as:

As job level increases, people are more likely to describe good bosses as good at business strategy, and less likely to describe good bosses as sociable.

Why can’t we be friends?

• Respondents were most likely to say it is important for them to like their boss.
• Likewise, respondents were most likely to say it is important for their boss to like them.
• Respondents were evenly split when asked if they work harder for bosses they consider friends.

Lonely at the top: As job level increases, people are less likely to say it is important that their bosses like them or that it is important they like their bosses.

The Hogan Certification workshop will be held in a new location this October. The Westin New York at Times Square will host the two-day workshop where participants will leave with an in-depth understanding of how to use and interpret the Hogan suite of assessments. Register for this popular workshop location before it fills up.

More info and register

Everyone has made a bad hire, and considering they typically cost 150% of their annual salary, chances are you don't want it to happen again. This new book by Abhijit Bhaduri outlines how employers should weigh education, experience, competence, and personality to hire the right people and drive success at their companies.

 For more info and to purchase