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!

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.

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.

After analyzing the personality profiles of Homer’s Greek heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon, Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, asked the question, “In which occupations, organizations or environments would these heroes prosper today?”

Career counselling for these two ancient heroes starts with their motivation (Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory). Achilles feels fulfilled by helping others, developing them and generally working for a prosperous society. He values material success, profit, ROI, trade and money, as well as traditional social values and virtues, morale, history and principled attitude towards life and work. His motives indicate that Achilles would be satisfied in a well-established organization with a clear mission, values and business purpose. The company should also be commercially oriented, such as a financial institution, and care about the satisfaction of its employees or customers. A good example would be a private bank with a long tradition of customer care and elaborate employee program.

Valuing commerce, finance and material success, Agamemnon, unlike Achilles, feels motivated by social status – the desire to stand out and get recognition – and desires influence and power. Self-sacrifice for others and helping society doesn’t really work for him. He is more likely to feel satisfied in environments that enable him to work on his individual career, achieve an important position, and gain credit as well as high financial remuneration. He would be happiest working in financial and insurance companies or private firms focused on profit and beating the competition.

The two share Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) scores that are like those of successful entrepreneurs. Achilles and Agamemnon would be successful in launching companies and organizations (though probably not together as per the last blog in this series). Both have traits of leadership, though their disposition could be more suited for crisis management which involves time restrictions and often requires making unpopular decisions. It is important to note that their definitive success or failure would also be shaped by their ability to cope with their potential risky behavior indicated in the Hogan Development Survey (HDS). High scores in these assessments mean a raised flag for entrepreneurs and managers – “Beware! You have certain exceptional characteristics; however, if you don’t learn to handle them and use them constructively, they may contribute to your fall later.” Which, in the case of Achilles and Agamemnon, they did.

Is it possible to know how two people will interact with each other based solely on their personality? In the article “Homer and Big 5,” Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, analyzed the personality profiles of the two heroes – Achilles and Agamemnon – from the first song of Homer’s Iliad to find out whether the two Greeks were predisposed for mutual conflict.

The authors considered both characters’ potential for behavioral conflict and value conflict. When looking at Achilles and Agamemnon’s Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and Hogan Development Survey (HDS) profiles, Duriš and Porubjak found that both men were very goal-oriented, competitive and ambitious. They were also self-critical, dissatisfied, sensitive to threats, and communicated in a straightforward manner without the tendency to build or maintain relationships with others.

Duriš and Porubjak predicted the possibility of conflict between the warrior and his king. For example, lower to average Prudence in both heroes indicates that they may attempt to use non-standard means in order to achieve goals or break rules. In some situations, Achilles as well as Agamemnon will be short-tempered and hot-headed, which will add an element of unpredictability as well as strong emotional and black-and-white perception to their interactions (e.g. mutual denigration). Achilles will only minimally respect the authority of Agamemnon and will be quite independent. On the other hand, if confronted, Agamemnon may perceive Achilles’ actions as especially negative, hostile, threatening or deceitful. While under stress, he may even attack Achilles by means of non-critical self-confirmation and misinterpretation or fabulation of events.

Duriš and Porubjak also found that the two also had potential towards mutual antipathy due to differing motivations. By analyzing their Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) profiles, they found that, while Achilles is interested in the prosperity of a wider community and welfare of others in general, Agamemnon is a relationship pragmatist and materialist who is predominantly interested in his own agenda.

While Agamemnon probably won’t get the world’s best boss award, his management of Achilles fails disastrously due to their conflicting personalities and motivations. And to think, all of this might have been avoided had the two been self-aware of their differences and motivational tendencies beforehand.

Ever wonder how your personality assessment results compare to well-known figures in history? What about ancient Greek heroes? In their article “Homer and Big 5,” Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, explore the socio-psychological aspects of Homer’s famous war epic, the Iliad, by putting the head-butting heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon, to the Hogan test.

Hellenic thinkers and orators, like Homer, dealt with subjects of the human condition and broached many topics which subsequently manifested as modern-day psychology. Ancient Greece is the cradle of one of the earliest personality typologies – Hippocrates’ division of people into sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic types. Although personality research has advanced since then, it is illuminating (not to mention fun) to retrospectively apply it to ancient Greek history. By applying current psychological models of personality to a close reading of the first song of the Iliad, uriš and Porubjak were able to make assumptions based on content analysis about the Greek heroes’ inner motivators and derailers.

When analyzed using the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) scales, Achilles, the Achaean warrior who flew off the handle and dragged his Trojan opponent’s lifeless body around for days after his best friend was killed in battle, is (not surprisingly) high on the Excitable scale. His moodiness and irritability are coupled with a low Adjustment score on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) to make one pretty emotionally volatile and unpredictable Greek guy. High scores in Ambition (HPI) and Tradition also explain his competitive nature and intense loyalty to his friend’s memory.

Agamemnon, the Achaean king who stole the Trojan king’s daughter only to give her back and then steal Achilles’ girlfriend, has scores similar to those of Achilles. Add in low Prudence (HPI) and high Bold (HDS) scores and you’ve got a stubborn king who thinks he’s the bee’s knees. His values? Power and Recognition. All this coupled with high Skeptical and Mischievous scores (HDS) creates the potential for a power hungry, mistrusting ruler who would quickly kick his army to the curb and flee the scene as soon as the going got tough – which he almost did (a couple of times).