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.

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.

We got a kick out of this U.S. Navy office safety video from the 1940s.

Although the office environment (and the tone of the safety videos) has changed a bit since then, the underlying point of the video remains relevant – some personalities make an individual more prone to carelessness and, even in the most mundane of environments, that carelessness can cause accidents.

For more information about how people’s personalities influence office safety, check out Hogan SafeSystem.

In season 3, episode 15, of the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” one of the characters introduces the gang to a workplace phenomenon called the chain of screaming. I’ll let the video clip below do the heavy lifting, but it basically works like this: my boss’s boss screams at my boss, who in turn screams at me, after which I scream at one of my subordinates, and so on.

Although this seems like a clever joke around which to build a 20-minute episode, according to an article published yesterday on Forbes.com, the chain of screaming is real – sort of.

A new study suggests that bullying bosses affect more than just their victim. Researchers polled 233 people from various fields and found that, much like the chain of screaming, victims of a bullying boss often turn into bullies themselves, spreading their discontent through the office like a nasty virus.

Hogan’s own research supports these findings – 75% percent of working adults say the most stressful aspect of their job is their immediate boss.

Fortunately, companies aren’t powerless against the effects of bullying bosses and the disengaged workforces they create. To find out more, check out our free eBook, “Leadership: You’re Doing It Wrong.”

Many business owners and managers have likely found themselves in a predicament similar to the one Eric Sinoway describes in a recent blog for the Harvard Business Review.

One of his firm’s top performers was having a detrimental impact on the company culture. Should he and his partner continue to support and reward the employee based on his results, or should they cut him loose? How do you weigh the results a person gets vs. how he or she gets them?

Culture is a crucial factor in business success. There are dozens of stories of how a company’s culture either positively or negatively impacted its business.

Sinoway goes so far as to quote a Harvard Business School professor who claimed, “maintaining an effective culture is so important that it, in fact, trumps even strategy.”

Sinoway proposes there are four types of employees in terms of culture:

• Stars – Employees who perform well and align with organizational values
• High Potentials – Employees whose performance could improve, but who align with organizational values
• Zombies – Employees who neither perform well or align with organizational values, and
• Vampires – Employees who perform well but fail to align with organizational values.

Vampires, Sinoway said, can prove the most destructive, since most companies are reluctant to fire top performers. In this particular employee’s case, Sinoway knew he had to let him go.

For more about how values impact organizational culture and how culture can affect performance, check out our three part series, The Power of Unconscious Biases, The Value of Values, and The Culture Clash.

By now, most people have heard about Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs vice president who resigned in a searing article on the New York Time’s op-ed page. The former investment banker has been making news again this week following the release of a book detailing his experiences at the storied firm.

In his op-ed article, Smith leveled intense charges against the firm’s corporate culture, calling it toxic and destructive, and said that the firm promoted morally bankrupt people.

Although there is a fair amount of question regarding his allegations, Smith’s article and subsequent interviews bring up an interesting topic – the effect of leaders’ values on corporate culture. From Apple to Zappos, there are hundreds of examples of the positive effect a CEO can have on his or her company’s culture. Unfortunately, there are just as many about what happens when that effect takes a dark turn.

For more about how leaders’ values can affect company culture, check out Eric Sinoway’s recent blog on the Harvard Business Review, or take a look at our whitepapers The Power of Unconscious Biases and The Culture Clash.

Mornings aren’t my favorite thing, and the morning these events transpired was particularly early and particularly hot, which meant that I was in a particularly crappy mood.

So, on the way to work, I stopped by my neighborhood Starbucks for a venti iced mood elevator with no sweetener and no room for cream. When I went to reach for my wallet, however, all I found was an empty back pocket. Damn.

Just as I was about to admit total defeat, turn my car around and crawl back into bed, the dear, sweet barista behind the counter smiled, handed me my drink, and said, “It’s on us.”

I walked out smiling.

Altruism, as measured by the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory, is defined as a desire to serve others, improve society, help the less fortunate, and make the world a better place to live. Does that describe every dreadlock-sporting hippy you met in college? Probably. But it also describes a customer service superstar.

Consider this: that barista could have let me cancel my order and walk out the door. It wouldn’t have stopped me from going back to Starbucks in the future. Instead, she recognized that I was having a bad day, made a kind gesture, and now I’m here telling you about it.

Here in the Hogan marketing department, we spend quite a bit of time talking about the dark side of personality – the way people experience us when we are at our worst.

There are three reasons for this:

First, we were the first, and remain the only personality assessment provider that deals with dark side personality characteristics.

Second, derailment, the often-disastrous, sometimes headline-worthy result of succumbing to your dark side tendencies, is the most demonstrable example of personality’s effect on our lives.

Finally, every now and then, the particular manner in which someone derails is downright hilarious. Like in the case of the Winnebago Man.

Winnebago Man is a (sort of) censored version of an outtake reel from a 1980s Winnebago infomercial. The seven-plus-minute clip features RV salesman Jack Rebney having a profanity-laden on-the-job meltdown that became so famous, it inspired an award-winning documentary.

Watch at your own risk.

Ron Ashkenas recently posted an interesting blog on Harvard Business Review positing two common failures of high potential development programs: (1) employers are uncomfortable tapping some employees for development over others, and (2) managers are uncomfortable maintaining the complex coaching dialogue needed to develop these high potential employees. Ashkenas writes:

Taken together, the twin discomforts of differentiation and dialogue hinder high-potential programs, even when senior line and HR executives do a good job of centrally structuring assessments, rotations, and training. This may at least partly explain why so many company-identified high potentials don't remain with their firms.

Ashkenas places much of the blame on squeamish managers:

… most managers hate to differentiate. They would prefer to treat everyone the same, avoiding the uncomfortable process of sorting people by levels of performance … engaging in … developmental dialogue is foreign to many managers and can cause just as much anxiety as the need to differentiate.

This is where I disagree, at least in part. Yes, managers are uncomfortable ranking their employees. However, this discomfort with differentiation likely exists because, in many cases, being selected for development has more to do with politics than potential. Good personality assessment provides a fair, accurate way to identify employees who have the potential to become strong leaders, which effectively absolves managers of accusations that they play favorites.

Similarly, managers are often uncomfortable mentoring their high potential employees because without the data-driven development framework provided by personality assessment, feedback can be unfocused, and performance critiques taken as a personal attack.

For more information on high potential development, check out our recent whitepaper, “From Potential to Performance,” in which we examine how these and other common talent management problems can be solved by making personality assessment the cornerstone of any high potential selection and development program.

As unpatriotic as it sounds: I am not a huge fan of the presidential election cycle. It’s not that I don’t value the power I’m given to choose the leader of the free world, it’s just that I’m not much for the rhetoric, the 15-candidate free-for-all primary debates, or the lazy, only-sometimes-clever Saturday Night Live sketches.

The upside is that it sets the stage for us to examine one of the most important questions in the social and organizational sciences: “What makes a good leader?” Some say the keys are intelligence, ambition, and optimism. Some say the key is a simple, down-home style that says, “Hey, I don’t have just a ton going for me, but I love drinking beer and working on my ranch” (they’re wrong, by the way).

In their paper, “Abstracting Leadership,” Drs. Joyce and Robert Hogan proposed something different; that good leadership is about meeting the basic human needs of one’s followers.

1. Respect your people
It’s the number-one rule of surviving in prison: on your first day inside, pick a fight with the biggest, toughest dude on the yard. The intended result is instant respect, authority, and protection against unwanted romantic advances.

Although a darling metaphor of business writers, office politics are not the same the politics that exist in prisons – or battlefields or second-century China, for that matter. Still, how many times in your career have you watched someone lay into his/her subordinate?

People need respect and acceptance. A high-functioning work group depends on its members feeling confident and unafraid to suggest new ideas. Punishing failure with public humiliation can leave you with a gun-shy workforce and stagnant performance.

2. Less nature, more nurture
In the wild, animals claw their way to the top of the pack. When a new animal takes control of the power structure, it asserts its dominance by marking everything that belongs to it.

When Jack Griffin took control at Time, Inc., he insisted that each of the company’s magazines run a masthead with his name listed first, above the publications’ editors. People crave status and control of resources. By literally marking the pages of his magazines, Griffin robbed his editorial staff of their status and autonomy. Griffin lasted less than six months before simmering resentment boiled over and he was asked to resign.

The point is this: you’re already the boss. Your job is to hire talented, capable employees and provide the resources, guidance, and incentives they need to succeed. When your group performs, share credit. When they fail, take the blame.

3. Be clear, be consistent
As I write this post, there is a squad of riot police working with teargas and batons to subdue a crowd of angry U.S. citizens in Oakland, CA. Their protest is just one of hundreds popping up around the country.

Although their message is disjointed at best (including the always-present “legalize it, dude”), the overwhelming undercurrent behind the 99%ers protests is anger at the lack of transparency in the U.S. government and financial system. Like your momma always said: Honesty is the best policy.

People need structure and predictability in their lives, especially when it comes to work. When they don’t get it, they spend more time worrying, gossiping, or searching for new employment than working. The key to providing stability is clarity and consistency. Make your expectations clear from the outset. Hand out kudos when things go well. When something goes awry, be fair and even. Do the same thing every time. Employees that know what to expect are happier and more productive than those worried about a volatile work situation.