For the first time, Hogan has developed a science-based personality profile for leadership in the workplace specifically for the Latin America (LATAM) region. This profile is the best option for hiring and developing leaders in the region because it identifies the strengths, shortcomings, preferences, motives, and other personality characteristics of high-performing leaders.

Hogan partnered with local consulting firms in the LATAM region — namely Ateliê RH, Alto Impacto, Compass Consulting, HR Tools, and Thuoper — to improve selection accuracy and development for LATAM leaders. LATAM leaders are responsible for establishing broad policies, strategic planning, forecasting, and directing the work of their organizations.

Personality Characteristics of High-Performing Leaders

Hogan’s data science team worked with regional experts to develop a scientifically valid screening tool to improve the quality of leaders in LATAM. Hogan identified specific competencies, characteristics, and values that predict job success. Hogan built a custom personality profile using the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), Hogan Development Survey (HDS), and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) that will enable companies to select higher-performing leader candidates.

Hogan found that leaders in the LATAM region emphasize the importance of teamwork by continually engaging in opportunities to learn, being supportive, and being willing to pitch in when needed. In addition, LATAM leaders need to balance a respect for the company history, but also innovation.

On one hand, this is important because there is a strong relationship between personality and performance in the workplace. The more we understand the characteristics and traits of leaders, the more we can predict their impact in organizations, including financial results. On the other hand, better leaders improve engagement among employees, and engaged employees are happier and produce better results as well. Hogan estimates that companies can improve the accuracy of their hiring by 28%, reducing bad hires by 14% and increasing successful hires by 14%, just by using this profile.

The LATAM leader profile can be implemented in any stage of the leadership life cycle within an organization, including recruitment, development, succession planning, and career reorientation. Hogan can provide a variety of personality- and competency-based reporting options to meet these needs.

To learn more about the Hogan LATAM Leader profile, contact your local Hogan distributor, or email info@hoganassessments.com.  

From 2008 to 2011, I worked as the leader of the human resources team at a Fortune 50 company. During that time, I had a challenging experience at one of the company’s manufacturing plants, which employed 1,200 people. Immersed in a list of negative key performance indicators, my challenge was to recover governance while facing the possibility of a plant shutdown.

Some of the issues that we were dealing with included a very controlled environment with restrictive labor laws, employee behaviors that contradicted corporate values, a high rate of absenteeism, unpaid wages and benefits, and jeopardized safety compliance.

The HR team seemed to be the “lightning arrester” in the middle of the storm — we had to solve every single challenging situation involving a worker. Was this right? That’s a story for another article, but the fact is that we handled it.

Team Role Assessment

Unfortunately, we didn’t have the benefit of using a team role assessment to assemble our task force, but I wish we had. Hogan’s personality tests and Team report would have helped us to design our task force to function most effectively by allowing us to better understand each team member’s strengths and weaknesses, potential derailers or dark-side personality characteristics, and key values and motivators. As I describe the actions we took to respond to the crisis, I’ll point out how a team role assessment would have served our team in this situation.

Our Action Plan

Our first action was to create a situation room. Any information we received had to be analyzed in that room, where we would work as a team to generate a timely, effective decision.

Once the situation room had been created, our second action was to define roles, a chain of command, and communication channels. Our strategy required team members to be relatively ambitious, reasonably hardworking, and good team players, who would not be driven by status concerns but would be willing to move into positions of authority or leadership roles when needed. An average Ambition score would have been ideal for this. The subscale Self-Confident would have needed to be high, as well.

Additionally, we saw the need to have some members of the team be dependable, planful, organized, reliable, and responsible, with high standards for their own and others’ performance. High scores on the Prudence scale would have been ideal to pinpoint these characteristics. Since we were facing a crisis, we also would have wanted team members with high scores on the subscale Calmness.

For our third action, we had to create a plan to maximize the use of our resources, including tasks, time, money, and people. We also had to assess potential consequences. For the most effective planning, it would have been ideal to have a combination of team members with above-average scores on the Not Spontaneous subscale, which would have indicated that they would take a planful approach and enjoy predictability, and team members with above-average scores on the Generate Ideas subscale, who would be good at brainstorming and thinking creatively.

The fourth action? Execution! This was the time for the team to demonstrate its effectiveness at making changes to our favor. For this, we needed team members who would have scored low on the Inquisitive scale. People who score low on this scale tend to be practical and levelheaded, take a pragmatic and hands-on approach to problem solving, and be good with application and implementation.

The fifth action was communication. This changed depending on the level of impact that we needed the message to have, from updating information every day or announcing difficulties or successes until we reached the final end, which was recovering the governance of the manufacturing plant. Since our audience was such a large group, we would have benefited from being able to look at the subscales Self-Confident, Likes Crowds, and Exhibitionistic, because we needed our communicator to be confident and appear comfortable in front of a crowd.

The Final Outcome

We finally did improve the key performance indicators in this manufacturing plant, and governance was recovered. The team was dissolved, but for me, it was the best management experience ever. This made me grow in my professional career.

While we managed to resolve our challenges without the use of a team role assessment, I can see in retrospect how the power of personality assessment would have made it easier for us to take an organized and purposeful approach to assembling our task force and correcting the key performance indicators to prevent the plant from shutting down.

To learn more about how you can use Hogan’s assessment solutions during a crisis, please call us at (918) 749-0632.