In January of 2017, Les Snead, the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, had a tough choice to make. Hired in 2013, his team had not had a winning record since 2003 and had moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles just a year earlier. Expectations in LA were high, and it was time for Snead to find a new head coach. The safe and easy choice would be a seasoned, veteran head coach who was no stranger to the biggest stage in American sports. Jon Gruden, who won a Super Bowl in 2003 (2002 season), seemed to be an obvious candidate. Or, you take a look at successful college coaches, such as Nick Saban, who has won six NCAA championships as head coach at the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University. Both of these coaches had proven records as head coaches and were realistic candidates to fill the Rams’ coaching vacancy.

Instead, Snead hired Washington Redskins Offensive Coordinator Sean McVay, who also was a former assistant wide receivers coach under Gruden in 2008. At 30 years old, McVay was the youngest coach in NFL history. The results have been tremendous. In two seasons McVay has lead the Rams to a 26-9 record (including playoff games). On February 3, just nine days after his 33^rd birthday, McVay will coach his team against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LIII.

As the spread offense, which is popular in college football, began to slowly infiltrate the NFL, disruption was imminent. All of a sudden, offensive innovation became a priority, but not all teams saw it coming. The Rams, preferring to disrupt rather than be disrupted, took a chance and hired McVay. They hired him because he knew how to get the ball into the hands of those who could score touchdowns, which he did for three seasons as offensive coordinator of the Washington Redskins. It was obvious he had the necessary competencies to orchestrate a successful offense, and that was the top priority.

We don’t know if the Rams used personality assessments to hire McVay, but we do know that you can learn a lot about McVay’s personality by what he does (i.e., his behavior) and what others say about him (i.e., his reputation). Following a game in 2017 when he was criticized for how the Rams poorly managed their timeouts, McVay said the following:

“With some of the previous ones (timeouts) it might have been a miscommunication – guys were confused or things like that – but all things being equal, it starts with me. I’ve got to do a better job with that.”

When talking to media in 2018 just a few days before playing the New Orleans Saints, McVay was asked about what he’s learned from Wade Phillips, his 71-year-old defensive coordinator and former NFL head coach. Here’s his response:

“A guy like him, I feel great to work and learn from him every day.”

Both of these quotes tell us a lot about McVay’s humble character, and his willingness to both admit mistakes and put good people around him, even if one of them (Phillips) was defensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles the year he was born.

Following their 26-23 win over the New Orleans Saints in the NFC Championship to reach Super Bowl LIII, Rams left tackle, Andrew Whitworth, said this about his coach:

“He’s a coach that knows his team. He knew we needed to do something to get things going our way, and he believed his team could get it done. That sounds simple, but it’s actually huge.”

And, perhaps the most important quote following the NFC Championship came from Snead:

“The idea was for him to come in and help us create a winning environment.”

At Hogan, we believe effective leaders are those who can develop and maintain high-performing teams. This involves possessing the required competencies for the job, being humble, getting the most out of the individuals on your team, and creating an environment where they can succeed. Gruden might have been a safe choice back in 2017, but he went 4-12 as head coach of the Oakland Raiders this year. On February 3, he won’t be coaching his team in the Super Bowl. He will be watching his former assistant wide receivers coach lead the Rams in the Super Bowl instead.

According to Hogan Assessments founder Robert Hogan, life is about competition. There’s competition within groups to attain status, and those who win generally are those with good social skills. There’s also competition between groups, and the groups with the strongest leaders win in this arena.

Competition within groups is what fascinates and entertains people. However, competition between groups, such as the increasing rivalry between the United States and China, has real worldwide consequences.

In a new video, Robert Hogan takes on these topics and more, in “The Nature of Human Nature.”

Over the years, we’ve discovered growing enthusiasm for identifying leadership potential, since talented leaders drive success. Unfortunately, many organizations make a critical mistake at the very beginning of the process – they don’t define potential in a way that leads to the selection of strong leaders.

Through our decades of research, we’ve found the person who draws attention to himself and performs well at his role may turn out to be a dud as a manager. And those who might perform best at the role might never get the opportunity to lead since they focus on their job and don’t draw attention.  

The Hogan High Potential Talent Report can help. This new video will walk you through the process, from our streamlined definition of success to personality characteristics of effective leaders.

No one likes a know-it-all.

They’ve annoyed us all by talking down to us about anything and everything, even when it’s obvious they know far less than they believe. But know-it-alls don’t just ruin watercooler gatherings and dinner parties. When they rise to positions of power, they can wear away at productivity and trigger costly mistakes.

Joann S. Lublin wrote an entertaining article on the subject in the Wall Street Journal. She interviewed a number of self-professed former know-it-alls that caused major problems for themselves and their companies, such as losing over $2 million on a home purchase, hiring an unsuitable job candidate, and not asking subordinates for their input.

The know-it-all causes all kinds of professional headaches. They don’t try to learn about an issue or ask for help, which leads to poor decisions. They ignore some people or are condescending to others, which leads to a toxic work environment. They project a false aura of power and knowledgeability, which gets them promoted into jobs they might not actually be able to perform.

Right now, the United States has a perfect example of know-it-all leadership – President Donald Trump. Even before his election, he’s directly and literally said he knows it all. Axios compiled a list of all the things Trump has said he knows about more than anyone, including campaign finance, ISIS, the visa system, international borders, international trade, and drone technology, just to name a few of their nearly two dozen examples.

Despite the bravado, Trump’s declarations of expertise have created a culture of chaos in the White House and beyond. His claim that ISIS was defeated became his justification to immediately pull the U.S. military from Syria, a decision that caused confusion in the Pentagon and ultimately led to the departure of this secretary of defense. His insistence on a trade war with China has created new challenges for Apple and other American companies. And rather than tackle the numerous complex and technical issues along the U.S./Mexico border, he is insisting on a wall and walked out of negotiations to reopen the government when Democrats refused.

Though the political news of the day seems bleak, the know-it-alls in Lublin’s article took significant steps to improve their behavior. One made certain his managerial hires hold diverse viewpoints, and he encourages them to call him an idiot. Another gave his committee more power when making hiring decisions. All of them took a similar approach – they became more humble.

Humble leadership is the flip side of know-it-alls. Rather than assuming they know what’s best, humble leaders turn to their co-workers and ask questions in order to make the most informed decision possible. At Hogan Assessments, we define humility as self-awareness, appreciating the strengths and contributions of others, and openness to new ideas and feedback toward personal performance. Know-it-alls generally lack those three characteristics.

Furthermore, humble leaders become more successful than know-it-alls. They don’t allow their sense of self-worth to interfere with leading their organization to success.  A recent study revealed high levels of humility lead to higher rates of employee engagement, more job satisfaction, and lower rates of turnover. Humility is the antidote to know-it-alls.

Although Lublin’s interviewees became self-aware enough to change their habits, not all know-it-alls can correct their habits without outside intervention or a particularly costly mistake. Personality assessments can also help know-it-alls understand what they’re doing. No matter the method, increasing self-awareness and learning to ask questions is clearly a better strategy than pretending you know everything while showing the world you clearly don’t.

The trend toward Big Data shows no signs of slowing down, as businesses, organizations, and governments continue incorporating new technology in the race to collect an almost unfathomable amount of information. But a more critical problem remains – what do you do with all that data? How can you find something useful within?

In this video, Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessments, discusses how Hogan has embraced Big Data from the very beginning in order to study one of the most complex subjects of all – the human mind.

The concept of ambition has a bad reputation in popular culture. The textbook definition – a strong desire to achieve something, typically through determination and hard work – seems innocuous, but the word is often associated with destructive consequences. Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler were ambitious, and that cost the world millions of lives. On a smaller scale, it’s easy to picture ambitious businesspeople who put their careers ahead of the wellbeing of their employees or family. But at Hogan, we think about ambition in more positive terms, and believe that to ignore ambition is to miss a crucial component of human personality.

For many years, psychological science has ignored, and even vilified ambition. Freud decreed ambitious people to be neurotic and potential father murderers, and Jung felt that ambitious people suffer from a “regressive restoration of the persona” which blocks their potential for personal growth. Even during the development of modern personality assessment, ambition has been ignored. Neither the well-known Five-Factor Model nor the six-factor HEXACO personality inventory assess ambition, and both of these models claim to be comprehensive.

Recently, psychologists have started to take ambition more seriously. The school of proactive personality asserts a disposition to take proactive action to change one’s environment predicts leadership and personal achievement. “Grit,” a measure of perseverance in long-term goals, has taken pop psychology by storm. Though both proactive action and grit overlap with ambition, they don’t fully align with ambition either.

Robert Hogan, founder of Hogan Assessments, Ryne Sherman, Hogan’s Chief Science Officer, and Bell Jones of Florida Atlantic University, recently examined how ambition was assessed by prominent factor models of personality, specifically HEXACO and NEO-PI-R personality inventory. Their paper, Where is ambition in factor models of personality?, concluded that these models can predict ambition, but in an indirect and  inefficient manner—by combining facets relating to energy level, social dominance, achievement motivation, and self-control.

Hogan Assessments has always stressed the role of ambition for predicting career success. Socioanalytic Theory, the foundation for all our assessments, tells us that all people are motivated to get along and to get ahead. Ambition describes the degree to which people want to get ahead. Over the course of human evolutionary history, people with higher status enjoyed better food, mates, and living conditions; conversely, people feared and suffered from the loss of status.

Of course, there is good news and bad news about high and low scores on the Ambition scale. Highly ambitious people are productive, energetic, and driven, but are also competitive, pushy, and domineering. Their less ambitious counterparts, on the other hand, seem considerate, cooperative, and good team players, but also lacking motivation.

One of our three core assessments, the Hogan Personality Inventory, features Ambition as one of its seven scales. Research shows that people with high Ambition scores can be energetic and competitive, though also restless and forceful. Low Ambition indicates good teamwork, and complacency and lack of initiative.

Although people are beginning to understand how personality impacts career success, Hogan Assessments remains unique in its understanding of the way ambition impacts peoples’ ability to achieve their life goals.

*This article was originally published on November 2 by People Matters.

Agility in leadership is about the ability to effectively balance factors that drive organizational performance at a rapid pace. But does moving quickly, integrating data, and engaging staff really require a different type of leadership?

The leadership consulting industry loves catchphrases. Popular ones include transformational leadership, servant leadership, boundless bravery, coherent confidence, learning agility, grit, and now agile leadership. These are all superfluous words consultants use to keep their work current in the eyes of consumers.

The challenge with all these phrases is the majority are just a repackaging of what we have known for a long time: personality predicts leadership performance. The lens through which personality is viewed – and the buzzwords – can change; but in the end, personality is just that: personality.  

This brings us to “Agile Leadership”, which some describe as the ability to effectively balance factors that drive organizational performance (i.e. people, processes, and innovation) at a rapid pace. Sure, information is flowing at faster rates than ever before, and leaders are being asked to integrate all of this into real-time decisions. But does moving quickly, integrating data, and engaging staff really require a different type of leadership? Although the evidence-based answer is still pending, our preliminary findings suggest that the majority of high-potential leaders simply need the organization’s environment to change. Many of these leaders are already fighting what McKinsey describes as the “machine organization.” Specifically, their goal is to introduce a new mindset of collaboration, new technology, less structure, and higher team engagement — but most have to fight against their organization’s old-fashioned ways. 

We believe the discussion should not just focus on digitization and the speed of change. Equally important to the debate is the need for strategic self-awareness — the ability to be introspective while listening to outside opinions of oneself. A stronger focus on self-awareness is the underpinning of true agility. The characteristics of great leaders include the ability to understand how they view themselves, and how that aligns or departs from how others view them. Accordingly, leaders like those at ING, Pixar, Alibaba, and Walmart would be appropriately described as having agility. 

Three things can occur to help drive leadership agility in organizations. First, recognition that many leaders have the necessary characteristics to survive in the digital world; they just need to be unleashed. Second, that organizations, not so much the people in them, need to change structures to tear down silos. Third, using valid personality measures can facilitate the awareness that current and future leaders need in order to keep the concept of agility top of mind.

Agile leadership is important, but it is not new. It is just being rediscovered. The emphasis must be put not only on the individual, but also the organization. Some organizations are so stuck in the past that agile leaders waste most of their energy fighting history. So, let us not get so awestruck by a new phrase that we forget the basics of effective leadership — to build and maintain high-performing teams. Industry buzzwords will continue to change, and in 2019 there will undoubtedly be a new catchphrase that enamors organizations. However, what won’t change are the tenets of leadership that translate to organizational success, and those can be measured using valid personality assessments. 

Hogan will expand its Global Learning offerings in 2019 with the new Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop.

The one-day workshop will focus on how to analyze themes and connect personality scales across Hogan’s core assessments, allowing attendees to gain a deeper understanding of how to extract maximum interpretive value from Hogan scales and subscales. Jackie VanBroekhoven Sahm, Hogan’s Director of Global Learning, said the new program was developed based on two years of participant feedback.

“In early 2017 we launched the Hogan Level 2 Certification Workshop, which focused more on advanced feedback delivery of Hogan profiles,” said Sahm. “What we discovered in post-workshop surveys was there was also a popular demand to take a deeper dive into Hogan scale interpretation. So, we decided to expand our program offerings accordingly as part of our commitment to create the best user experience possible.”

Beginning in January 2019, Hogan will offer the following workshops in the United States:

Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop – This two-day program, previously known as Hogan Level 1 Certification, qualifies professionals to administer and interpret Hogan’s three core assessments, the Hogan Personality Inventory, the Hogan Development Survey and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory.

Hogan Advanced Feedback Workshop – This program, previously known as Hogan Level 2 Certification, is a one-day add-on workshop designed for practitioners who want to get certified and also receive more extensive instruction and opportunities to practice delivering effective Hogan feedback.

Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop – This newly-developed program is a one-day add-on workshop designed for practitioners who want to get Hogan certified and also gain more advanced instruction and practice on how to interpret Hogan assessment profiles.

The workshops will be offered in multiple cities across the United States throughout 2019, with the advanced workshops occurring on the third day. Participants can complete the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop during the first two days with the option to attend either the Hogan Advanced Feedback Workshop or the Hogan Advanced Interpretation Workshop on the third day. Each of the two, one-day advanced workshops are also available upon request for those who have previously completed the Hogan Assessment Certification Workshop. Hogan Certified users can email training@hoganassessments.com to register for an advanced workshop separately.

“We put a major emphasis on ensuring our learners have the tools they need to be successful, and that begins with listening and responding to customer feedback,” said Sahm. “What we learned is that people find tremendous value in our workshops and leave wanting even more. That’s why we developed the new advanced interpretation workshop, and we will continue to explore new additions to Hogan Global Learning curriculum in the future.”

Click here to learn more about Hogan’s three certification programs.

Awair, an authorized Hogan distributor in Italy, Spain, and France, hosted an event on November 14 in Milan attended by nearly 50 members of the Italian community of Hogan Certified talent management experts. The lively session allowed participants to network, expand their knowledge of Hogan competencies, and to share experiences. 

Over the years, the community of certified people has been growing significantly, and many of the participants have shown interest in meeting and exchanging ideas. With facilitation by Andrea Facchini, Awair Partner and Hogan expert, Awair launched the first Italian Hogan Certified Community, with a remarkable turnout of people ready to share their Hogan knowledge at the November 14 event.

During the meeting, Andrea introduced three main topics requested by participants via survey (Report Selection: How to choose the most appropriate Hogan product. Feedback & delivery: Sharing success and stories and lessons learned, as well as tips for more creative and efficient feedback. Report interpretation: How to handle critical profiles and to look at interdimensional conflicts from a different angle) and then opened the floor to the participants for continued interaction and discussion.

The benefits of being part of the community include:

1. Keeping your Hogan knowledge up-to-date
2. Advancing by learning from practical, real examples
3. Meeting like-minded people, listening, and sharing experiences
4. Expanding your professional network

For those who are not certified, Hogan Certification allows attendees to develop a deep knowledge and understanding of the tools. By leveraging the predictive power, use of the assessments can boost organizational performance by identifying and addressing both the individual and the organizational development areas. But that’s not all: Hogan Certification provides participants with a set of skills that changes their way of looking at the nature of human nature.

Awair has organized Hogan Certification Programs in Milano and Roma since 2015, and has certified over 400 HR experts, including HR professionals at several levels, as well as talent management consultants, coaches, and psychologists.

The meeting on November 14 was a pilot and the feedback was so positive and enthusiastic that more meetings have been scheduled for 2019 in Italy. Also, keep an eye out for the launch of a Hogan Certified Community in France and Spain as well.

A recent article in the Washington Post described a new service from a company called Predictim that claims to help people find the perfect babysitter. The service scans the would-be sitter’s entire Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram history, then uses recent advances in personality and data analytics to assess four “personality features” — propensity toward Bullying / Harassment, Disrespectfulness / Bad Attitude, Explicit Content, and Drug Abuse.

At face value, this type of service has merit. There is a plethora of recent research demonstrating that social media profiles and word use on Twitter reflect the personalities of their users. Thus, it is sensible to think you could combine social media profiles and behavior to predict how a person might behave on the job.

However, these services ignore a long history of research showing that people strongly respond to incentives and will modify or even falsify their responses to succeed. This is a major problem, not just for Predictim, but for any service offering to evaluate someone’s work potential on the basis of their social media pages. Let me explain.

In the mid-2000’s, many employers started using text-searching programs to quickly sift through resumes. This worked just fine until savvy applicants found ways to stuff their resumes with keywords. A simple tactic was to put loads of keywords typically used by employers to select candidates in their resume in white font. When printed, the white font is undetectable to the human eye (on white paper, of course). However, the computers slogging through resumes picked up all of those keywords hidden on the resume, increasing the applicant’s chances of being selected.

Today, text-searching technology has gone beyond keyword-only searches to use natural language to weed out such strategies. However, the point is not about resume stuffing. The point is job applicants strongly respond to incentives and will try to trick or cheat the system to get selected.

In 2013, researchers demonstrated that “Liking” curly fries on Facebook was associated with higher IQ scores. However, as this curious finding made its way through the media, the relationship quickly disappeared; liking curly fries no longer predicts IQ scores. People thought they would appear smarter if they liked curly fries on Facebook, so everyone started liking them, eliminating the relationship.

Which brings us back to choosing babysitters via social media analysis. Virtually all the research mentioned in the opening paragraph demonstrating that personality is linked with social media usage was done in a context in which the people being studied had no incentive to be dishonest. However, when people know their social media profiles are being used to measure their intelligence and select them for jobs, they will start gaming their social media profiles to beat the system. If there is an incentive to have a “clean” social media profile, people will have them.

In fact, many people already have both “professional” and “personal” Facebook accounts. Which account do you think they submit to a potential employer who asks? Which Instagram account will the potential babysitter send to parents?

With employers using social media records to make personnel decisions, the stakes of social media use have become much larger. When careers are at stake, people will carefully cultivate social media profiles to maximize their chances of getting the job. If employers continue to do this, services that specialize in creating sanitized social media accounts for job applicants will emerge. How will employers combat these services? How will firms that assess personality via social media know that the profile they are getting is the real “Risky Rebecca” and not the professionally cultivated “Responsible Rebecca?”

Faking is a common problem in the personnel selection industry, though traditional personality assessments based on questionnaires tackled this issue long ago. Simply put, faking a questionnaire-based personality assessment is extremely difficult and many people who try to fake on such assessments get worse job-fit scores than they would have gotten if they had simply answered honestly. Faking a social media-based personality assessment is much easier, as you just need to keep content positive and to a minimum. If social media analysis companies cannot solve the faking problem, it will quickly put an end to their business model.