*This post was authored by Dr. Gordon Curphy, Managing Partner of Curphy Leadership Solutions.

Teams are fundamental structures for getting work done, and tens to thousands of teams can be found in organizations. Despite the prevalence of teams, research shows that only 10-20 percent are high-performing, which means most have room for improvement. There are four basic ingredients needed to properly launch new teams or improve team performance. First, teams need a roadmap for performance. They need to understand the key factors associated with high-performing teams, which factors are the most important, and how they are interrelated. The Rocket Model fills this need, as it is a well-researched yet practical roadmap for building high-performing teams. 

Second, teams need both “how” and “why” feedback. The Team Assessment Survey provides benchmarking feedback on how a team is doing in each of the eight Rocket Model components. The Hogan suite of assessments can be used to provide “why” feedback, and the particular assessments used depends on which questions teams need answered. The Team Assessment Survey works best when team membershave been working together for a month or two, but the MVPI and HPI can be used when launching new teams. The third ingredient is a team improvement toolkit, which can be found in The Rocket Model: Practical Advice for Building High Performing Teams (Curphy & Hogan, 2012). This book describes different effective team improvement tools and techniques for improving team performance.

The last ingredient may be the most important, and this is using skilled team coaches to design and facilitate off-sites. The best team coaches have a deep understanding of the Rocket Model, can interpret Hogan and Team Assessment Survey results, understand team dynamics, can facilitate team improvement exercises, and help teams develop action plans and accountability mechanisms to enforce team agreements. Team coaches can come from inside or outside an organization; knowledge, experience, organizational politics, cost, and an understanding of the context in which a team operates are some of the more important considerations when choosing facilitators.

When properly designed and facilitated, team off-sites can accelerate the team launches and dramatically improve the performance of existing teams. The amount of time dedicated to team off-sites varies considerably; some are a couple of hours long and others take several days. In crafting a team off-site agenda we recommend the following contextual variables be considered:

1) How long the team has been in existence

2) Any recent restructuring or newly onboarded team members

3) Team members’ roles and responsibilities

4) Evaluation of team’s key performance indicators

5) Team goals and plans

6) How the team has been doing in achieving key milestones

7) Ownership and accountability norms

8) Shared assumptions about customers, competitors, regulators, and other teams being relied on for support

9) Effectiveness of team meetings and decision-making processes

Dr. Gordon Curphy is the Managing Partner of Curphy Leadership Solutions and the thought leader behind the Team Assessment Survey. With over 30 years of education and experience, Dr. Curphy helps clients navigate a range of talent management challenges, including leadership and team improvement workshops.

Photo by Alex Sajan on Unsplash.

Building the perfect team isn’t about assembling an all-star squad of archetypes. It’s about find- ing contributors who are generous and respectful, but confident and charismatic, too— and picking the right leader who can pull them all together.  

IF CLASSIC CARTOONS like Scooby Doo, Captain Planet, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have taught us anything, it’s that only a team has the capacity and resourcefulness to solve a mystery or save the universe.

As working adults, sometimes it can feel like we’re being asked to handle similarly complex undertakings. But in a world devoid of talking dogs, superheroes, and pizza-eating reptiles, a sense of duty to something greater than one’s self doesn’t come naturally—or, quite frankly, easily. To maximize the advantages of teamwork in the workplace, and to avoid the common pitfalls, the environment must encourage individual members to set aside self-driven interests while pursuing a collective goal.

This is precisely where a leader is supposed to emerge. An effective leader is expected to galvanize a team’s superior performance toward common aims. Although being able to envision the future, inspire trust, and repeatedly make good decisions are keys to a leader’s competence and reputation, none of those qualities demands the communal mind- set that cultivates selflessness and productive kinship.

So if having a capable and reliable trailblazer at the helm is no guarantee of success, let’s consider which characteristics enable a group of individuals to actually band together and move forward as a singular, like-minded unit. In other words, what does it take for a team to not only get something done, but get it done well?

What Are the Key Ingredients to a Good Team?  

Personality, personality, personality. At its basic core, a team is merely a collection of diverse characteristics (i.e., individual members) being asked to work in concert to accomplish an objective.

To do so, each person must restrain certain propensities or desires for the betterment of the team. When looked at collectively, individual pro les can provide pivotal insights into the dexterity of the team. A team’s drive, passion, self-imposed obstacles, and blind spots are the sum of the personalities involved. We know successful teams get this blend of personalities right. Whether or not “getting it right” has a universal formula is another matter entirely.

In a 2017 article in Harvard Business Review, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D., and Dave Winsborough found that certain roles need to be fulfilled to optimize team functioning. Ideally, you want the following generic types of people operating in a team:

• Results-oriented team members to keep the plan on track.
  • Relationship-focused team members to socialize ideas and align people.
• Process and rule followers to ensure team compliance with organizational policy.
• Innovative thinkers to keep the team ahead of evolving and future needs.
• Pragmatists to ensure the feasibility of the team’s way forward.

This model presents an easy-to-understand roadmap for staffing, or at least coaching, individual team members to position themselves into a role. Here, everyone has a place and a part to play.

But does this approach merely glorify our cartoon ideals, insisting every gang of heroes needs a range of archetypes present to succeed? What happens when individuals could excel at multiple roles, or when a person simply has no cookie-cutter role to play? Granted, this isn’t the only organizing structure aimed at identifying and arranging archetypical team members according to broad- stroke ideals. But it’s one we’ve favored in the past.

No matter to which role-based model one ascribes, most agree that to extract maximum value, the assessment of team members’ pro- les in relation to a role (as well as any resulting inferences) should be data-based. Furthermore, most team evaluations highly recommend results be examined in consideration of the team’s strategic imperatives, operating environment, and understood goals.

When working with team members on accelerating individual and team performance, the emphasis on each role can depend on the team mission and how that fits into the organizational plan and business landscape.

In TQ: The Elusive Factor Behind Successful Teams, Gordon Curphy astutely points out that when describing the Rocket Model (a team-based approach to development), “teams build TQ [team effectiveness quotient—the capacity for becoming a high-functioning team] when they understand the factors contributing to team performance, get feedback on those factors, and address the gaps.”

How a team approaches their development and tasks varies based on the context (volatile, stagnant, or gradually changing), organization- al constraints (how much is the company driven by regulation versus market needs?), operational characteristics (multinational, government- run, or locally confined), and the line of business in which the team resides.

Furthermore, to the best laid strategies and plans, there are unforeseeable, uncontrollable, and irrational variables that often seem to derail progress. To paraphrase the adage: “Teams plan. Markets and organizations laugh.”

Considering these factors, it’s not unreasonable to assert that a team’s optimal constitution of role representation is somewhat bespoke and fluid. And despite a role not being personified, success is still possible with the right components. If this sounds eerily familiar to the trappings of which characteristics will predict senior leadership success in a particular time and place, you’re not alone in your déjà vu.

Just like with leadership, all the planning, data, and experience in the world might not help a team get to where it needs to be. And similarly with leadership, there must be a common thread differentiating the teams that have all the right ingredients but still fall at from the teams whose members’ interdependent personalities bring big wins for the organization.

Effective Teams Try Smarter 

It’s tempting to buy into the idea that cognitive or creative abilities are the answer to predicting success across the board. After all, if a team is expected to face a series of challenging scenarios, it seems logical to assume that intelligence and innovativeness can be the keys to staying on track. That is to say, despite one’s expected role, a bit of cognitive horsepower and creativity in each team member would do the trick vis-à-vis strategic acumen.

But cognitive studies don’t tend to offer much in terms of linking the “g factor,” as it’s known, to specific behaviors that support targeted goal attainment. Furthermore, intelligent people, just like everyone else, consistently make poor decisions.

And not every team’s ongoing mission compels the need for strategic thought leaders. In fact, for many teams, these traits can serve as a detriment if they’re predominant among members; there are plenty of tactical teams that need to rethink processes and adapt to quickly changing parameters without the distraction of constant brain- storming, what-ifs, and paralysis by analysis.

Nevertheless, cognitive ability and creativity, as well as related newer-age concepts like learning agility and coachability, endure in the talent management zeitgeist.

Regardless of the label used, experts often conclude the secret to high-performing teams is that they try smarter. What they often fail to acknowledge is that the search for a singular, linear construct predictive of a group’s penchant to try smarter together is, at best, quixotic; this is another likely reason why an approach advocating a balanced distribution of roles also periodically gains more traction.

Rather than continue to wax nostalgic on the benefits and drawbacks of a role-based model or examine the limitations of focusing on a group’s collective intellectual capabilities, we propose

an idea that introduces a blend of characteristics. This recipe for team success includes ensuring each team member engages a continuous improvement mindset, maintains other members’ confidence in his or her contribution toward goal achievement (and vice versa), and continuously questions the rules of engagement when approaching an unforeseen challenge.

More specifically, team members should:

• Be willing to learn, un- learn, and then relearn— constantly.
  • Default to an optimistic attitude grounded by realism and emotional control.
• Be prone toward action, but also toward continual evaluation of the biases embedded in their determinations.

Having observed high- performing teams in varying situations, we also arrived at the conclusion that some form of moderated humility can be the ultimate accelerator of team performance. Although high-performing teams can spontaneously take shape if the right characteristics are present, these teams can achieve even better results when they show humility and learn from one another’s mistakes.

What Is Team Humility? 

In a 2013 study in Organization Science, Brad Owens and colleagues noted that humility is a characteristic based in behavior that emerges during social interaction and is recognizable in others. Key behavioral characteristics that define humility include trying to view yourself accurately, being able to appreciate the strengths and contributions of others, and being open to new ideas and feedback regarding your performance. Humility shouldn’t be confused with deference or lack of confidence.

Research shows humility in leaders can positively impact an organization by propagating employee empowerment and increasing the likelihood team members will demonstrate organizational citizenship behaviors. More importantly, humility may also have a substantial positive impact on a company’s bottom line. For example, studies have shown that humility is associated with increased follower performance, team performance, and reduced turnover.

Still, humility can’t be the only missing piece to the puzzle of maximizing team performance. Overdone, collective humility can have the opposite effect. If left unfettered, members may inadvertently build a team culture that sends signals to other teams and leaders that they are insecure—or worse, incapable. The same dynamics may eventually affect team members’ levels of self-efficacy and confidence in one another. Thus, a team’s level of humility needs to be counterbalanced by optimism, persistence, and openness to change.

At first glance, the idea of humility and self-assuredness working together might seem counterintuitive. But we think there’s a form of confidence that complements humility, and that this blend is the unifying super- power a leader should instill in team members.

In our view, the success of teams depends on what type of charisma is demonstrated by those who have assumed or are vying for ownership of the team goal (or facets thereof). The psychologist David McClelland found charisma comes in two forms: socialized and personalized. Only one complements humility well.

Personalized charismatic team members are primarily concerned with obedience and immediate goal achievement; they’re not as considerate of the way in which something is accomplished or with other team members’ needs. Socialized charisma, however, is a different story. If the team member leading an initiative brings socialized charisma to the scene, he or she will truly care about other team members as well as the best interests of the group overall. People with socialized charisma are more likely to communicate and listen to others, as well as encourage ethical behavior.

Several studies find that success is more likely to be achieved when project leaders are socially charismatic, as they will look to align their vision with followers’ needs and goals, versus demanding implementation. Furthermore, research shows socially charismatic leaders tend to inspire their fellow team members to be autonomous, empowered, and responsible.

Team dynamics can make or break cooperative goal achievement. An engaging, effective team leader will have a far easier time guiding a team if he or she cultivates members who consistently demonstrate humble self-assuredness. Additionally, teams will be successful if they have the following:

• Members who have different personality characteristics.
  • A leader (or leaders) who can pull individuals together despite competing agendas to achieve a common mission and goal.
• A willingness to try smarter by listening, evaluating, and correcting.
  • A combo of humility and socialized charisma to support the constant search for feedback in a way that increases self-efficacy and empowerment.

When teams and leaders focus on leveraging collective strengths and seek advice around shortcomings, they have a far better chance of seizing the right opportunities and maximizing gains. Although adjustments will be necessary, this approach puts teams, and ultimately organizations, in the best position for success.

*This article was authored by Ryan Ross and Michael Sanger, and was originally published in The Teams Issue of Talent Quarterly. Visit their website to purchase the full issue as well as all previous issues.

Recent EEOC agreements with two major US companies have once again raised concerns about adverse impact resulting from personality assessment use in hiring. Just as every automobile, electrical appliance, or medicine can negatively impact people’s lives if manufactured poorly or used improperly, assessments can be poorly developed, haphazardly applied, or purposefully misused to negatively and unfairly impact peoples’ lives and employment. At Hogan, we agree with the EEOC’s investigation and intervention on behalf of plaintiffs when any selection procedure results in unfair hiring practices, because our research shows that well-developed assessments predict job performance and that well-developed personality measures help companies make fair hiring decisions.

There are two key issues to consider when using any pre-hire assessment or test, and at Hogan, we encourage assessment users to attend closely to them. The first is validity. The validity of a test or assessment regards the predictions that can be made from it. The key issue in pre-hire assessment is whether there is scientific evidence that the assessment predicts job performance, turnover, safety behaviors, or other relevant business outcomes for a job or job family. Note the following from the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (1978).

Nothing in these guidelines is intended or should be interpreted as discouraging the use of a selection procedure for the purpose of determining qualifications or for the purpose of selection on the basis of relative qualifications, if the selection procedure had been validated in accord with these guidelines for each such purpose for which it is to be used. – Section 60-3, U.G.E.S.P. (1978); 43 FR 38295 (August 25, 1978).

Employers should demand validity evidence before they implement assessments, and that evidence should be produced in a way that reflects Uniform Guidelines requirements. Unfortunately, the assessment industry is unregulated, and many improperly developed assessments are sold and used without demonstrating that they predict anything of value. This is not only a legal issue; it is a practical one. Employers use assessments because they want to make better hires. Making better hires requires accurate prediction. Accurate prediction provides value to the company. Value is demonstrated through scientific evidence of validity.

Do Personality Assessments Discriminate?

However, an assessment can produce adverse impact or unfairness even when validation studies are professionally conducted. Hogan believes adverse impact and fairness are equally critical considerations for any assessment user, and there is ample research demonstrating that personality assessment, when properly developed and used, rarely results in adverse impact. Ethical assessment providers will provide evidence of validity and a statistical evaluation of the potential for adverse impact. Any assessment publisher who sidesteps or refuses to provide such evidence should be viewed with suspicion.

At Hogan, we believe every job candidate should be evaluated using valid and fair assessments. We have worked hard over the past 30 years to democratize access to employment by providing validation research that meets the highest professional standards and assessments that provide equal opportunity based on occupational qualifications. We welcome clients’ questions about validity and adverse impact and the opportunity to demonstrate our standard-setting approach on both fronts.

Want to learn more about personality tests? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Personality Tests

*This press release originally appeared on Business Wire.

In a new study published in Psychology, Dr. Robert Hogan, Chairman & President of Hogan Assessments, was nominated by his peers as a top psychologist in multiple categories.

The study, conducted by Adrian Furnham, Professor of Psychology at University College London and the Norwegian Business School, asked 101 qualified participants, all psychologists, to nominate the person they consider the “Greatest Living Psychologist.” Dr. Hogan was one of 10 psychologists to receive multiple nominations for this distinction.

The study aimed to determine how psychologists thought about their peers, asking each participant via an online survey to respond to open-ended questions such as “who is the greatest psychologist of all time?” and “who is the greatest living psychologist?” Participants were asked to rank psychologists across six different categories.

Dr. Hogan, who is widely known for his groundbreaking research on personality and how it translates to organizational and leadership effectiveness, was also ranked among the top five greatest personality psychologists. This group consisted of famous psychologists, such as Sigmund Freud, Hans Eysenck, Gordon Allport and Carl Jung.

Although the study does not go so far as to provide insight into what criteria was used to make these nominations, the psychologists listed are highly-recognized for having made significant contributions to the field.

“It is hard to imagine a modern psychologist who has influenced more peers in science—or more leaders in the world of business—than Robert Hogan,” says Rob Kaiser, President of Kaiser Leadership Solutions. “When he started in the 1960s, conventional wisdom held that personality doesn’t matter. Thanks to Hogan’s tireless efforts, we all know better—and have the tools for assessing, selecting, and developing the right people into the right roles for the right reasons.”

According to Furnham, the participating psychologists found this pilot study “both challenging and engaging,” and it could result in a more serious and systematic study in this area in the future.

THUOPER, Hogan’s Colombian distributor, embodies one of Hogan’s core values: developing future leaders. Ineffective leadership has plagued the global workforce for centuries, mostly because the characteristics that help people emerge as leaders are quite different from those that make an effective leader.

Of course, when leadership potential has been measured incorrectly for so long, there is no simple solution to fix the issue overnight. That’s why it has never been more important to look to the future and start exposing younger generations to the most accurate and effective tools for identifying effective leaders. 

In this edition of the Distributor Spotlight series, our friends at THUOPER provide us with an overview of an incredible program in which they are utilizing Hogan’s assessments for students who are selected to serve as CEO for a day.

One of the most common complaints against the education system of different countries is their apparent disconnection with the needs of companies. Generally, educational programs do not respond to organizational reality, and recent graduates find many difficulties when facing their first job.

The situation in Colombia is no different. Moreover, the lack of coordination and coherence between the academic world and the organizational world is worsening. Responding to this situation, THUOPER decided to take action on the matter. Since 2016 we have teamed up with CESA (College of Advanced Studies in Administration), a private university located in Bogotá that specializes in Business Administration, to create the CEOPPORTUNITY program.

As the name implies, CEOPPORTUNITY seeks to give students in their last few semesters of CESA the opportunity to live a day as a CEO. Each semester we match 10 of CESA’s best business students with 10 CEOs from some of the top companies in Colombia. Throughout this process students learn real business knowledge and are able to better understand the expectations of CEOs.

The program is highly selective, and students must endure an extensive application process due to there only being 10 placements per semester. The student must meet a semester grade requirement. Once this filter is done, THUOPER performs an assessment and interviews the students, where the aim is to show the alignment of their expectations with the objectives of the program and provide them with a first experience of an assessment center as well as a real-world interview.

The group of selected students is evaluated with a Hogan Flash Report and a Hogan Career Report. With this, we seek to equip them with perspective.  How they are perceived in the business world and, with that frame of reference, compare their profile to that of the leader with whom they will spend the day. They are given an opportunity to ask themselves: how do I see this leader? What do I see from their positive characteristics? What characteristics would I not want others to perceive in me? How could I have been perceived if I had gone through a similar situation?

At the end of the semester we hold a closing dinner attended by the 10 participating students with their CEO’s to discuss the benefits of the program, the power of the Hogan tests, and what both parties learned throughout the process.

There have been three CEOPPORTUNITY series, through which 30 students have had the opportunity to live out a day as a CEO. THUOPER and CESA will continue executing this program in future semesters, since the impact has been very beneficial. The three main achievements of this program include: giving local students knowledge of real-world work experience, educating this younger generation on an evaluation tool of global significance such as Hogan’s, and enriching the position of the Hogan brand in leading Colombian companies.

*This article was authored by Robert Hogan and Joan Jacobsen, and was originally published in The New Thinking Issue of Talent Quarterly. Visit their website to purchase the full issue as well as all previous issues.

Assembling a roster of all-stars isn’t easy—and keeping your squad together is even harder. Steal these five strategies and your team will be a perennial contender.

SUCCEEDING IN BUSINESS is a lot like succeeding in sports: The team with the most talent and best coach will almost always come out on top. But as any struggling squad will tell you, finding top talent isn’t exactly easy.

Let’s say, however, that you draft some homegrown stars and supplement your roster with a few big free agents. Even then you may not beat your competitors, because finding talent is one thing. Using it efficiently is some- thing entirely different.

But don’t throw in the towel. Here are five simple strategies you can use to sign franchise players, create a winning formula, and execute flawlessly.

STEP 1: Don’t Cheat Your Way to the Top 

Well-run organizations have always engaged in the systematic search for talent. For example, in China, the Ming Dynasty established an objective, multi-stage assessment process to find talented civil servants to serve the empire. After World War I, the German Army invented the modern assessment center as an objective method for identifying leadership talent.

Today, objective (and proven) assessment methods for talent identification are well known and commercially available; so are fraudulent methods for identifying talent. One of the biggest issues with today’s assessments is that most organizations have trouble distinguishing between valid and fraudulent methods. Make sure you learn the difference.

STEP 2: Understand Your Players’ Real Contributions 

Talent has serious financial consequences. The Vilfred Pareto Rule tells us that performance is essentially a fractal distribution: Twenty percent of the players on any team will account for 80 percent of the performance, while 80 percent of the players will account for 20 percent of the performance.

What’s true in team sports is also valid in sales, where 20 percent of the salespeople will account for 80 percent of the revenue. Along the same lines, 20 percent of employees will account for 80 percent of an organization’s personnel problems, and vice versa.

STEP 3: Steer Clear of Team Killers 

How should we define talent? The answer isn’t as straightforward as you think. Talent can (and should) be defined in terms of actual and measurable performance. However, in most organizations, it’s in the eyes of the beholders. Specifically, talent is almost always defined by supervisors’ ratings for performance.

In our experience, supervisors don’t know which employees are doing a good job. They think they do, but in reality, they only know which employees they like. And those employees may or may not be high performers.

Think back to your days in middle or high school. There were probably two groups of smart kids: The students whom the teachers thought were smart, and the students whom all the other kids knew were smart.

Unfortunately, the same process applies in the adult world of work. Inside many organizations, it’s all politics, all the time, and success depends on whom you know, not what you do.

In addition, supremely gifted athletes aren’t always good team players. Sports history is littered with examples of great athletes who fought with their coaches and teammates, so much so that we label these stars “team killers.” They generate mind boggling statistics for themselves while their teams underperform.

The same is true for law firms, healthcare providers, and research groups: Highly talented people who can’t share or collaborate often create more problems than they solve.

In our view, being willing and able to work well with others should be a key part of the definition of talent. All significant human achievements, from building the pyramids to landing on the moon to building a world-class company, require coordinated team e orts as well as stellar individual contributions.

STEP 4: Protect Your People from Incompetency 

Once any organization has successfully identified and recruited a talented player, it will have difficulty retaining that new team member because he or she has a 60 to 70 percent chance of working for an incompetent boss.

The stats are stark: In the industrialized world, 70 percent of employees hate their bosses. Bad managers destroy employee engagement, but most employees have no choice but to put up with their horrible bosses.

Talented employees have more options than average employees; they can easily move onto better jobs internally and externally. A major key to retaining talented employees, then, is to shield them from incompetent managers.

STEP 5: Don’t Be Fooled by Emergent Leaders 

So how do organizations find talented managers who won’t alienate their new recruits? In the corporate world, this is known as high-potential (hi-po) identification.

Many organizations identify the next generation of leaders, the hi-po talent, using nominations. Bosses handpick junior people who ooze with talent and potential for future leadership. But re- member: Bosses know who they like, but not necessarily who’s doing a good job.

Here’s where an important leadership study comes into play. Back in the 1980s, management guru Fred Luthans followed more than 400 young managers for a year and recorded their behavior daily. At the end of the year he found they naturally fell into two groups based on their performance.

The first group, which he called “emergent leaders,” received rapid promotions and pay raises. The second group, the “effective leaders,” managed high-performing teams.

The two groups only overlapped about 10 percent as managers; emergent leaders spent much of their time net- working and tending to office politics, while effective leaders worked with their subordinates and provided coaching and performance feedback.

The takeaway? Organizations tend to systematically overlook their most effective managers when trying to identify high-potential leadership. Instead, they choose as high-potentials those managers who are visible and self-promote, and tend to overlook those who are busy doing a good job.

Is it any wonder why there are so many incompetent bosses today?

The good news: While emergent and effective leaders have very different psychological profiles, it’s possible to distinguish between the two groups quickly and efficiently using modern assessment methods.

In other words, stop guessing and start testing. The future of your business depends on it.

*Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash

*This post was authored by Robert Hogan & Ryne Sherman.

There is a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated topics: self-deception and leadership. The two themes often come together in the lives of prominent politicians, for example, in the career of Barack Obama. Let us explain.

We are both fascinated by the idea that people often do things for reasons of which they are unaware. On the one hand, it is pretty obvious that people frequently act without knowing (or caring) why they behave as they do. On the other hand, why is that? For Freud, unconscious thoughts are created by what he called “repression:” one part of the mind (the Ego) recognizes that another part of the mind (the Id) prompts us to do things that will be great fun but which will get us in trouble. The Ego saves us from ourselves by repressing the impulses of the Id—most of the time. But from time to time, the Id escapes the Ego, and we do naughty things. Even then, however, the Ego protects us by “repressing” our awareness of what we have done and why. Freud goes on to say that maturity involves replacing repression with condemnation: immature people repress their socially inappropriate impulses; mature people acknowledge that they have socially inappropriate impulses but refuse to act on them.

The existentialists (Sartre, Camus) interpreted the Freudian unconscious in an interesting way. They understood that people often do selfish things without being aware of what they are doing. But they attributed this lack of awareness to “self-deception” (in French, mauvaise foi—bad faith), a tendency to avoid recognizing the reasons for one’s actions. Self-deception is nothing more than lying to oneself about the reasons for one’s actions. For the existentialists, then, self-deception is a form of cowardice—an inability to face up to the meaning of one’s decisions—and they argued that people have a moral obligation to overcome self-deception. So, we are left with two questions: (1) Are people often unaware of the reasons for their actions; and (2) are they still responsible for those actions?  Freud says “yes” and “no,” the existentialists say “yes” and “yes,” and we agree with Sartre and Camus.

Freud mistrusted politicians, whom he saw as ruthless psychopaths driven by the desire to dominate others—Freud had Hitler and Napoleon in mind. In our view, psychopaths are charismatic, charming, and ruthless, but they also tend to be impulsive, opportunistic, and lacking career agendas. Like psychopaths, narcissists also can be charismatic, manipulative, and ruthless, but unlike psychopaths, they tend to be strategic about their careers. In addition, most psychopaths are loners, whereas narcissists often build coalitions of supporters. We believe many politicians are narcissists—people who want power and control, feel they deserve it, and work to gain it.

Charisma and narcissism are closely related—to the point that charisma is a code word for narcissism.  And this has important implications for leadership. Charismatic people tend to be chosen for leadership positions, but charismatic narcissists make ruinous leaders. A substantial literature (cf. O’Reilly, 2017) shows that narcissistic CEOs are overly confident, unwilling to listen to feedback, and hostile and combative when challenged. These tendencies are associated with excessive risk-taking and a range of unethical behavior including tax avoidance, manipulating accounting data, and excessive personal compensation. The risk-taking leads to bad investments and ill-advised law suits, staff alienation and defections, and poor overall financial performance. Humility is the opposite of narcissism, and a growing empirical literature shows that humility in combination with appropriate self-confidence predicts leadership effectiveness and organizational success (Ou, 2012; Owens et al., 2013).

Turning back to political leaders, politicians want power and control, but they are surrounded by like-minded competitors. To gain power, they often claim that they only want to serve the public and work for the greater good, with no thought of personal gain. They claim to seek power in order to help those who lack power. And they can project this message so well that it becomes hard to see what is behind it.

The essence of animal communication is deception—most animal communication is intended to deceive competitors and predators. It follows that much human communication serves the same purpose. The difference between politicians and the rest of us is not that they are deceptive; the difference is that they are good at it and they know why they are doing it. In addition, the best liars are those who believe their own stories, and this brings us back to self-deception, to Barack Obama, and to Ben Rhodes’ new book on Obama’s leadership. Rhodes was recently interviewed about his book on National Public Radio. In that interview, Rhodes came across as bright and articulate, but also as narcissistic and self-deceived. This impression was confirmed in the following (astonishing) commentary on his book in Sunday’s (June 10^th) Wall Street Journal:

“Mr. Rhodes’ prose is engaging, and his Syria narrative, contrary to his slippery reputation, is astonishingly candid. We can attribute his honesty to a lack of self-awareness. He depicts himself, Mr. Obama and other members of the former president’s team as not only tragically indecisive and irresponsible but self-absorbed to the point of moral insensateness.  Yet there is no indication Mr. Rhodes understands that his account is damning.”

So, what is the point? First, Freud was right: politicians are not like the rest of us; they have a distinctive psychology that sets them apart from ordinary citizens. Second, Freud was wrong about that psychology. Even dictators like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad are not psychopaths; rather, they are narcissistic politicians who escaped the bonds of accountability. Unlike psychopaths, successful dictators are clear minded about their goals—they are pragmatic, rational, and make data-based decisions in order to secure their legacies. Third, our own elected politicians also tend to be narcissists (Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Woodrow Wilson, etc.); charismatic, charming, and self-deceived. Sincerity is the mark of people who have been taken in by their own acts. The problems occur when political leaders commit their countries to seemingly humanitarian projects that are actually intended to secure their own personal legacies: Woodrow Wilson in WWI; Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam; George Bush in Iraq…

References

O’Reilly, C.A.  (2017).  The Leadership Quarterly.  http//dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.08.001

Rhodes, B.  (2018).  The world as it is:  A memoir of the Obama white house.  New York:  Penguin.

Ou, Y. (2012). CEO humility and its relationship with middle manager behaviors and performance: Examining the CEO-middle manager interface. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, 72(7-A), 2478.

Owens, B. P., Johnson, M. D., & Mitchell, T. R. (2013). Expressed humility in organizations: Implications for performance, teams, and leadership. Organizational Science, 24, 1517-1538. doi: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0795

*This is a guest post authored by Dr. Nicholas Emler, Professor of Psychology at University of Surrey.

Social organizations generate immense power and great benefits. Today, we rely on social organizations to support every facet of our lives—from food production and distribution to water supply and waste disposal to the provision of health care and national security. However, that power can also be a source of massive harm.  It therefore matters whose hands control the levers of this power. And moral character matters immensely at this level because leaders have significant discretion to act, discretion denied to people lower in the organizational hierarchy.

There are some distinct moral challenges associated with the exercise of organizational leadership; unfortunately, some leaders are not up to these challenges.  This essay identifies seven moral challenges of leadership, and concludes by suggesting that moral failure may be commonplace at the top of social organizations.

The first and most elementary moral challenge concerns the fact that leaders occupy positions of trust; they are entrusted with managing the material resources of the organization. As criminology clearly shows, theft depends on opportunity and most societies are arranged so as to minimize the opportunities available to known delinquents. But matters are very different at the top of organizations; the opportunities and temptations – of personal enrichment at collective expense — can be huge and the strength of character to resist those temptations is often lacking. Think of Enron executives, Bernie Madoff, Jacob Zuma, or virtually any Russian oligarch.

The second challenge arises because leaders occupy positions of power – over subordinates—and the temptation is tyranny. People often have reasons to dislike others and wish them harm. But they seldom act on their wishes because aggression is not free; victims retaliate and the law intervenes. In criminological terms, there are credible deterrents. But as we move up organizational hierarchies, the deterrents become less credible and the cost of aggression fades away. Consequently, bullying, sexual predation, persecution, torture and mass murder can result. The examples here begin with Harvey Weinstein and Robert Maxwell (head of a British publishing empire and notorious bully) and extend to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung and the horrors they perpetrated.

The third moral challenge is based on the fact that leaders are in positions of authority, and are, therefore, responsible for maintaining fair procedures for administering justice.This might seem to be a benign challenge, but not managing it properly can be very costly to organizations. People care about justice—the fairness of the procedures to which they are subject and the outcomes they receive. And when they perceive matters to be unfair, they withdraw their commitment to organizational citizenship, a commitment on which all organizations depend. This leads to depressed morale, lowered motivation, and resentment-driven sabotage. However, the literature on organizational justice mostly concerns how the recipients of justice react; it tells us little about how to deliver justice in a manner acceptable to those recipients.

The fourth challenge reflects the fact that social organizations tend to embody a particular set of values. Think about the claims of competing candidates for political office; there will typically be a contrast in the values they endorse, for example, freedom versus equality. The elected candidate then has an obligation to promote those values. Leaders need to be clear about their value priorities. Without being clear about their values, they risk decision-making paralysis.

Fifth, organizations exist to do something, and achieving that mission is the responsibility of the leadership. Mission failure is also a moral challenge; mission failure is all too often due to incompetence. However, the problem ultimately is not the limited competence of leaders but their failure to acknowledge their limits. Complex organizations require expertise beyond the capacity of any single individual and good leaders have the humility to recognize this and seek expert advice from others. Bad leaders refuse to admit any limits to their omniscience. The results can be corporate collapse and financial ruin for thousands of investors, the catastrophic failure of health care organizations, battles lost with massive casualties, the economic ruin of entire countries (think Robert Mugabe), and mass starvation.

Sixth, leaders have a moral obligation to avoid collateral damage when pursuing the organizational mission. Much of the literature on corporate crime documents this moral failure. It is estimated that on the job injuries resulting from unsafe working practices are 7 times the injuries resulting from criminal assaults. Avoidable deaths from occupational accidents and diseases are between 5 and 7 times as frequent as deaths by homicide. In addition, evidence collected by US federal agencies show that about 20 million Americans a year are injured or killed by unsafe consumer products. Corporate executives may not intend these consequences but they are foreseeable, and often foreseen; the Ford Pinto and Thalidomide are but two examples.

The final and perhaps most difficult moral challenge to meet, is to use the opportunity provided by leadership of a powerful organization – most notably but not only a nation state – to do good, to address grievous wrongs and injustices, to root out corruption and oppression, and to face down tyrants. The list of leaders rising to this challenge is depressingly short. One reason may be that the complex causal linkages in social systems are difficult to grasp and interventions designed to fix one problem often have other unintended but damaging consequences.

Why are we so often poorly served by our leaders? Some of the reasons are noted above – the corrupting consequences of opportunity, the lack of effective deterrence, etc. But another reason lies in processes of leader selection. The extensive psychological literature on leadership selection and evaluation is largely irrelevant because it assumes the selection process is rational and empirical—e.g., assessment center methodologies. In most real organizations, however, people are chosen for positions of leadership through selection processes that are heavily top-down. And in top-down selection, politics and technical competence often trump questions about the moral integrity of candidates.

*This Q&A was originally published by HRPWR.com. 

Dr. Robert Hogan is an international authority in the fields of personality assessment, the assessment of management skills and organisational efficiency. He is the author of more than 300 articles, book chapters and books in total; the founder of Hogan Assessments and eponym of the Hogan test.  Dr. Hogan is a determining personality of 21st century applied business psychology, who is widely acclaimed internationally in scientific and business circles alike. We recently spoke with Dr. Hogan when he was in Budapest to speak at the Future of Coaching in Organisations conference.

May I start with a personal question? Have you always been interested in organisational psychology, or had you previously tried your hand at other fields of psychology?

I’m a retired naval officer. After leaving the navy, I worked with youthful offenders for one and a half years – my interest in psychology derives from these times. I was completely enchanted by the task of understanding how these young people had arrived at this point, many of whom were really smart and good at sports – how did they become youthful offenders? I wanted to find out what could be done to reverse the process which had led them to that point. After this, I decided to pursue a PhD in psychology, and I spent the first 11-13 years of my post-navy career studying crime.

How did you arrive at studying personality assessment, leadership and organisational development from there?

While I was studying the psychology of delinquency I realised that in truth I’m more interested in the normal personality – through criminals we can’t understand the normal personality, but through studying the normal personality we can understand what has happened to those who become criminals. This is how I got to the point of studying personality in itself, and how I got to the question, which is a very important question in life indeed: what shapes our career? How can we be successful in life? As this is something criminals can’t have: success in career. This was followed by the question of how to make a career within an organisation – since nobody makes a career in the desert alone… I started thinking about the topic of “people in the organisation”, then one thing came after another. I explored the literature of organisational theory, and I realised that this doesn’t exist: that nobody had ever talked about organisational theory before. Even though people create organisations, organisations develop cultures, and after this, the culture affects who can be inside and who remains outside… This is how someone becomes a criminal – they are the ones who remain outside – and this is how I started dealing with organisational psychology.

I have seen a video on the web page of Hogan Assessments, in which people are asked what they think the concept of personality covers. Now I would like to ask you: what is personality?

It’s about two things. One of them is what a person thinks about him or herself: this is his or her identity. The other is what others think about him: this is his reputation (in other words, his honour or credit). The first covers what a person thinks about who he or she thinks he/she is, the second is what others think about him or her. During the history of psychology, most psychologists have focused on identity, even though the most important part of our life is our reputation: since based on this we are hired, fired or promoted; people lend us money, vote for us and so on. So psychologists have missed this opportunity, because we focus exactly on this, on how we affect others. Our reputation is the key to everything. For instance politicians understand this very well – but psychologists don’t.

From where did you get the idea to measure reputation?

Freud phrased it something like this: “The ‘you’ that you know is hardly worth knowing” – as it’s something that you invented about yourself. The problem with all of this is self-deception: people lie to themselves most of the time. And one of their biggest lies towards themselves is in connection with who they are and what they do. What we can believe is what other people say about them. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Our reputation aggregates of all our past behaviors: this is our best data source for how we are going to behave in the future.

Can we always believe what other people say about someone?

We have to analyze all of the results. We can’t take the opinions of only one or two people. We have to ask at least ten or fifteen people, since anyone can be antagonistic towards someone – or is his or her good friend. That’s why we need a lot of data.

Does all the above mentioned mean that self-knowledge doesn’t play a part at all in a successful career – and it’s not important in the assessments?

Exactly! How do we know where self-knowledge comes from? We assume that it comes from introspection – namely, what we think about ourselves. But many, many successful people are incapable of introspection! They are just not capable: they become angry if you ask them to peer inward. Ronald Reagan was famous about not being able to do this; another example is Voltaire. So if very successful people are not capable, then introspection is not even important – is it?

I will have to think about that a bit…

All right! So the thing we have to speak about, is strategic self-knowledge. This means that we have to be aware of how others see us, and also of how we affect others.

If it’s true that a person’s reputation consists of all his/her past behavior, then how should we evaluate if someone’s personality has gone through a big change – how can we assess that? Can we assess it at all?

I don’t think that personality could ever change in a large measure. It’s very hard to change personality. What we can change is behavior: based on feedback, we can change something in our behavior. At the same time, personality has an important dimension, which we call coachability. This means that not everyone listens to feedback. Let’s just think about athletes: you get 9-10 athletes to every star athlete who are just as skilled, but they don’t become star athletes. Those who become star athletes listen to coaching. Without this, they can’t perform at their best: it won’t work if they don’t allow themselves to be coached.

So what you are saying is that coachability is something which can be measured, and if someone is coachable, there is a chance that his or her behavior will change later on?

Yes. And if someone reaches low scores in coachability, it means that he/she will never change. Because these people like themselves as they are – why should they change? (Or so they think.)

Hogan Assessments also deals with measuring leadership skills. What characterises a good leader?

That their subordinates like him/her and they trust him/her. And they believe him/her. I can also tell why they like a good leader. There are four reasons: first, they know that they can trust him or her, and that he or she won’t betray them. Second, they see that this person knows what he/she is talking about. She/he knows the field she/he is dealing with, and is really competent in it. The third is that she/he has good judgement: she/he makes very good decisions. Nelson – one of the best leaders I know – never made any bad decisions. And the fourth? These people have a vision which is attractive. If we would like to define the bad leader, just recall all the bad managers we have met so far: they lie, they don’t know what they are talking about, they make bad decisions, and they aim to realise bad values. What they are trying to achieve is not worth achieving. As a matter of fact, what I have just said is based on knowledge gained from millions of data points about what a good leader looks like. I’m not a philosopher, I approach the question from the viewpoint of an engineer. I really have to build on data. For building up a business or anything else, we need to support the process with data. We don’t build bridges from instinct either. (Laughs.)

Could you share your views about how digitalisation has changed, or how it is changing, personality assessment?

First, I have to lay down that I’m constantly thinking about this question: in fact, it’s been troubling me since 1965, so I’ve been worrying about it for a while. But I think that human nature has a biological core, which will never change. What we would like to measure does not change; the method of measurement can change at best. At the same time, I also think that the best way to collect data from a person is to ask him or her a series of sophisticated questions. I don’t know yet if there is any faster way of getting information about people. And the best way to get information about people is to ask other people about them. And how can we digitize this…? Digitalisation makes all this faster and more effective, we can ask more people within less time – but what we want to measure will always remain the same. Today we can collect the amount of data within 4-5 days which took me 2 years in the first occasion. And this is astounding!

As a conclusion, I would ask you a personal question again: what are you most proud of in your career?

There are four things of which I think I can be proud. I think I was the one who stood up and showed to the scientific world that personality is important, indeed: that it predicts workplace performance, moreover, in the case of all occupations. It predicts work performance more than anything else, including IQ. And personality doesn’t discriminate. Here there is no difference among the attainable scores between women and men, or between people coming from various places, and so on. Anyone completing the test can reach the same scores. In the second place, I also showed that leadership and leadership skills are important. So, first of all personality is important. Secondly, leadership ability is important, and thirdly, personality predicts leadership ability. And the fourth thing I’m proud of is that (through mapping the dark side of personality) we also pointed out the fact that 65-75% of present managers don’t perform well in their work. I think these are important contributions. And it can be said in every case that the scientific community has always had a different opinion. So when we pointed at these things, we met serious resistance from the scientific community. And I’m very proud that we did it!

Today, many organizations use personality assessment tools to assess their employees. But before deciding to use a personality tool, should organizations create their own thermometer test? 

Imagine someone walking up to a doctor with a new kind of device that claims to measure the body temperature. What if the manufacturer requested the doctor to endorse the new product? The doctor is the head of a hospital and her endorsement could mean opening up a new market for the manufacturer. How should the doctor go about taking that decision?

The doctor would check it for the safety and reliability of the readings, and calibrate it against thermometers used by the hospital. The doctor could check her own temperature a few times over the hour to check if the reading is consistent. In short, one would take all measures to check the reliability and validity of a product or a tool against the accepted standards.

Passing the “Thermometer Test” 

Today, many organizations use personality assessment tools to assess their employees. Talent acquisition, job fit, and coaching are all great cases for the use of personality assessment tools. After all, the leader’s personality is what gets reflected in his or her leadership style and can be a great source of understanding the organization’s culture. But before deciding to use a personality tool, organizations should create their own “thermometer test”. It is important to know that the test that one is using is capable of doing what it promises to do and have an expert psychometrician decide the “reliability and validity” of the tool.

Here is a set of elements that one can use to choose the right personality assessment tool:

• Check for the science behind the test: Check if a sufficient number of top peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Human Performance, International Journal of Selection and Assessment etc.) has reviewed the tool. Check if the test adheres to globally accepted standards of designing personality assessment tools and check for the reviews in Buros’ Mental Measurement Yearbook or the British Psychological Society (BPS) standards or the Psychological Testing Center. Do not get carried away by the names of client organizations provided by the test provider.
• Determining what the test will be used for: The tests can be used for making decisions on hiring, the potential for success in a new role in case of an internal move, or to provide a basis for coaching a leader. It is important to define the key demands on the role for which a person is being evaluated. Then decide if the test that is being chosen measures what is wanted. You cannot use the thermometer to check the weight of a patient (at least, not yet).
• Membership of bodies that regulate statistical and ethical standards: Check if your test provider is a member of the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology (SIOP), or some other professional organization that mandates ethical and statistical guidelines for creating assessments. It is like checking if a surgeon has the requisite experience defined by a professional body regulating guidelines applicable to surgeons or a Chartered Accountant is a member of the Institute of CAs — it is a proxy for the person’s ability to advise.
• Test manual’s standards: The test manual should adhere to the standards described by a body (e.g. SIOP) that regulates standards in development, validation, and norms for the assessment. The test manuals and reports must follow these standards. If your mobile phone manufacturer provides details on the radiation levels, standards around display, battery life etc., so must the personality assessment tool.
• The Job: The test being used should be validated for a job similar to the one it is being tested for. Ask the personality assessment provider to produce a summary of validation results for the job. Just as what is needed to succeed in Sales differs from what is needed in an Executive role, the test must be a valid predictor of performance in the target job. Ask the provider to explain how the high and low score cut-offs have been arrived at. That would help in understanding the norms against which the results will be compared. In the thermometer test, it is like asking the range of temperature that would be considered normal. A temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is cast in stone as a measure of normal temperature. A body temperature of 99.7 degrees F or higher measured using an oral thermometer is considered fever.
• Test the test: Personality assessment tests need to be developed by skilled psychometricians. They need to be tested and calibrated by experts before they are administered to the employees of your organization. Your employees trust you to do the due diligence before their career choices get shaped by an assessment. Try the ‘thermometer test’ with your assessment provider and evaluate the science behind the instrument.

Want to learn more about personality tests? Check out The Ultimate Guide to Personality Tests

*This article was first written by Abhijit Bhaduri for People Matters Magazine, June 2018 issue.