In the 1970s, only 8 percent of S&P 500 CEOs were recruited externally. That number grew to 22 percent in 2014. Yet, outsiders are almost 7 times more likely to be dismissed within a short tenure than homegrown CEOs. No matter how much a board learns about an outside candidate, executive stakeholders simply have a better understanding of an internal contender’s strengths and weaknesses, especially as they relate to the specifics of the current business landscape and strategic objectives. As a result of the inherent “information misalignment,” the chance of making a mistake is much higher for a CEO hired from outside the company.

Most stakeholders will admit that they know this already. But what they won’t admit is that the expressed need to bring in an outside CEO is evidence that neither the board, the current (or previous) CEO nor the chief of human resources successfully performed one of their most crucial, shared responsibilities: building a sustainable leadership pipeline that readies executives and potential executives to advance at all levels of the organization.

There is good reason effective succession planning eludes so many otherwise functional companies. Making inferences about future performance, the variance of organizational politics and a tendency to devote limited (if any) focus to assessing “hidden potential” often hinder otherwise valiant efforts. For example, there are several reasons an individual may be nominated to participate in a succession plan, but far too often these individuals are identified because they are socially skilled, confident and interested in influencing others and moving up the corporate ladder. However, just because an individual is rewarding to deal with, doesn’t mean that the organization should devote resources to his/her development.

When it comes to desired leadership outcomes, emergence does not necessarily equal effectiveness. If beating the competition remains the ultimate goal, an organization’s leadership pipeline needs to be filled with those who can successfully lead high performing teams. Accurately identifying top talent must involve science in the form of objective, relevant validated data. Despite guidance from the academic and business literatures, some companies still base these important decisions on politically fraught processes, or confound successful emergence with effective leadership. But clarity is not unattainable. According to various studies, successful managers tend to spend their time managing up by networking and politicking, whereas effective managers spend their time managing down by taking care of subordinates and driving team performance. Rarely do the two groups overlap.

What’s more, there is a common misunderstanding amongst most executives that all individuals considered for a succession plan should be able to effectively lead people, as opposed to advancing as a leader of processes or thought (i.e. subject matter expert), for example. Tech companies in the Fortune 100 have pioneered the notion that not everyone makes a great people leader. In addition to the typical “high potential” evaluation models, organizations like Microsoft and Cisco smartly consider other “leadership” skillsets that lend themselves to domains such as operational efficiency or innovation. In other words, insisting on professional people-leadership development for an individual who lacks the interest or compulsion to guide others toward stretch goals only sets up that valued employee for inevitable failure.

Well validated personality assessments give a preview into which path forward is most conducive to an individual’s inherent behavioral patterns and latent interests. Those who have the proclivity to impose structure and the drive to keep things predictable will demonstrate behaviors conducive to process leadership. Those who have the propensity to seek inspirational ideas and who also emphasize the importance of imagination will likely have an easier time in a thought leadership role. And the working styles of those compelled to stay knowledgeably up-to-date as well as demand sound rationales to determine courses of action will be more conducive to data-dependent jobs. Having such information available in easy-to-understand terminology can help stakeholders vested in the organizational well-being leverage employees’ natural tendencies for more informed and specific succession planning.

Our business landscape continues to shift and evolve at an ever-faster rate. People represent the difference between an organization’s success and failure. The stakes of correctly identifying and developing the next generation of leaders could not be higher. Focusing on specific, differentiating options for advancement early in the careers of valued employees will only serve to benefit the organization. Basing the related evaluations of potential on objective data-driven metrics will help HR overcome the ultimate challenge: keeping the pipeline from entry level all the way to the CEO flush with options for filling vacancies.

This article originally appeared in Human Resource Executive. Photo credit by Lou Levit on Unsplash.

If you went to a concert to see Lorde and instead Ed Sheeran emerged on stage, you might be pleased to see him, but disappointed because Ed Sheeran is not Lorde and is never going to do the version of Green Light you thought you’d be watching.

The fact that Ed Sheeran is not Lorde demonstrates the economic principle of fungibility. If something is fungible, it means it can be exchanged for a good of equal value. Money is said to be fungible, because it can be exchanged easily for goods of the same value. Around the world, $4-5 can be swapped for a Big Mac. However, Lorde is not fungible.

Although this seems to be common sense, the many incompetent managers, team leaders, or coaches in the world completely fail to understand it. They look at the members of a team in the same way they see batteries in a torch or a tool: a technical skill that can simply be exchanged. While a football team requires a striker, a wing, and a goal-keeper, competence is all that is needed to change out one player for another using this line of thinking (fungibility). But that’s incorrect. Players are more than mere functional capability, and arrive on the field with personalities, styles, and preferences. Messi is not Neymar and both are very different players to Wayne Rooney.

Scientific evidence indicates quite clearly that individuals’ personalities play a significant role in determining the performance of the team they play with. Personality impacts team performance as much or more than pure technical skill and, when combined, team members’ personalities operate like the different functions of a single organism. A meta-analysis showed that team members’ personalities influence:

• cooperation
• shared cognition
• information sharing
• overall team performance

There are often substantial compatibility differences between people on the team, regardless of how similar their expertise or technical backgrounds. Suzanne Bell, a psychologist working on the Mars project for NASA, points out that astronauts are intelligent, they’re experts in their technical areas, and they have at least some teamwork skills, but “what’s tricky is how well individuals combine.”

People aren’t fungible because they play two roles in a working group: a functional role, based on their formal position and technical skill, and a psychological role, based on the kind of person they are.

Because so many teams miss the psychological synergy required to perform, my colleagues and I developed a method to look at teams as a function of their psychological roles, exposing the deep dynamics of the group. We found team members occupy one of five roles:

• Results.Team members who naturally organize work and take charge tend to be socially self-confident, competitive, and energetic. 
• Pragmatism.Team members who are practical, hard-headed challengers of ideas and theories tend to be prudent, emotionally stable, and level-headed. 
• Innovation. Team members who naturally focus on innovation, anticipate problems, and recognize when the team needs to change tend to be imaginative, curious, and open to new experiences.
• Process.Team members who pay attention to details, processes, and rules tend to be reliable, organized, and conscientious.
• Relationships.Team members who naturally focus on relationships, are attuned to others’ feelings, and are good at building cohesion tend to be warm, diplomatic, and approachable.

Looking at the balance of roles in a team offers an extraordinary insight into its dynamics and can predict the probability of success or failure for an assigned task. For example, a finance team was charged with rolling out a novel business reporting product for transforming the culture of a government agency. But, the percentage of players in each role showed the team was doomed from its inception:

• 17% of team members were considered results-oriented (low)
• 100% of team members were considered pragmatic (high)
• 0% of team members were considered innovative (low)
• 50% of team members were considered process-oriented (good)
• 0% of team members were considered good relationship builders (low)

This team failed because no one played the relationship-building role, the team lacked internal cohesion, and they failed to establish any connection with the frontline leaders who were required to take on the team’s new accounting process. With low-results role players and a team full of pragmatists, the group moved slowly, reluctantly, and waited to be told what to do.

The mix of the right personalities can make the difference between a competent performance and a great one. A Lorde single featuring Ed Sheeran might be a good example.

My new book on teams is “Fusion: The Psychology of Teams.”

When Frederick Taylor published his pioneering principles of scientific management in 1912, the repetitive and mundane nature of most jobs required employees to think as little as possible. Breaking down each task into basic components and standardizing workers’ behaviors to eliminate choice and flexibility could help managers turn employees into productive machines, albeit with alienated spirits.

Fast forward to the present and we see that most jobs today demand the exact opposite from employees: the capacity to keep learning and developing new skills and expertise, even if they are not obviously linked to one’s current job. As academic reviews have pointed out, people’s employability – their ability to gain and maintain a desired job – no longer depends on what they already know, but on what they are likely to learn.

In other words, higher career security is a function of employability, and that in turn depends on learnability. Thus Eric Schmidt notes that a major pillar in Google’s recruitment strategy is to hire “learning animals,” while EY recruiters observe that “to be a standout, candidates need to demonstrate technical knowledge in their discipline, but also a passion for asking the kind of insightful questions that have the power to unlock deeper insights and innovation for our clients.”

Sadly, most organizations have yet to wake up to this reality, so they continue to pay too much attention to academic qualifications and hard skills, as if what entry-level employees had learned during university actually equipped them for today’s job market. Although learnability does boost academic performance, just because someone is job-ready when they obtain their educational credentials does not mean that they are also learning-ready.

For starters, workplace learnability is far less structured and formulaic than college learnability, and employees must juggle the tension between the demand for the short-term efficiencies of productivity with the long-term quest for intellectual growth. For all the talk of lifelong learning – as well as billions of dollars spent on training every year – scientific studies suggest that most organizational training programs have no long-term effects on people’s job performance.

So how can managers do a better job of fostering learnability in the workplace? We suggest starting with three things:
Select for it. Don’t waste training budgets on employees who haven’t demonstrated learnability, even if those employees are otherwise skilled, collaborative, and productive. To maximize the benefit of limited training investments, focus on employees with higher learnability: curious and inquisitive individuals who are genuinely interested in acquiring new knowledge. Just like some people are more likely to benefit from coaching than others – because they are humbler, more open to feedback, and ambitious – certain individuals are more trainable than others because of their hungry mind.

Nurture it. Managers who want their employees to learn new things will encourage that behavior by doing it themselves. We are all time-deprived, but high learnability people make the time to learn new things. What is the last book you read that opened your mind? (Simply reading the articles your Facebook friends share doesn’t count.) When did you last devote time to study another industry? When was the last time you spoke to someone about stuff outside your area of expertise? How hard do you try to break up your default routine at work? How often do you ask “why”?

Paradoxically, instant access to information may suppress our natural curiosity and appetite for knowledge. It is to our learnability what fast food is to our diet: a ubiquitous vice with no nutritional value and the potential to make healthy food tasteless. High learnability enables people to dive deeper to translate information into actual expertise. It is the key intellectual differentiator between those who can go online and those who become smarter in the process.

Reward it. If you want to change people’s behavior, you should show them that you mean it. It is not enough to hire curious people and hope they display as much learnability as you do. You should also reward them for doing so.

One of the best ways to reward high learnability is to provide new and challenging opportunities for those individuals where they can continue to be stimulated to exercise their learnability and be rewarded by broadening their expertise and increasing their value to the company and themselves. Another suggestion is to promote people only if they have acquired sufficient expertise in other jobs in the organization, not just their own.

Or you could give awards for individuals who organize events or activities to promote learnability in the company: e.g., running internal conferences, bringing external speakers, and circulating information that is intellectually stimulating and has the potential to nurture people’s curiosity. Even simpler habits, such as writing a blog, sharing articles on social media, or recommending books and movies, can be rewarded.

Though people differ in their natural curiosity and learning potential, the context will also determine how much learnability people display. Executives and senior leaders should be tasked with enhancing employees’ learnability throughout the organization. Since leaders play a major role in shaping the climate of teams and culture of organizations, they will act as either catalysts or blockers of employees’ learnability.

This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review on July 18, 2016 by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Mara Swan.

In Hogan’s endeavors to become a global brand, we have searched for partners worldwide who believe in our assessments as much as we do. Our distributors are the backbone of what makes our company so effective around the globe, and that is why Hogan would like to spotlight, Compass, a Hogan distributor based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They joined the Hogan network in 2009, and have steadily grown ever since.

With a vibrant, growing economy, Argentina is an excellent place to establish relationships because of its growth potential. Using the Hogan Assessment suite, we hope not only to make a difference for individual companies, but change how people around the globe perceive using personality testing for hiring decisions, so that individuals are hired more effectively on an international level.

Here’s a personal account from Adrian Büchner, the CEO and Experience Director of Compass, on why Hogan work so well for the Argentinian workforce:

Before working at Compass, I had worked with other personality tools that were very inconsistent when predicting leadership profiles or talent potential, and none that examined culture fit. They were basically like reading horoscopes in the Sunday paper. At my previous job I managed an account for Bridgestone, and they told me that I should get certified through Hogan because it was the current trend in the HR world. However, after my first experience working with the Hogan Assessments, I realized it was not just a trend; it was an incredibly reliable and consistent tool that analyzes identity as a whole.

Something that I love about working with Hogan is that Compass is not only providing quality assessment, selection, and development tools to the companies we do business with, but we are able to have a substantial effect on the growth and prosperity of our city and region by improving the multinational corporations, as well as local and regional conglomerates here in Buenos Aires.

Here at Compass we like to say “que ayudamos a nuestros clientes no a levantar una pared sino a construir un edificio”. This loosely translates to “we help our customers not to raise walls, but to construct buildings”. We believe that it is imperative to help businesses in the still-developing regions of the world, in which we are located, to build solid foundations of leadership that will help them pursue a more prosperous future for our country as a whole.

The value of Hogan is seen on both a macro, business-wide level and a micro, employee level. We have been asked to incorporate Hogan’s services to team building, internal and external talent acquisition, in addition to coaching. Some of our clients have even recommended Hogan’s tools to their suppliers and clients!

Ninety-five percent of our clients have repeated the Hogan experience. They understand the benefit of Hogan’s expansive toolbelt, and have utilized them to solve complex problems in many different types of situations and projects. Some have commented that Hogan is a “lighthouse illuminating issues, so that they can be better solved with savvy products and a keen knowledge of management.”

We are convinced that keeping a focus on the people side of a business, as Hogan does, is the best way to lead modern companies into a brighter future, and we hope to continue this journey with Hogan today and always.

We’re excited to announce that we have released our 2018 US Hogan Certification Workshop schedule.

The 2-day Level 1 workshop provides an in-depth understanding of how to use and interpret the Hogan Assessment Suite, offering a comprehensive tutorial on three Hogan inventories – Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI); Hogan Development Survey (HDS); and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI). Participants attending both days and successfully completing the Level 1 curriculum will be certified to use and interpret the Hogan inventories.

The 1-day Level 2 workshop prepares the learner to apply more advanced feedback models, properly set the frame for a Hogan feedback session, create developmental action plans and understand best practices for presenting Hogan data.

Insights acquired during Level 1 and Level 2 workshops will challenge and change the way you think about human nature, leadership and performance. Outlined below is a detailed schedule of all Hogan Certification Workshops across the US in 2018:

Level 1 Workshops

New York – January 23-24

Dallas – February 20-21

Portland, Ore. – March 6-7

Atlanta – March 7-8

Washington – April 10-11

Atlanta – April 24-25

Minneapolis – May 8-9

Los Angeles – May 15-16

Portland, Ore. – June 12-13

New York – June 26-27

Atlanta – July 17-18

Minneapolis – September 18-19

Portland, Ore. – September 18-19

New York – September 25-26

Atlanta – October 2-3

Tulsa, Okla. – November 6-7

Portland, Ore. – December 4-5

Atlanta – December 11-12 

Level 2 Workshops

Portland, Ore. – March 8

Atlanta – March 9

Atlanta – April 26

Minneapolis – May 10

Portland, Ore. – June 14

Atlanta – July 19

Minneapolis – September 20

Portland, Ore. – September 20

Atlanta – October 4

Tulsa, Okla. – November 8

Portland, Ore. – December 6

Atlanta – December 13

Click here for more information.

Although we live in an age that glorifies innovation, there is a big difference between theoretically advocating for it and being able (or willing) to actually implement it. None of this is really new. From Schumpeter’s classic definition of innovation as “creative destruction” to recent portrayals of innovators as disruptors or constructive nonconformist, we have known for years that the people and processes that enable innovation are often undesirable, not least because of the ubiquitous human fear of the unknown. As Slavoj Žižek points out, few things are as violent – psychologically speaking – as change, and the violence of change is what makes people cling to the familiar, even when they hypothetically embrace change. Indeed, whether the goal is to change oneself or one’s environment, most people don’t want to change – what they want is to have changed. “Take this pill and you’ll be smarter, slimmer, happier, richer” – everybody would sign up for that. Now if the deal is to follow a specific set of instructions that may or not, after a great deal of effort, suffering, and persistence, create the desired change, then the uptake will be rather smaller.

Traditionally, there have been three major levels of explanation to understand the determinants of change, including innovation (the implementation of original and useful ideas into new products, processes, and services that enhance organizational effectiveness). The first and most widely discussed is strategy and it concerns the business plan for innovation – hire MBAs or McKinsey consultants and they will help you pick a recipe from their innovation cookbook, with detailed instructions and a stepwise approach based on data-driven management theories. The second, more metaphysical, is culture, and, according to Peter Drucker, it “eats strategy for breakfast”. Culture comprises the explicit and implicit rules dictating the dynamics of social interaction in organizations. It includes the organization’s code of conduct and dictates what gets sanctioned and rewarded, or, to borrow Google’s expression, “how we do things around here”. While both strategy and culture are no doubt pivotal to predict and manage organizational innovation, they are actually the product of a third variable, namely talent. Indeed, strategy and culture don’t emerge out of the blue – they result from the leaders of the organization, and talented leaders are better at creating a culture and strategy to harness innovation, as opposed to destroying it.

Yet in every organization the main challenge for those interested in pushing forward an innovation agenda is to work with people who resist it. This is not only true for leaders – when they have to get buy-in from their executives and boards – but also employees. Regardless of how senior you are, and what role you occupy, you will only be able to contribute to innovation if you can overcome the barriers and hurdles put in place by those who are eager to maintain the status quo, and what makes this challenge so difficult is that these innovation killers are often utterly unaware of their resistance to change. It is always easier to fight a rational enemy, and delusion inhibits rationality.

Personality research provides a useful theoretical model for understanding innovation from a people perspective, and that includes a range of practical recommendations for dealing with anti-innovation personalities. Sadly, most writings in this area have focused on the qualities of individuals with great innovation potential (the bright side of innovation), and to a lesser degree on the problematic or undesirable characteristics of these creative personalities (the dark side of innovation). However, given that innovators are far less represented in organizations (and societies) than conformists, and that only a minority of organizations succeed in their innovation efforts, it makes sense to devote more attention to the profile of blockers than enablers of innovation.

So, what are these blockers typically like, and how should one deal with them? Here are four valuable lessons from science:

Threat-detection mode: One of the most common reasons for resisting innovation is the unconscious bias to attend to (and prioritize) potential threats over and above rewards. In contrast, innovation is a reward-seeking activity, as evidenced by the higher risk tolerance, optimism, and opportunism of successful entrepreneurs, who are naturally prone to distort reality so as to ignore the potential threats underlying change and disruption. As a result, innovators are often unable to enthuse threat-sensitive people with their ideas and ventures. It is as if they spoke a completely different language to innovation killers. Indeed, to tell someone who is on threat-detection mode that pursuing X or Y could be exciting, original, or innovative, is like trying to cheer up someone with depression; it is as ineffective as trying to persuade natural innovators that their plans are risky or unfeasible. Thus if you want to convince innovation killers of the need to innovate, you are better off using a threat-based strategy: “if we don’t innovate, we are going to shrink, lose market-share, or die”. Note that people are generally more worried about losing what they have than gaining something they don’t.

Passive resistance: Another common feature of innovation killers is that they are quite good at avoiding over conflict. Instead of confronting innovators, they specialize in passive avoidance or resistance, which results from their leisurely personality style (a dark side trait). This is why innovation killers may pretend to agree with your innovative ideas while being not just disinterested, but also appalled by them. Their polite and cordial fake attitude is an effective strategy for boycotting ideas behind your back, and they effectively play on the enthusiasm of innovators who are so enamored with their own ideas that are easily fooled into thinking that others are equally keen on them. Thus the best way to deal with innovation killers is to disbelief in their apparent cooperativeness and acceptance, and assume that they are just faking interest. But instead of challenging or confronting them so they reveal their true attitudes, make them agree, document their approval in writing, and they will be forced to carry on pretending that they are in favor. In short, instead of exposing their passive insubordination, force them to keep faking it, until your ideas are executed and implemented.

This article was originally published by Forbes on May 23, 2017, and it was authored by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

Technology has turned HR into a data-driven game. This does not mean intuition is waning, but rather that a larger number of practitioners are likely to experience some shame or guilt if they admit that they are ‘playing it by ear’. The recent rebranding of talent management as ‘people analytics’ has arguably enhanced the status of HR.

The hope here is that HR can empower organisations with robust tech and data to turn the art of people management into a science: an objective, defensible and replicable process with a clear ROI.

That said, there is still room for improvement, as most technological innovations have yet to be rigorously scrutinised or effectively applied. The HR tech world is replete with shiny new objects, including some that warrant a considerable amount of optimism, even among cynics. However, at this stage there is no indication that these toys are more effective than applying well-established scientific principles. This is perhaps clearest in talent identification. Consider these salient examples:

Gamification. Although the application of game-like features to talent identification tools has enhanced user experience, enabling organisations to tap into a much wider candidate pool and turning recruitment upside down (from B2C to C2B), it is hard to get carried away. First, most assessment games look like 1980s arcade games.

If you look at what goes on in the real gaming industry, where it is increasingly hard to see the difference between a game and a 3D movie, gamified assessments seem to belong to a prehistoric era.

Second, most gamified assessments are either good-looking IQ tests or glorified situational judgment tests. However, they are less valid than traditional (non-gamified) tests of the same type. Third, the cost of gamified assessments is much higher than traditional ones, so you end up spending more on less accurate tools.

A more hopeful path may be to mine data from existing gamers – who play real videogames – to assess their job-related potential. There are now more gamers in China than people in the US, and hardcore gamers spend an average of 20 hours a week playing. Imagine a future in which companies send avatars to recruit Grand Theft Auto players as heads of sales because of their kick-ass aggression.

Big Data. There is now so much data available on people that we probably don’t need to gather any more. Internal company data, such as email content or metadata, can be used to monitor people’s performance, engagement, and identify their potential. The opportunities are even bigger online where our digital exhaust is as vast as it is underexploited. If only algorithms could access people’s browser history, Amazon purchases, Spotify playlists, Facebook and Twitter feeds (as in programmatic marketing), we would probably ‘know’ them better than the average manager does. However, there is no evidence this approach can predict work-related behaviours better than established selection methods, which also represent more ethical (and legal) alternatives. There is big a difference between what we could and should know about people.

Digital interviewing. A final area of technological disruption is in interviews, which are still the most widely used selection tool in the world. Today it is possible to interview anyone, and analyse their answers and behaviours, without the need for human intervention. Questions can be asked by avatars, and speech- and video-mining algorithms can translate interviewees’ behaviours into valid predictors of future performance, eliminating unconscious biases while reducing time and cost.

The problem, however, is most interviewers can’t ignore their intuition. It’s like having self-driving cars; people still put their hands on the steering wheels because they have more faith in themselves than in technology.

In short, when measured against intuition HR tech is making the industry smarter. But it has yet to reach the level of rigour of scientifically defensible methods.

This article was originally published by HR Magazine on January 10, 2017 and is authored by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

VIDEO: Dr. Hogan Discusses the Importance of Values 

Values are the DNA of culture, and culture is incredibly stable over generations. That explains why parent-child voting preferences and religious preferences have correlated so strongly throughout human history. Values are what drive prejudice, and the clash of values is what has caused so much unrest and conflict across the globe.

Values are also directly related to organizational success and failure, and the culture of an organization is defined by the values of the people at the top. You can have the world’s most effective business strategy but, if your organizational values are not aligned, you’re doomed.

High-performing groups will have similar values and you have to determine exactly what they are. In this video, Dr. Hogan discusses the importance of values, and how organizations need to put less of an emphasis on descriptive values and focus more on prescriptive values.

Among the various core ingredients of talent and career success, few personal qualities have received more attention in the past decade than emotional intelligence (EQ), the ability to identify and manage your own and others’ emotions. Importantly, unlike most of the competencies that make it into the HR zeitgeist of buzzwords, EQ is no fad.

In fact, thousands of academic studies have demonstrated the predictive power of scientific EQ assessments vis-à-vis job performance, leadership potential, entrepreneurship, and employability. Moreover, the importance of EQ has been highlighted beyond work-related settings, as higher scores have been associated with relationship success, mental and physical health, and happiness.

All this is good news for people with higher EQ. But what can those with lower scores do to improve their intrapersonal and interpersonal skills? Is it possible to increase your own and others’ EQ beyond its natural levels? While Goleman and other popular writers argue that (unlike IQ) EQ is malleable and trainable, EQ is really just a combination of personality traits. Accordingly, it is not set in stone; it is largely heritable, shaped by childhood experiences, and fairly stable over time.

This does not mean that the effort put toward sculpting emotionally intelligent behaviors is a waste of time. It simply means that focus and dedication is required. The same goes for helping others to act with EQ when they are not naturally inclined to do so. Here are five critical steps for developing EQ:

Turn self-deception into self-awareness. Personality, and thereby EQ, is composed of two parts: identity (how we see ourselves) and reputation (how others see us). For most people there is a disparity between identity and reputation that can cause them to ignore feedback and derail. Real self-awareness is about achieving a realistic view of one’s strengths and weaknesses and of how those strengths and weaknesses compare to others’. For instance, most people rate their own EQ highly, yet only a minority of those individuals will be rated as emotionally intelligent by others. Turning self-deception into self-awareness will not happen without accurate feedback, the kind that comes from data-based assessments such as a valid personality tests or 360-degree feedback surveys. Such tools are fundamental to help us uncover EQ-related blind spots, not least because other people are generally too polite to give us negative feedback.

Turn self-focus into other-focus. Paying due attention to others is tantamount to career success. But for those with lower levels of EQ, it’s difficult to see things from others’ perspectives, especially when there is no clear right or wrong way forward. Developing an other-centric approach starts with a basic appreciation and acknowledgement of team members’ individual strengths, weaknesses, and beliefs. Brief but frequent discussions with team members will lead to a more thorough understanding of how to motivate and influence others. Such conversations should inspire ways to create opportunities for collaboration, teamwork, and external networking.

Be more rewarding to deal with. People who are more employable and successful in their career tend to be seen as more rewarding to deal with. Rewarding people tend to be cooperative, friendly, trusting, and unselfish. Unrewarding individuals tend to be more guarded and critical; they are willing to speak their minds and disagree openly but can develop a reputation for being argumentative, pessimistic, and confrontational. Although this reputation helps enforce high standards, it’s only a matter of time before it erodes relationships and the support for initiatives that accompany them. It’s important that these individuals ensure an appropriate level of interpersonal contact before tasking someone or asking them for help. Proactively and frequently sharing knowledge and resources without an expectation for reciprocity will go a long way.

Control your temper tantrums. Passion and intense enthusiasm can easily cross the line to become moodiness and outright excitability when the pressure’s on. Nobody likes a crybaby. And in the business world, those who become particularly disappointed or discouraged when unanticipated issues arise are viewed as undeserving of a seat at the grown-ups’ table. If you’re one of many people who suffer from too much emotional transparency, reflect on which situations tend to trigger feelings of anger or frustration and monitor your tendency to overreact in the face of setbacks. For example, if you wake up to a bunch of annoying emails, don’t respond immediately — wait until you have time to calm down. Likewise, if someone makes an irritating comment during a meeting, control your reaction and keep calm. While you cannot go from being Woody Allen to being the Dalai Lama, you can avoid stressful situations and inhibit your volatile reactions by detecting your triggers. Start working on tactics that help you become aware of your emotions in real time, not only in terms of how you experience them, but, more important, in terms of how they are being experienced by others.

Display humility, even if it’s fake. Sometimes it can feel like you’re working on an island managed by six-year-olds. But if you’re the type of person who often thinks, “I’m surrounded by idiots,” then it’s likely that your self-assured behaviors are seen as being arrogant, forceful, and incapable of admitting mistakes. Climbing the organizational ladder requires an extraordinary degree of self-belief, which, up to a certain point, is seen as inspirational. However, the most-effective leaders are the ones who don’t seem to believe their own hype, for they come across as humble. Striking a healthy balance between assertiveness and modesty, demonstrating receptiveness to feedback and the ability to admit one’s mistakes, is one of the most difficult tasks to master. When things go wrong, team members seek confident leadership, but they also hope to be supported and taught with humility as they work to improve the situation. To develop this component of EQ, it is sometimes necessary to fake confidence, and it’s even more important to fake humility. We live in a world that rewards people for hiding their insecurities, but the truth is that it is much more important to hide one’s arrogance. That means swallowing one’s pride, picking and choosing battles, and looking for opportunities to recognize others, even if you feel you are right and others are wrong.

While the above recommendations may be hard to follow all the time, you will still benefit if you can adopt them some of the time. Much as with other coaching interventions, the goal here is not to change your personality but to replace counterproductive behaviors with more-adaptive actions — to build new habits that replace toxic tendencies and improve how others perceive you. This is why, when coaching works, it invalidates the results of a personality test: Your default predispositions are no longer evidenced in your behaviors.

This article was originallypublished in Harvard Business Review on January 9, 2017, and was authored by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Michael Sanger.

There is a well-known story about a cleaner at NASA who, when asked by JFK what his job was, responded “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.” This anecdote is often used to show how even the most mundane job can be seen as meaningful with the right mindset and under a good leadership.

Today, more and more employees demand much more than a good salary from their jobs. Money may lure people into jobs, but purpose, meaning, and the prospect of interesting and valuable work determines both their tenure and how hard they will work while they are on the job. Finding meaning at work has become so important that there are even public rankings for the most meaningful jobs. Although there are many factors determining how appealing jobs tend to be, those that contribute to improving other people’s lives are ranked top (e.g., health care and social work). Interestingly, meta-analytic studies indicated that there is only a marginal association between pay and job satisfaction. A lawyer who earns $150,000 a year is no more engaged than a freelance designer who earns $35,000 a year.

Research consistently shows that people experiencing meaningful work report better health, wellbeing, teamwork and engagement; they bounce back faster from setbacks and are more likely to view mistakes as learning opportunities rather than failures. In other words, people at work are more likely to thrive and grow when they experience their job as meaningful. This is why businesses with a stronger and clearer sense of purpose tend to have better financial performance. Unsurprisingly, the most successful companies in the world are also the best places in the world to work.

Over the past few decades, a great deal of research has shown that leaders play a significant role in helping employees understand why their roles matter. Furthermore, the leadership characteristics that enable these cultures of meaning and purpose to engage employees are a reflection of a leader’s personality — which has been proven to have a strong impact on team and organizational performance.

In particular, research suggests that there are four key personality characteristics that determine leaders’ ability to make other people’s jobs more meaningful, namely:

They are curious and inquisitive. Studies show that people tend to experience work as meaningful when they feel like they are contributing to creating something new — especially when they feel able to explore, connect and have an impact. Curious leaders help people find meaning at work by exploring, asking questions, and engaging people in ideas about the future. In a way, curious leaders help employees find something meaningful by providing a wider range of possibilities for how work gets done, as opposed to being very prescriptive and micromanage people. Curious leaders are also more likely to get bored and detest monotony, so they will always be looking for people to come up with new ideas to make their own experience of work more interesting.

They are challenging and relentless. One of the greatest problems organizations must solve is the inertia and stagnation that follow success, or even its anticipation. Research shows that optimistic people who expect to do well don’t try as hard as people who expect to struggle or fail. Leaders who remain ambitious in the face of both failure and success, and who push their people to remain dissatisfied with their accomplishments, instill a deeper sense of purpose in their teams and organizations. As a result employees feel a sense of progress, reinvention, and growth, which in turn results in a more meaningful and positive work experience.

They hire for values and culture fit. Research shows that people only find something valuable if it aligns with their core needs and motives. This is why the fit between an individual’s personal values and the culture of the organization they work in is such an important driver of their performance. In fact, you are better off not hiring the best, but instead people who are a good fit for your organization. Values function like an inner compass or lens through which we assign meaning to the world. Leaders who pay attention to what each individual values are more likely to hire people who will find it easier to connect with their colleagues and the wider organization, all of which help to drive a sense of meaning.

They are able to trust people. Most people hate being micromanaged. Overpowering and controlling bosses are serious source of disempowerment for employees. This drains the impact from the work they do and makes them feel worthless. In stark contrast, leaders who know how to trust people are more likely to give them room to experiment and grow. In particular, they help people mould their roles — something researchers call job crafting. Employees who customize their job tend to feel a much greater sense of importance and value because they feel that their manager actually trusts them.

Note that all the above four qualities ought to exist in concert. A boss who is relentless but not trusting might seek to “keep people on their toes” by being erratic or unpredictable — a sure way to hurt performance and morale. A boss who is challenging but not curious may come across as a bully, while a boss who’s trusting but not challenging will seem like a pushover. In short, there is a clear difference between making work meaningful and making it fun or easy, just like there is a big difference between an engaged and a happy employee. Whereas engagement results in enthusiasm, drive, and motivation— all of which increase performance and are therefore valuable to the organization — happiness can lead to complacency. To be a good leader, focus on helping employees find meaning in their achievements, rather than just enjoy their time at the office.

This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review on August 9, 2017, and was authored by Lewis Garrad and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.