When thinking about personality, one thing that we know is there is no such thing as a good or bad personality. It really depends on the job and situation. This is a point that we regularly emphasize to individuals and organizations. Along these same lines, we know that high scores on personality assessments do not inherently mean good things, and low scores do not always mean bad things – there are positives and negatives to both ends of the continuum. Having stated that, our scores do represent our reputations. Over the course of time people come to expect certain behaviors from us based on our past performances.

One of the main goals of personality assessment is to provide individuals with strategic self-awareness. Through feedback, we can help the individual understand his or her tendencies and reputation in the work environment. As such, we can help the low Prudence individual understand that others view him or her as being impulsive and lacking attention to detail, or aid the high Prudence individual with recognizing that he or she may be somewhat inflexible and resistant to change. Having stated that, we are not out to change personality, rather we are looking to make people more aware of their tendencies so they can change their behavior moving forward.

Nevertheless, change is a difficult and ongoing process. To illustrate this point, take a minute to write a few sentences using your opposite hand (i.e., your right hand if you are left-handed and vice-versa). At first, it’s a challenging and awkward thing to do. However, with practice this behavior will become easier to execute. This analogy represents what we are trying to accomplish with feedback and coaching. We should not be trying to convert lefties to righties, and the same is true with personality. We are not trying to convert the low Prudence to high Prudence (or vice-versa), rather we are aiming to help individuals understand their strengths and shortcomings of what their scores represent, and provide developmental tips to leverage these strengths and mitigate these shortcomings.

So, the next time you are confronted with a challenging situation, don’t throw up a white flag and hide behind your personality scores. If you’re low Prudence and the project requires attention to detail, or are high Prudence and the project demands flexibility and openness to change, don’t allow your personality to be a barrier to your success. Instead, take some time to reflect on your natural response tendencies and decide if this is the most advantageous response option given the situation, or if a different course of action would be more beneficial. Through persistence and ongoing coaching, we can learn to overcome the dark side of our personality and let the bright side shine.

You make what seems like a promising hire – good resume, relevant experience, and solid references. And, at first, her performance matches that promise.

As time wears on, however, you start to hear grumbling around the water cooler. Nobody likes to work with your new hire. Her coworkers start to pull away, her work unit shows signs of waning engagement, and her performance starts to flag. Just like that, your promising new employee turns into a nightmare. Why? Odds are, your new hire is succumbing to the dark side of her personality.

Dark side personality characteristics emerge during times of increased stress, like the often-intense pressure to perform during the first several months of employment. If unchecked, these characteristics can disrupt relationships with a person’s coworkers and subordinates, which can impede their chances at success.

The Hogan Development Survey measures dark side personality along 11 characteristics, which can be grouped into three distinct reactions to conflict:

• Moving Away From Others – People in this group manage insecurities by intimidating and avoiding others. They tend to be alert for signs of criticism, rejection, betrayal, or hostile intent. When they think they have detected threat, they react vigorously to remove it.
• Moving Against Others – People in this group expect to be liked, admired, and respected. They tend to resist acknowledging their mistakes and/or failures (which they blame on others), and they are often unable to learn from experience.
• Moving Toward Others – People in this group want to please figures of authority. As a result, they are easy to supervise, and are popular with their bosses. However, in conflict, they tend to side with authority figures rather than sticking up for their team members or subordinates.

Unfortunately, dark side personality characteristics are nearly impossible to detect in a normal hiring process, making this story all too familiar. However, you can use targeted personality assessment to identify candidates’ dark side characteristics and focus onboarding efforts to ensure that you don’t wind up with a hiring horror story.

To learn more about our approach to dealing with people’s dark side, check out our whitepaper How your Greatest Strength can Become your Greatest Weakness.

We heard it all before: leaders behaving one way in public, then very differently behind closed doors.

Right now in the UK, ex Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling is spilling the beans over the leadership style of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Seemingly placid, timid and shy on the surface, rumours of an explosive, temperamental and potentially bullying Brown gradually started emerging from Number 10 in the final months of his presidency. These allegations were quickly dismissed by government officials and no further action was taken. Mr Darling is now telling the world about the “hellish” behaviour he experienced and the “brutal regime” he suffered at the hands of Mr Brown. And while, admittedly, we have only heard one side of the story (Brown has yet to comment), Darling painfully refers to this period as "hellish... very personal. It left a scar on me... you just can't get over it." Once again, a leader’s personality is on the front cover of all newspapers.

It is not hard to see why Brown’s personality captured the attention of the media. Reports of Brown’s behaviour away from the public eye appeared like two inexplicable sides of the same coin – and the difficulty in the reconciliation of the two once again highlighted our inner challenges with ambiguity and conflicts.

This is not surprising; human beings do not like to consider themselves conflicted and it is known that most of us find inconsistencies in behaviour unsettling. In the history of personality research, these conflicts were once considered discrepancies and thus wrongly attributed to assessment and measurement errors. Today, consultants specialising in the assessment of the bright and dark side of personality are aware that conflicting behaviours can be exhibited in different circumstances or even days (e.g. emotionally composed and mature one day, volatile and abusive the next). In fact, we often encounter these conflicts when interpreting psychometric reports and delivering feedback to organisational leaders. Addressing intrapersonal conflicts is a complex task that requires careful analysis, introspection and a desire to change.

Years of research conducted by the Centre for Creative Leadership and Hogan Assessment Systems, as well as an increasing number of publications (see Dotlich and Cairo’s Why CEOs Fail), demonstrate that leadership derailment can be attributed to recurrent, measurable and most importantly, manageable themes (or derailing tendencies).

Darling’s testimony is a stark reminder that these derailers do not only represent barriers to leadership effectiveness and well-being at work, but also constitute significant barriers to individual, team and organisational performance (in this instance coming in the way of something as important as tackling the country’s financial crisis). These destructive tendencies affect the ability of leaders to gain trust from subordinates and form coalitions at work, which in turn negatively affect a range of executive functions, such as decision-making, the objective analysis of crucial facts and figures, and the ability to build and maintain a high performing team.

Brown’s example of leadership style characterised by an excessive focus on managing relationships publicly with external customers and stakeholders, while ignoring the quality of the interactions with internal ones: colleagues, peers and subordinates. Leaders adopting this style have a tendency to release their frustration upon team members, disregarding the consequences of their behaviour, either because they think that the behaviour is acceptable (it’s between us) or simply because they can get away with it (no one will know).

We never fully know what goes on behind the closed doors of an organisation. But leaders who keep smiling in public, only to behave carelessly towards their team members, have an opportunity to learn a valuable lesson from this story.

After all, reputations are powerful and enduring things; they can be buried, but they never fully go away.

Andrea Facchini, MSc.
Business Psychologist and Guest Blogger

The future of the US (and world) economy depends on the activity of entrepreneurs, who create businesses, jobs, and wealth. Although, as Adam Smith noted, they do this for perfectly self-centered reasons and the fact that others profit from their activities is of no interest to them. Adam Smith was speaking from personal experience, and if he were alive today, he would still need to speak from experience, because applied psychology knows little about the psychology of entrepreneurship in an empirical way—although interest in the subject has begun to emerge. What happens when they are in charge? The bottom line is that they make disastrous managers.

Writers from Drucker to Christensen note that the essence of entrepreneurship is “creative disruption” – tearing up the old to make way for the new. In addition, these writers suggest that the characteristics of entrepreneurs closely resemble the characteristics of creative people in general; these involve:  making statistically unusual associations; challenging conventional wisdom; observing standard practices closely; networking; and constant experimentation. This suggests that the literature on creativity will hold some insights regarding the characteristics of entrepreneurs. 

Barron provides an old but hard-to-improve-upon summary of the empirical literature on the personality characteristics of highly creative people (writers, mathematicians, architects, etc.). Making an early version of the distinction between the bright side and the dark side of personality, Barron notes that highly creative people score high on measures of normal personality. In terms of the FFM, creative people are above average on Adjustment, Sociability, and Openness, and somewhat below average on Conscientiousness and Agreeableness – so they make a strong first impression.  But, as Barron stated: “The evidence is convergent from a number of sources: creative individuals are very much concerned about their personal adequacy, and one of their strongest motivations is to prove themselves.” And this statement is the key to the dark side of these people who, as a group, receive high scores on the MMPI and on the Hogan Development Survey. They are driven, edgy, impatient, volatile, and unconcerned with their impact on subordinates.  

This profile has several implications for thinking about entrepreneurial managers. First, because they make a strong first impression, they will do well in front of various audiences, including search committees, but also customers. As leaders, they make a good visible face of the organization, and this is often quite important. Second, the essence of leadership involves building a team. Because these people tend to bully and intimidate their subordinates, they are, by definition, poor leaders. Third, as managers rise in organizations, their duties change. Entry level managers need good team building skills, while middle managers need good bridge building and implementation skills. But CEOs and top level leaders need good judgment, because their decisions set the direction for their business. Entrepreneurs are most needed, and probably function best, at the top of organizations. We refer to this as “the Apple Paradox”: Steve Jobs is a very difficult person with minimal leadership skills, but he is a marvelously successful CEO—because of his astute decision making. 

The bottom line of this discussion is that entrepreneurs are hard to live with but successful businesses can’t live without them. The quandary is somewhat resolved by the fact that entrepreneurs dislike working for other people and, although they tend to make poor organizational citizens, they tend to avoid becoming organizational citizens.