*This interview was originally published in Business Class Magazin – this is the translation of the Hungarian text. The original version can be found here.

We met Dr. Robert Hogan at the Four Seasons Budapest. He is an American psychologist and the founder of Hogan Assessments who has institutionalized the use of personality assessments for the enhancement of work performance, and whose organization serves more than half of the Fortune 500 companies. He visited Budapest for the “Future of Coaching in Organisations” international conference organized in April, and he took some time to meet us for a glass of Chardonnay.

Please summarize briefly the principles and main elements of the personality test which you have developed, and which is used so widely in the business world.

People who have power make decisions every day that affect those who have less power. They hire, promote or fire them. These decisions are usually based on work interviews with them, but this is the worst possible way to make a decision that has such an effect on a person’s life. My aim was to make employee evaluations – firings, promotions, hiring interviews – that is, the whole decision-making process – rational and empirical. So, I based it on defensible, scientific foundations. Over the years, we have built up a serious database – based on this we can demonstrate that if business leaders listen to us, they will make better decisions regarding their employees. And why is this important? The keys to success in business are money and people. Managers generally make rational decisions when comes to money, so why wouldn’t they want to make rational decisions when it comes to people?

Do you think it’s important for a good leader to have psychological or coaching experience?

It’s a good question. My views are based on scientific research and data. These data show that good leaders need to possess four attributes. They have to be honest – it’s important that they have a moral compass, so you don’t end up with liars, thieves or frauds. They shouldn’t make duplicitous decisions behind the backs of others. If they are not honest, then they will fail. For example, Bill Clinton was a liar, that’s why nobody was loyal to him in his government. The second requirement is to be competent – they have to know what to do and how they should do it. If you are always the boss, people turn to you for advice. If you don’t know what you are talking about, then you can’t give good advice, which has immediate consequences. For example, Barack Obama never led anything, he wasn’t ever the boss of anything, and so he failed.

Do you think he failed?

Yes, I think so, namely because he didn’t know what he was doing.

He was elected twice.

The reason behind this is the quality of his rivals. Many people don’t like Donald Trump, but what was the alternative?

Honesty and competence. Which other attributes are necessary?

The third is whether you are capable of making good decisions, or if you made a mistake, to admit it and fix it. Evidence shows that 50 percent of business decisions are bad. So you can’t always arrive at good decisions. The key to good judgement is to realize if you’ve made a bad decision, and to be able to fix it. Let me mention one more politician as an example, George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq – which was a bad idea. Then, Bush raised the stakes and he didn’t leave the area. Bad decisions ruin the organisation, whether it’s a corporation or a political body. In the end, it’s important whether you have vision, whether you can explain why you are doing what you are doing, or what your objective is from which others can set their own. These are the four indispensable tools of a leader. Things like having to be kind to others are not among these. Meanwhile, I think a good leader has to be humble as well; he or she has to listen to the opinions of others. It’s important for him or her to be open, and it’s just as important that when he or she delegates a task to someone, he or she has confidence in that person. At the same time, a good leader is also a good manipulator – it doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she has to understand people, he or she just has to persuade them to follow him or her. To bring up another presidential example: although Ronald Reagan was an excellent manipulator, he couldn’t be truly appreciated because all his other attributes were imperfect.

They were politicians?

Exactly.

Aren’t business and political attitudes different? Don’t they require different skills and capabilities?

There are solid arguments which prove that really successful executives are humble and listen to their employees. They listen to feedback. They trust their people and they build teams. This is why Barack Obama failed – he never built a team, never talked to anyone, just sat in his office alone. You have to be able to build a team.

I suppose that you are aware of the highly successful series, “House of Cards” – what is your opinion of Frank Underwood; what kind of leader is the president in that series?

I liked the British version more. The BBC version was top-notch. Frank Underwood is a real leader. Politics are about this, people like him can collect votes, but then what will they add to the whole when they get to the top? I think this is a problem in the business world too: that in the end politicians rise above executives, but they are not experts in anything apart from getting themselves elected. Even campaign slogans are about this: for being able to make a change, they have to be elected first, but what do they actually do after having been elected? They try to remain in power, and for this they just say to the people whatever they want to hear. And this is just a kind of entertainment, nothing more. At the same time, as a corporate leader you have to do something to bring about change, you have to achieve something. An army general or the coach of an athletic team has to achieve victory; it’s not enough for him or her to be popular.

What caused you turn your attention towards the business sphere after leaving university, as a practicing psychologist?

I have always been interested in leadership and the business world. During my university years during the ‘60s and ‘70s, the general view among academics was that the personality of the leader is unimportant. If business was successful, they owed it to luck, not the personality of the leader. But I have never believed this. I had been practicing as an academic for a long time, and when I finally received my pay check, I started asking myself about the way ahead. Academic salaries are poor, and I didn’t want to live this way; I had to make money somehow. I knew that I was good at psychological evaluations, and that maybe I could profit from this, so I tried to make money from my interest, that is, from studying leaders.

It wasn’t easy to shape the way of thinking, you have been attacked by many.

I have proven with my team that managerial attitude is indeed important. In the 1990s, we proved, scientifically and supported by data, that the role of personality is fundamental in how people perform in the workplace. Then in the beginning of the 2000s we proved that leadership characteristics are also determinants in leading a company to success. And in the middle of the 2000s I published that personality characteristics determine corporate results. It turned out that the successful operation of an organization depends on the formation of personal relationships within the organization. We have proven that if companies listen to us with these questions, they will earn more money, because they will hire more effective people for the corresponding positions.

Which skills do you think helped you to become so successful in your field?

First of all, our team has worked very hard. We do very high-quality work, and we pay attention to what our customers want. We have found the way to promote what we know. One has to work very hard; 90 percent of ventures go bust.  At first,we have had both good and difficult moments, but when you get that first big client, everything comes together immediately. In our case, this big client was the government. We received an order from the American government.

*This article was written by Danielle King and published in Human Resource Executive on June 1, 2018. 

How to Recognize Absentee Leaders. 

A high-performing salesperson knocks his sales goals out of the park every month and consistently brings in new clients while maintaining great internal and external relationships. When a new sales-leadership position opens, his boss suggests that this star performer fill the role. Following a stellar interview, the star performer is now a sales leader. Is this happily ever after?

Not always, says Scott Gregory, CEO of Hogan Assessments. Too often these top performers are promoted into leadership positions for which they aren’t suited, he says.

“What it takes to be a successful salesperson versus a successful sales leader is different,” says Gregory. “Companies fail to recognize that and fail to measure the characteristics required for leadership roles appropriately. These star contributors get promoted but not on the basis that they have talent for a leadership role.”

In the star-performer scenario, you lose the best salesperson and gain a poor manager. It’s not good for the leader who got promoted, his team or the organization, says Gregory.

These types of corporate promotions happen frequently and the characteristics that may have made a stellar salesperson don’t carry over easily into leadership, which can derail both the leader and the company. Many leaders fail because of what Hogan has termed “dark-side” characteristics, or strong and overused personality characteristics that get in the way of productive leadership. Some of the same characteristics that made for a good salesperson, for example, strong self-confidence and independence, may become derailers in a leadership role if the person shows up as overly confident or unwilling to consider others’ perspectives. A good deal is known about identifying dark-side characteristics, and they are relatively obvious in many organizations. Bosses and teams often know when dark-side characteristics are getting in the way of leadership success.

The dark side of leadership is just as worrisome as it sounds. It may suggest a narcissistic, passive-aggressive, emotionally abusive and demanding figure; however, that’s not the only kind of derailed leader, says Gregory. He argues that an even worse leader is one in title only.

“Absentee leaders are neither actively destructive nor constructive, so they tend to get overlooked,” he says. “In organizations, people pay attention to actively destructive, dark-side leaders. People who don’t cause trouble won’t get much air time. They’re invisible. That’s why it doesn’t get talked about.”

Absentee leaders are psychologically absent from their roles—they enjoy the perks and privileges that come with a promotion but shirk any management-related tasks and avoid meaningful involvement with their teams. Though these leaders may fly under the radar, their negative impact on the company is much more pronounced. Gregory says that the most significant impact absentee leaders have on employees is job satisfaction—rather, the lack thereof.

“There are decades of research on how to measure job satisfaction and it’s well known that job satisfaction is highly related to turnover, individual performance, role ambiguity and more,” he says.

In 2015, Interact Authentic Communication conducted a survey of 1,000 U.S. workers to uncover the top complaints about leadership—although not labeled as such, the overwhelming majority of responses were related to absentee leaders. Some of the issues workers cited were that their leaders were not giving clear direction, not recognizing employee achievements, refusing to talk to subordinates and not giving constructive feedback.

Gregory says that on top of decreased job satisfaction, research indicates that there’s an increased risk of bullying within work teams who have an absentee leader and that safety outcomes are compromised when active leadership is lacking.

Employees are left wondering who is in charge, what they should really be doing and to what standards will they be held. This ambiguity often manifests into stress, which is detrimental to both the individual and the organization.

“We know that the conservative estimate of stress in the U.S. workplace is that it costs nearly $30 billion per year, making absentee leadership a costly organizational problem.”

Personality Assessments Highlight the Bright and Dark Sides of Leaders 

Absentee leaders, the silent killers of an organization, are hard to pick out from a crowd. Gregory says people’s dark-side qualities usually don’t appear until they have let their guard down, but are obvious when they appear.  Absentee leadership, by its nature, is detectable only through the vacuum it creates.

This means that absentee leaders may already be settled into their management roles before problems arise. Though no assessment currently exists to pinpoint the exact qualities of an absentee leader, Hogan’s Leadership Forecast Series combines four development-focused reports that paint a clear picture of the good, the bad and the ugly sides of a leader.

Its three flagship assessments, the Hogan Personality Inventory (bright side); Hogan Development Survey (dark side); and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (inside) offer information regarding the characteristics, competencies and values that underlie ways in which a leader approaches work, leadership and interaction with others in the workplace.

Gregory says that the Hogan Personality Inventory characteristics, or bright side of leadership, show up in a person’s day-to-day behavior and predict performance in a variety of jobs. The Hogan Development Survey highlights dark-side characteristics that appear when someone is stressed, bored or not self-monitoring their behavior. These characteristics don’t show up during interviews because most people are highly self-aware during the interview process. Finally, the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory measures, as the name suggests, someone’s motivation and values. It answers questions such as: What does this person value? Are those values compatible with an organization’s values? Will he or she be a good fit within this company’s culture?

The Series, and its subsequent self-awareness and development reports, are targeted toward senior- and executive-level leaders. There are four core reports, three of which correspond to the assessments. The fourth can be one of the following: a summary report, which supplies an integration across the other reports; or a coaching report, which is designed to help the individual think holistically about the results and translate them into a development plan.

Gregory cautions that there is not one set of characteristics that pinpoints an absentee leader—yet.

“It may not be a set of dark-side characteristics.It might be the absence of some bright-side characteristics, such as ambition, desire to be in charge or make an impact—things that aren’t overtly destructive unless in their absence,” he says. “It’s something we’re actively researching. It’s clear that absentee-leadership qualities differ from what has been found in overtly dark-side leaders, which are easy to spot based on dark-side characteristics—absentee leadership is more about what’s missing than what’s actively present.”

*Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash