Is there such a thing as being too creative? Although creativity is largely associated with positive work outcomes, our research shows that, in excess, creativity can be a powerful roadblock to career success.

To understand how creativity can harm an individual’s career, we must look at personality from two perspectives: bright-side personality and dark-side personality.

Bright-side personality describes the strengths and weaknesses people display when they are at their best. Dark-side personality describes personality characteristics that are strengths under normal circumstances. Under the increased stress, pressure, or boredom of most work environments, people tend to overuse those strengths, and they can become powerful career derailers.

Creative people often have parents who emphasize their uniqueness and favor creative expression over convention. As adults, their ability to comfortably work outside of societal norms makes creative individuals valuable sources of potentially important ideas. However, highly creative individuals also tend to focus too much on thinking outside the box, often at the cost of their ability to clearly explain their ideas or follow through.

For more on performance implications and recommendations for coaching highly creative individuals, download our white paper, Way Outside the Box.

This axiom is all too relevant for entrepreneurs today. Companies like Google and Pixar embrace a collaborative and innovative culture with unconventional work hours and offices. Why do they go through such great lengths to foster their employees’ creativity? Because that’s what a creative employee’s personality demands.

A creative employee’s personality profile indicates that they’re idealistic, nonconforming, and tend to be unconcerned about money. Conversely, good managers tend to be stable, practical, and concerned with maintaining order and controlling costs.

Although they are psychological opposites, managers and creative people badly need one another.
Find out what 5 steps organizations can take to ensure they are properly managing their creative employees and driving innovation by downloading our complimentary ebook.

When it comes to understanding your employees, there are three things that matter.

1. What do they want?
2. How will they get what they want?
3. What will get in their way?

Our assessments provide insight you can leverage to get the most out of your people and help them get the most from their careers.

After analyzing the personality profiles of Homer’s Greek heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon, Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, asked the question, “In which occupations, organizations or environments would these heroes prosper today?”

Career counselling for these two ancient heroes starts with their motivation (Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory). Achilles feels fulfilled by helping others, developing them and generally working for a prosperous society. He values material success, profit, ROI, trade and money, as well as traditional social values and virtues, morale, history and principled attitude towards life and work. His motives indicate that Achilles would be satisfied in a well-established organization with a clear mission, values and business purpose. The company should also be commercially oriented, such as a financial institution, and care about the satisfaction of its employees or customers. A good example would be a private bank with a long tradition of customer care and elaborate employee program.

Valuing commerce, finance and material success, Agamemnon, unlike Achilles, feels motivated by social status – the desire to stand out and get recognition – and desires influence and power. Self-sacrifice for others and helping society doesn’t really work for him. He is more likely to feel satisfied in environments that enable him to work on his individual career, achieve an important position, and gain credit as well as high financial remuneration. He would be happiest working in financial and insurance companies or private firms focused on profit and beating the competition.

The two share Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) scores that are like those of successful entrepreneurs. Achilles and Agamemnon would be successful in launching companies and organizations (though probably not together as per the last blog in this series). Both have traits of leadership, though their disposition could be more suited for crisis management which involves time restrictions and often requires making unpopular decisions. It is important to note that their definitive success or failure would also be shaped by their ability to cope with their potential risky behavior indicated in the Hogan Development Survey (HDS). High scores in these assessments mean a raised flag for entrepreneurs and managers – “Beware! You have certain exceptional characteristics; however, if you don’t learn to handle them and use them constructively, they may contribute to your fall later.” Which, in the case of Achilles and Agamemnon, they did.

Is it possible to know how two people will interact with each other based solely on their personality? In the article “Homer and Big 5,” Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, analyzed the personality profiles of the two heroes – Achilles and Agamemnon – from the first song of Homer’s Iliad to find out whether the two Greeks were predisposed for mutual conflict.

The authors considered both characters’ potential for behavioral conflict and value conflict. When looking at Achilles and Agamemnon’s Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and Hogan Development Survey (HDS) profiles, Duriš and Porubjak found that both men were very goal-oriented, competitive and ambitious. They were also self-critical, dissatisfied, sensitive to threats, and communicated in a straightforward manner without the tendency to build or maintain relationships with others.

Duriš and Porubjak predicted the possibility of conflict between the warrior and his king. For example, lower to average Prudence in both heroes indicates that they may attempt to use non-standard means in order to achieve goals or break rules. In some situations, Achilles as well as Agamemnon will be short-tempered and hot-headed, which will add an element of unpredictability as well as strong emotional and black-and-white perception to their interactions (e.g. mutual denigration). Achilles will only minimally respect the authority of Agamemnon and will be quite independent. On the other hand, if confronted, Agamemnon may perceive Achilles’ actions as especially negative, hostile, threatening or deceitful. While under stress, he may even attack Achilles by means of non-critical self-confirmation and misinterpretation or fabulation of events.

Duriš and Porubjak also found that the two also had potential towards mutual antipathy due to differing motivations. By analyzing their Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) profiles, they found that, while Achilles is interested in the prosperity of a wider community and welfare of others in general, Agamemnon is a relationship pragmatist and materialist who is predominantly interested in his own agenda.

While Agamemnon probably won’t get the world’s best boss award, his management of Achilles fails disastrously due to their conflicting personalities and motivations. And to think, all of this might have been avoided had the two been self-aware of their differences and motivational tendencies beforehand.

Ever wonder how your personality assessment results compare to well-known figures in history? What about ancient Greek heroes? In their article “Homer and Big 5,” Rastislav Duriš, an HR consultant, and Matus Porubjak, a philosophy professor, explore the socio-psychological aspects of Homer’s famous war epic, the Iliad, by putting the head-butting heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon, to the Hogan test.

Hellenic thinkers and orators, like Homer, dealt with subjects of the human condition and broached many topics which subsequently manifested as modern-day psychology. Ancient Greece is the cradle of one of the earliest personality typologies – Hippocrates’ division of people into sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic types. Although personality research has advanced since then, it is illuminating (not to mention fun) to retrospectively apply it to ancient Greek history. By applying current psychological models of personality to a close reading of the first song of the Iliad, uriš and Porubjak were able to make assumptions based on content analysis about the Greek heroes’ inner motivators and derailers.

When analyzed using the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) scales, Achilles, the Achaean warrior who flew off the handle and dragged his Trojan opponent’s lifeless body around for days after his best friend was killed in battle, is (not surprisingly) high on the Excitable scale. His moodiness and irritability are coupled with a low Adjustment score on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) to make one pretty emotionally volatile and unpredictable Greek guy. High scores in Ambition (HPI) and Tradition also explain his competitive nature and intense loyalty to his friend’s memory.

Agamemnon, the Achaean king who stole the Trojan king’s daughter only to give her back and then steal Achilles’ girlfriend, has scores similar to those of Achilles. Add in low Prudence (HPI) and high Bold (HDS) scores and you’ve got a stubborn king who thinks he’s the bee’s knees. His values? Power and Recognition. All this coupled with high Skeptical and Mischievous scores (HDS) creates the potential for a power hungry, mistrusting ruler who would quickly kick his army to the curb and flee the scene as soon as the going got tough – which he almost did (a couple of times).

Most people have experienced some form of office politics, and it's wise to view other’s motives with a healthy amount of skepticism. But where is the line between skepticism and paranoia, and at what point does that paranoia interfere with a person’s career?

Our latest ebook, I'm too skeptical? Where's the proof?, evaluates potential performance implications and describes how to manage the highly skeptical.

We are fast becoming a nation of narcissists, at least according to a recent study by psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell. In their book “Living in the Age of Entitlement,” the two present findings from a survey of more than 37,000 college students showing that narcissistic personality traits rose as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present.

Why?

The driving force behind narcissistic behavior is an individual’s belief that he or she is unique or exceptional in some way. 

The origins of this attitude can often be traced to adult caretakers providing a child continuous positive feedback without the boundaries and discipline necessary for learning their own and others’ limits.

Sometimes an individual’s history of exclusion, rejection, and/or illness can create a belief in his or her own exceptionality – in other words, the individual is exceptional by the virtue of having experienced challenging circumstances. These individuals’ public self-confidence masks private self-doubt; however, their negative feelings may be so deeply buried that they are inaccessible.

Although some criticize Twenge and Campbell’s study as little more than kids-these-days moralizing, just the thought of an influx of arrogant, self-promoting members of generations Y (Millennials) and Z (Digital Natives) keeps many managers and HR practitioners up at night.

But what if narcissism wasn’t necessarily a bad thing? To find out more, download our ebook The Upside of Narcissism in the Workplace. 

Every office has a resident narcissist – that guy who never seems afraid to toot his own horn. But what if that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing?

Narcissistic individuals believe their own superior talent and typically resist developmental feedback. If personal development is presented as a strategy for advancing their personal agenda, however, narcissistic individuals can be persuaded to:

• Lower their expectations for special treatment, and try to accept responsibility for their occasional mistakes
• Recognize that they ignore negative feedback, and seek feedback from family, and friends who are not competitors and whose feedback is usually well-meaning
• Stop regarding team interactions as opportunities for competition in which only one person can win; remember that they real competition is outside the organization, not within it
• Realize that subordinates are most likely to be productive when they feel respected; learn how to offer positive feedback to others when they contribute
• Use their confidence, energy, and determination to motivate rather than intimidate others

It comes down to self-awareness. If you provide your employees with a realistic understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, and behavioral tendencies, they can harness the positive outcomes associated with narcissism and avoid taking it overboard.

To find out more, download our ebook The Upside of Narcissism in the Workplace. 

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.