We’re excited to announce that our very own Dr. Robert Hogan was given the 2020 RHR International Award for Excellence in Consulting Psychology at the Society of Consulting Psychology (SCP) annual conference on February 8 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The award is granted to individuals who epitomize the standards of excellence that RHR and the SCP seek to perpetuate. Dr. Hogan received the award in recognition of his distinguished career and his significant contributions to the practice of consulting psychology.

“Bob Hogan has made an extraordinary contribution to the understanding of how leaders can leverage strengths and avoid derailing behaviors as they lead organizations,” said Dr. Paul Winum, senior partner and co-head of Board & CEO Services for RHR International. “He is a well-deserving recipient of the RHR Award for Excellence in Consultation and embodies the professionalism and impact our firm seeks to deliver and recognize through this award.”

Deemed by his peers as one of the world’s greatest living psychologists, Hogan is known for his ground-breaking research on personality and how it translates to organizational and leadership effectiveness. The same study also ranked Hogan among the top five greatest personality psychologists of all time. In addition to Hogan, the group consisted of famous psychologists, such as Sigmund Freud, Hans Eysenck, Gordon Allport, and Raymond Cattell.

“I can’t think of a person more deserving of this award than our founder and friend, Dr. Robert Hogan,” said Hogan Assessments now-former CEO Scott Gregory, PhD. “His work disrupted and advanced the use of personality assessment to improve workplace performance and organizational success, and his work continues to drive valid and fair employment decisions for millions of people around the globe each year. He’s a legend in personality psychology, and he continues to be a tireless advocate for the science of personality.”

The amount of text data we send out in the world is staggering. On average, there are 500 million tweets sent per day, 23 billion text messages, and 306.4 billion emails. Everything we say, every email we send, and every word on our resumes can be used to not only understand the world around us, but as clues about the individual speaking, typing, and writing.

Unfortunately, text data does not fit into the traditional structured format of rows and columns. Text data is messy, unstructured, and not easily analyzed using classical statistical methods. Enter natural language processing, or NLP. NLP is a type of artificial intelligence that uses machine learning to break down, process, and quantify human language. NLP helps us understand the hidden stories within text-based data.

There is no singular method associated with NLP. NLP consists of multiple techniques ranging from using keywords to interpret text or speech to understanding the underlying meaning and context of communication. Because of the varying techniques associated with NLP, in the IO literature, NLP has been used to aid with several business initiatives, such as job analysis and selection, to name just two.

Up to 95% of usable organizational data is unstructured, resulting in an increased drive for using this data to remain competitive. The competition and consistent advancements in computational power, data access, and open-source research initiatives have led to the field of NLP to evolve and grow constantly. At Hogan, we are leveraging this continual growth by using NLP to improve our products and talent analytics solutions.

Hogan and Natural Language Processing

One way we are using NLP is by streamlining the coding process of focus-group notes for personality scale relevance, thereby injecting NLP into our job-analysis strategy to increase the efficiency of the approach and improve the quality of our results. Manually reading and coding focus-group notes is a time-intensive and cognitively draining process. Using NLP, on average, we can decrease the overall time it takes by approximately 6,000% while maintaining predictions that are both consistent and accurate.

Many text-based, data-analytic tasks require similar knowledge about language, such as semantics, structural similarities, and syntax. This knowledge can be shared from one model to another through transfer learning. Transfer learning allows us to quickly take advantage of cutting-edge NLP research without having to spend months and years gathering unneeded data and training similar models from scratch. Transfer learning involves taking a model trained on another dataset for a different task and fine-tuning it on a second dataset for a different task. In other words, we take what the model learned already and adapt it for our purposes. The base model for focus-group note prediction was trained on over 3 billion words. The base model was fine-tuned on a large collection of focus group notes collected across hundreds of organizations where researchers identified which personality scales were relevant based on their expert judgment.

This approach has already shown promising results for correctly identifying the relevance of personality characteristics from focus-group notes. When compared against human-raters (subject matter experts; SMEs), our model was consistent and had an average accuracy score approximately 10% higher than the average accuracy of the SMEs. This indicates that Natural Language Processing is an accurate and efficient method for identifying the critical personality characteristics of job roles from focus groups.

Hogan’s distributor in Indonesia, Experd Consulting, welcomed Krista Pederson, director of Asia Pacific business development at Hogan, to Jakarta. While she was there, the group visited the University of Indonesia’s psychology department, where Krista alongside Emilia Jakob, Experd’s vice president, taught a class on “Hogan Personality Assessments and Cross-Cultural Leadership” at a department-wide event.  Afterward, they spent time with the dean of the psychology department discussing potential cooperation and research projects.

During Krista’s time in Jakarta, Eileen Rachmann, CEO of Experd, arranged several business development meetings with major Indonesian banks and financial institutions to discuss using Hogan for talent and leader selection, especially with regard to making sure there is a company culture fit. Krista also shared Hogan’s findings on what Indonesian leaders’ personalities look like as compared to the leader personalities of their major trading partners, Japan, India, US, South Korea, and Singapore.

Hogan has found that emergent leaders in Indonesia tend to be higher on Prudence, Inquisitive, and Learning Approach, compared to the leaders of their top trading partners. Although this doesn’t provide information about effective leaders, it does provide an interesting context for Indonesian leaders when working with leaders and teams from other countries. We intend to continue our research into this area, especially with regard to what effective leader personalities in Indonesia look like.

Finally, Krista met Experd ‘s Hogan team and toured the Experd office building. Experd has been working on expanding its cooperation with several higher institutions across Indonesia using Hogan and looks forward to greater growth in the coming years.

Krista Pederson, director of Asia-Pacific business development at Hogan, spoke at the 42nd International Congress on Assessment Center Methods and Developing Leadership Talent, held in Shanghai from November 13 to November 15, 2019.

In a presentation titled “Assessing Global Talent: Using Personality for Talent Across Asia and the Globe,” Pederson discussed leadership across cultures. She explained how Hogan does assessment translations and uses local and global norms. She also shared Hogan’s unique point of view on cross-cultural topics, including our focus on researching leadership personality within a country’s borders, instead of cross-cultural constructs across countries or regions.

Pederson’s presentation was completely full, as were many of the other conference sessions. More than 50 CEOs, leaders, and top business and psychology professors gave presentations about leadership development and assessment centers. Keynote speakers included Sharif Khan, GEO HR GM for Microsoft, Asia; William C. Byham, PhD, DDI co-founder and executive chairman; and He Jinghua, vice dean of Tencent College. The conference was well attended—more than 350 CEOs, CHROs, and other business leaders joined.

Global interest in assessment and talent selection is increasing, especially in China. The market in China is diversifying, with fewer state-owned enterprises and multinational corporations and a rise in the number of privately owned enterprises. As diversification occurs, there is a rapidly increasing need for using data and assessments to solve talent issues across all levels of organizations.

Hogan has millions of data points on the global market and has done robust studies on personality in Asia and around the globe. We plan to continue our investment and growth in the Asia-Pacific market and look forward to working with our distribution network to meet the needs of the privately owned enterprises that are experiencing rapid growth and looking for a scientific, data-based talent metric.

If your company is interested in using Hogan in China or elsewhere in Asia, let us know. We are happy to work with our distributors to solve your talent needs.

Nicole Neubauer, CEO of metaBeratung, an official Hogan distributor in Europe, was recently featured in an article for Spiegel Wissen, one of Germany’s most prominent journals. The article, “Training Charisma: Do I Have the Julia Roberts Smile?” recounts Neubauer’s professional development and her rise to CEO of metaBeratung.

During an interview for the article, Neubauer reflected on her personality and the importance of reputation to her career path. As an introvert, she found that the path to her current position was a long one. She had to train herself to be charismatic and comfortable in a leadership position. She had to learn how to become more relaxed and self-confident when speaking in front of groups, holding keynotes, or otherwise taking the lead.

Today, Neubauer is pleased with the progress she has made in her professional development, and she says that constant learning and self-improvement are integral to career growth. She credits Hogan’s personality assessments with helping her to learn about her reputation and adapt her behavior to maximize her leadership potential.

“Thanks to Hogan Assessment Systems (who we are proud to distribute since 2005), your assessments helped me understand my strengths, weaknesses, and main drivers,” she posted on LinkedIn. “Fine-tuning behavior by coaching, I am what I am today: CEO of a management consultancy who is pushing personality out there for the past almost 15 years with a great team [at] metaBeratung.”

*This is an interview with Dr. Pradnya Parasher, Founder & CEO of ThreeFish Consulting, on High Potential Talent Development in India. 

In India, tenure and seniority have traditionally tipped the scales while creating a leadership pipeline. Now that old rules are being questioned, is it time to throw out all of the old and ring in everything new? Maybe not!   

Q1. Are you seeing Indian companies looking at identifying high potential employees?

Indian companies have valued tenure, loyalty, and seniority – this has its own due merit as experience and wisdom accompany seniority. With the advent of high-profile hires from management schools and diverse talent pools, Indian companies are looking at talent development differently. Accelerating the growth of high potential employees and scientific, methodical assessment of potential are therefore gaining traction. Newer talent management practices of assessment and diagnostics such as our personality-based tools now prove invaluable.

Tenure is not irrelevant – organizational knowledge, wisdom, the maturity which comes with age and experience are all products of tenure. Within the same system, the need isto additionally look for those who we can stretch more, earlier in their careers. High potential employees like to be challenged – if not challenged, they can get bored and seek their challenge elsewhere. Therefore, identification of high potentials is not just to accelerate careers but also to identify those gems who are ready to take on higher challenges; and should be challenged.

Q2. How has the Hogan High Potential Model worked for you in India?

The Hogan High Potential Model is well-researched. Leadership themes and competencies defined in the Hogan High Potential Model are quite universal and generalizable to the Indian work context. It identifies nine leadership competencies that are clustered under three themes.

• Leadership Foundations
• Leadership Effectiveness
• Leadership Emergence

Traditional Indian companies seem to value effectiveness and foundations. Multinationals and fast-growing Indian companies value leadership emergence more. High potential identification processes are often biased toward noticing “Emergent” leaders and overlooking “Effective” leaders. Using the Hogan HiPo model, organizations are able to see if they are operating with similar bias.

Q3. Where have you seen the Hogan High Potential Model being implemented successfully in India?

We’ve successfully deployed the Hogan High Potential Model across multiple sectors – traditional manufacturing, insurance, andprivate universities are some cases. Indian companies are under tremendous pressure to grow their leadership talent. Many of them find value in using well-researched, standard models of leadership, even as they pursue defining their company-specific leadership competency models.

We are currently working with an Indian agribusiness company that has recently acquired companies in Europe and Americas, and are leveraging Hogan’s HiPo model to quick-start data-driven leadership development.

Q4. So how do you typically work with the Hogan High Potential Model in India?

It’s a simple online hour-long assessment of the same three Hogan inventories – HPI, HDS, and MVPI. A validated report is generated that gives people a range of scores on the set of nine competencies. In-depth, one-on-one coaching sessions are scheduled to debrief the results, generate insights, and build targeted development plans. Sometimes, development continues in the form of micro-learning modules or ongoing coaching for change.

Aggregate, group level data is analyzed to get a baseline of the current leadership talent pool. Group level analysis enables organizations to note strengths and gaps in talent.

Individual talent “deep dives” include triangulating data from Hogan assessments, current and past performance records, and self-reports from the concerned person. This combination aides the creation of robust career development and leadership development plans for individuals. The company is able to objectively understand each individual – a strengths and opportunities matrix with assessment of potential can be evolved.

Q5. What, if any, are the challenges in this deployment?

The Hogan High Potential Model is a standardized model. Wherever companies have their own leadership competency model, they would like to assess potential against their competencies. In that case, we recommend a mapping of Hogan scales to the company’s competency model for evaluating potential.

However, I see more opportunities and benefits than challenges. Hogan’s HiPo solution is reliable, scalable, and easy to deploy globally. That is the key advantage that all of our clients have valued when adopting this solution.

Almost every week I learn about a new psychological assessment company entering the marketplace. Although each company is different, they all tell the same story. First, they tell you that hiring is broken; Personality tests don’t work anymore; Recruiting is out-of-date. Second, they tell you that their company has the answer. Finally, they hit you with the marketing smokescreen: a list of sophisticated-sounding technological advancements designed to confuse you, misguide you, and make you feel like you are missing out. You are not missing out, but you are falling for the common marketing trends used by these new companies. In this article, I expose these trends so that you won’t fall for them.

Trend #1: Neuroscience

Some companies measure how fast you react to flashing objects on a computer screen and say that their assessments are based on neuroscience. Neuroscience is the study of the structure and function of the nervous system. Even though such a broad definition leaves room for debate, the reality is that neuroscience concerns the function of individual neurons and the brain (i.e., a large mass of neurons). So unless the assessment you are taking is directly recording brain activity, it isn’t neuroscience. Pushing the spacebar in response to images on a computer screen isn’t neuroscience. You don’t have to take my word for it. Check the table of contents of this book on neuroscience methods. Here’s another. No mention of measuring reaction times to flashes on a screen. Don’t fall for the neuroscience routine when it’s just measuring reaction time.

Unfortunately, the deception isn’t as innocent as calling a reaction time task neuroscience. Recent scientific studies have shown that reaction time tasks of individual differences are psychometrically useless. First, these tasks are designed to eliminate individual differences. If individuals don’t get different scores on the tasks, how they can possibly predict individual differences in performance? Second, these tasks have poor test-retest reliability. This means that you won’t get the same score each time you complete the tasks. If the scores you get back are random, how can they predict performance? Last, and not surprisingly, these tasks don’t predict real-world outcomes. One recent study showed that self-report measures of personality predicted 20 (out of 30) life outcomes and that reaction time tasks predicted none. Don’t fall for computer-based reaction time tasks that don’t predict anything.

Trend #2: Big Data / Deep Learning

Some companies brag about their stacks of big data and their use of machine learning or artificial intelligence to produce talent insights. However, if you dig deep, you find that most of the data these companies collect is useless; they aren’t even using it. For example, millions of mouse movements, keystrokes, and response times can be measured in a 10-minute assessment. But are they consequential? Do they predict anything? How is moving your mouse five pixels to the left before you respond to a question even relevant to your job as a store clerk? Evidence indicates that these sorts of micro-movements don’t predict anything and aren’t job relevant. Modern assessments might measure millions of things that you do, but only a few of them predict job fit and job performance. Unless the assessment is asking the right questions and measuring the right things, the big data are just another smokescreen.

The second thing you find as you dig deep (and you should be digging deep) into these assessment companies is that the sophisticated statistical methods they tout don’t provide the new insights they promise. Recent advances in deep learning and artificial intelligence have made news; and, these areas are poised to advance human progress. But these techniques are most beneficial for complex problems and huge data sets, not on data sets with a few hundred people and a handful of variables. Don’t fall for grandiose claims about big data and artificial intelligence that aren’t bringing new talent insights.

Trend #3: Gamification

Another marketing trend to watch out for is gamification. Gamification is defined as adding game-like elements such as points, scores, trophies, competition, and entertaining environments to existing assessments. The idea is that if job applicants have more fun taking the assessment, they will be less likely to drop out of the application process. Although the data show that candidates do enjoy game-based assessments, the data also show that gamification doesn’t improve performance predictions. Research indicates that applicants who drop out during the assessment process are unlikely to be your strongest candidates anyway. So you aren’t losing high-quality candidates due to dropout during assessment.

Further, measuring psychologically stable characteristics (e.g., IQ, personality) via games is extremely difficult. Although there is evidence that cognitive ability can be measured via game-based assessments, measuring personality using game-based assessments doesn’t work. In addition, assessments that claim to be game-based often aren’t games at all. In fact, most are just boring psychology laboratory tasks, like the Go, No-Go. Dr. Richard Landers—a global expert on game-based assessments—points out that dressing up boring tasks and adding arbitrary point systems doesn’t make something a game. Don’t fall for games that don’t predict performance.

Trend #4: Profile Matching

Everyone wants to hire high-performing employees. One intuitive way to do that is to hire people who are like your current high performers. Several new companies use a profile-matching approach. First, they assess your high performers. Next, they see what differentiates your high performers from some larger population of people who have taken the assessments. The differences between the two create a high-performer profile. At face value this approach sounds perfect, but it is deeply flawed as the following example demonstrates.

Imagine you are the owner of a professional basketball team. You have three superstars and would like more superstars. A company promises to use their assessments to help you find superstars. First, they measure your three superstars on basketball-relevant skills: speed, height, shooting ability, etc. Next, they compare your players to a large population. Lo and behold, they find out that your superstars are faster, taller, and better shooters than the general population. On this basis, they recommend that you hire players who are fast, tall, and great shooters.

I’m sure you can see the problem here. The assessment company you hired isn’t differentiating between your high performers and your low performers. They are simply telling you what differentiates people, who work in your organization (professional basketball players) from those who work in other organizations (everyone else). Although this profile matching approach used by many companies seems intuitive, it doesn’t work. Only a proper validation study that differentiates high and low performers will give you an accurate profile. Don’t fall for assessments that are only validated on high performers.

Trend #5: Emphasizing Irrelevant Information

The last marketing trend is something that shysters have been doing for a long time: emphasizing features of a product that don’t really matter. New and old assessment companies often emphasize the total number of applicants, time to hire, and the diversity of the hiring class as selling points. The odd thing about emphasizing these is that you don’t need an assessment company to do any of them. A simple lottery will do. That is, if you hire people randomly, you are sure to increase the total number of applicants and the diversity of the hiring class, and likewise you will decrease time to hire. The problem is, when it comes to performance, hiring randomly doesn’t work.

When it comes to performance, the only thing that matters is validity: how well does the assessment predict performance? The reality is that some assessments predict job performance better than others. Rest assured that assessment companies that don’t show or emphasize validity don’t have any. With no validity, they have no choice but to emphasize irrelevant features. The good news is that you don’t have to trade predictive validity for these less relevant features. Well-validated assessments predict job performance and do not discriminate with regard to race, religion, sex, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. As a result, well-validated personality assessments help you build a workforce that is high-performing and diverse. Don’t fall for assessments that emphasize irrelevant information.

Conclusion

Many of the new assessment firms use flashy technology and claim new insights into workplace performance. Hiring managers and HR professionals need to be wary of companies using these common marketing trends. Only two things matter in psychological assessment: fairness and predicting performance. Companies that emphasize neuroscience, big data, and gamification are often trying to distract you from the fact that their assessments don’t predict workplace performance.

Advanced People Strategies (APS), an official Hogan distributor in the UK, will host a Hogan UK Seminar on October 22 in London featuring Dr. Robert Hogan and Peter Berry, managing director of Peter Berry Consultancy and originator of the Hogan 360.

The event is focused on Diversity & Inclusion, which has become a primary focus for organizations worldwide. Beyond the moral and legal obligations, organizations should focus on D&I to improve their business. Solving problems like increasing market share, understanding different markets, and ensuring your advertising translates across groups and cultures is much easier when employees come from diverse backgrounds.

That’s where Hogan can help. Hogan’s personality assessments, which are backed by decades of science and data, equip organizations with and easy-to-implement solution to improve D&I, as well as overall productivity and engagement.

This 1-day seminar for HR and People Development Professionals will explore how leadership personality and behavior impacts today’s increasingly diverse workforce. The cost to attend the event is £295 + VAT, which includes a morning of expert speakers, lunch, networking and, for those who are already Hogan Certified, an opportunity to attend the Hogan 360 accreditation workshop with Peter Berry. You can register here for the event!

A narcissist is defined as “a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves.” Given their self-obsession, it seems obvious that narcissists would be more likely to overuse first-person pronouns like “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine.” We might especially think this is true on social media, where everyone has a platform to reach society. After all, what could be a better way to express your narcissism than talking about yourself to the entirety of the internet? But, according to a new study published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, our intuitions are wrong.

This new study, authored by several personality psychologists including Hogan’s own Ryne Sherman, analyzed data on narcissism and word use from 15 samples in multiple languages. Both written and spoken words were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which categorizes words into 72 distinct linguistic categories, including first-person pronouns. Among those categories analyzed, 17 were statistically significantly related to scores on narcissism.

A narcissist may be more inclined to use:

• Sports-Related Words – Narcissism was most positively correlated with using sports-related words (r = .042). So, if you’re sitting around the water cooler at work and you hear co-workers throwing out phrases like “that presentation was a home run” or “we really knocked that one out of the park” or “that meeting was a slam dunk,” you might be dealing with a narcissist.
• Swear Words – The study found that narcissists tend to use more swear words (r = .032). One linguistic marker of disagreeableness is the use of swear words, and narcissists tend to be disagreeable. Narcissists also like to do whatever it takes to be talked about, and swear words generally get peoples’ attention. So, when you hear those four-letter words trickling down the hallway at work, you might be listening to a narcissist.
• Sexual Words – Consistent with other empirical research and theory, narcissists tend to use more sexual words (r = .031). “The idea is that narcissistic people will use sexual language to create a sexualized environment, perhaps as a means to signaling their own sexual availability or to prime sexual concepts in the minds of sexually available others.” So, when your coworker insists on sprinkling in sexual innuendo throughout the course of conversation, you might have a narcissist on your hands.

On the other hand, narcissists tend to avoid:

• Tentative Words – The study concluded that narcissists use fewer tentative words (r = -.045), such as “maybe,” “perhaps,” and “guess.” Because grandiose narcissists are self-assured and confident, it shouldn’t be surprising that they avoid using tentative words. So, when your work colleague says, “I guess we should have tried a different approach” or “perhaps there was a better way to handle this,” you’re probably NOT dealing with a narcissist.
• Fear/Anxiety Words – It should come as no surprise that narcissists use fewer words associated with fear and anxiety (r = -.065), but the potential reasons why are interesting nonetheless. One explanation is that narcissistic people actually experience little fear or anxiety. Another explanation is that narcissistic people may have some anxiety and fear, but they don’t register consciously and, therefore, aren’t expressed in language. So, if you’re in a meeting and a person says, “I’m afraid we don’t have a solution at this time,” you most likely are NOT in the presence of a narcissist.

Perhaps (see what I did there?) the most surprising result is that the study did not see a high correlation between first-person pronouns and narcissism. So, just because someone says “I” and “me” a lot doesn’t mean they’re a narcissist. Of course, they still could be, but it’s less likely than those who constantly use sports analogies, swear words, or sexual language.

Although the study did not reveal pronounced linguistic patterns, it did show that narcissism can be associated the words we use to communicate with others. This study should serve as a strong foundation for future research on narcissists as new text analytics emerge. Until then, you can use this study to sniff out the narcissists among the masses.

Hogan distributor, RELEVANT Managementberatung, is partnering again with the International Coach Federation Germany chapter to present the 2^nd Annual German Prism Award, awarded to companies making a difference in the coaching community through professionalism, quality, and data.

The selection process and criteria were modeled after ICF’s International Prism Award, which has been granted annually since 2005 to companies that stand out through the establishment of a coaching culture with extraordinary results in difficult change processes. Past winners of this prestigious award include Coca Cola, SAP, Airbus, and several other prominent companies. The Inaugural German Prism Award was awarded last year to CMS Law Tax, an international law firm with more than 70 offices worldwide.

“We are proud of the partnership we’ve formed with the ICF, and we’re excited to continue the momentum we built from last year’s event,” says RELEVANT owner, Dr. René Kusch. “Our goal from the very beginning was to advance the coaching profession, and this award honors the very best in the field.”

Those nominated are coaching programs that have innovative concepts and/or have made a significant contribution to achieving important corporate goals. The award will be presented on Friday, November 15 during ICF Germany’s Coaching Day in Munich. You can purchase tickets here to attend the event.

“There are so many strong candidates among this year’s nominations, but that’s exactly what we were hoping for,” says Kusch. “Although there can only be one winner, it’s wonderful to see so many organizations across Germany implementing such robust coaching programs. It’s obviously become a point of emphasis for German organizations, and we believe it will have a tremendous positive impact on the German workforce and the country as a whole.”