*This post was authored by Gillian Hyde, Director at Psychological Consultancy Ltd.

Destructive leadership can take many forms, from the specific counterproductive tendencies associated with an individual’s dark side profile to a simple failure to take on the responsibilities of a leader.

Register for the Dysfunctional Leadership Conference to hear these themes explored by experts in assessment, psychology and executive coaching.  

Introduction

Leadership effectiveness is often seen as an elusive, undefinable quality – something only a few will ever achieve. Dysfunctional leadership, on the other hand, is pervasive and a routine part of many people’s everyday working lives.

Social interaction exposes our vulnerabilities – and particularly social interaction at work where performance is key and the stakes are high. To succeed at work we have to perform, and for some of us this performance is much more of a challenge than it is for others.

These insecurities will impact on our ability to lead and manage others at work and cause many leaders to operate in a destructive fashion – maybe because of the negative impact of specific counterproductive behaviours such as arrogance or mistrust, maybe because of a particular state they are in (e.g. bereavement) but also sometimes because the leader is simply not capable of taking on the mantel of responsibility that comes with the territory.

PCL is delighted to announce the Dysfunctional Leadership Conference being held in London on November 14 where these themes will be discussed. 

Speakers

Gillian Hyde, Director of PCL, will be introducing the day’s events, setting the scene and facilitating the afternoon workshop with Darin Nei and Trish Kellett.

Scott Gregory, CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, will be speaking at the conference on the topic of absentee leadership  – having a leadership position while avoiding engaging in any leadership behaviours – and how this can have even further reaching effects than dark side leadership, for example, resulting in persistently lower levels of job satisfaction in subordinates.

Adrian Furnham, Professor of Psychology at University College London, will be discussing why leaders fail and derail, focusing on the dark side of personality.

Anne Scoular, Founding Director of Meyler Campbell, will be speaking about the impact of bereavement on a leader’s performance with specific reference to Queen Victoria.

Register

To register for the conference please click here.

About PCL

As Hogan Assessment Systems’ first international distributor, PCL has been working with organisations and individuals using the Hogan tools for 25 years, providing assessment solutions for selection, personal development, team development, leadership development and employee engagement. Using the most robust and valid psychometric assessments, we help companies make the best decisions for their business and staff and we help individuals reach their full potential.

HRTools, Hogan’s premier distributor in Mexico, is hosting a breakfast event on October 16 in Mexico City featuring Dr. Robert Hogan and Dr. Ryne Sherman as speakers.

Dr. Hogan’s presentation will cover the topic of humility and effective leadership. When organizations search for new leaders, they consciously or unconsciously look for candidates with charisma. However, a robust new line of research on leadership shows that charisma degrades leadership and often creates long-term chaos and ruin within organizations. In contrast with charismatic leaders, humble leaders admit their mistakes, listen to feedback, and solicit input from knowledgeable subordinates, and this creates an environment of continuous improvement.

Here is a brief preview of the presentation from Dr. Hogan:

Dr. Sherman’s presentation will focus on ROI and employee selection. People are an organization’s most important asset, and creating a competitive advantage begins by assessing and hiring the right candidates and developing them. Organizations that don’t use valid and accurate assessments in the selection process have to rely on intuition instead of data. This results in a lot of wasted time, energy and, most importantly, money.

Here is a brief preview of the Dr. Sherman’s presentation, as well as a message from HRTools founder, Victoria Zapata:

Dr. Hogan and Dr. Sherman will speak at 9 am at the Presidente InterContinental Hotel at Campos Eliseos 218, Polanco, Polanco IV Secc, 11550 Ciudad de Mexico. Registration for the event is currently full, but you can reserve a spot on the waiting list here.

*Hogan Senior Strategist, Michael Sanger, facilitated a webinar hosted by Workforce on Tuesday, September 18. This post offers you a summary of the talk and the presentation in its entirety. 

Personality determines the way we lead. The way we lead determines our teams’ performance. And a successful organization is a collection of high performing teams that act in concert. Seems simple enough. So what’s the problem? In a word…humans.

Effective leaders, just like other working adults, are a bunch of grown-up children, only one or two DNA percentage points apart from Chimpanzees. So what differentiates these hominids from the rest of the pack? How are they able to navigate our complex matrices more adeptly than the rest, whilst consistently delivering results? Believe it or not, the prerequisites for advancement in a hierarchy haven’t changed all that much over the last million years (give or take a couple of hundred thousand).

Learning Objectives:

• The tenets for effective leadership (from an evolutionary perspective)
• How “emergence factors” emerged in the modern day
• Getting along vs. getting ahead

Hogan distributor, RELEVANT Management Consulting, has partnered with the International Coach Federation Germany chapter to present the inaugural 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.

“Partnering with the ICF to present the first German Prism Award was a perfect opportunity for us,” says RELEVANT owner, Dr. René Kusch. “At RELEVANT, we are fully committed to advancing the coaching profession, and this award is symbolic of that commitment.”

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 November 16 during ICF Germany’s Coaching Day in Munich, and applications will be accepted through October 14.

“We look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with ICF Germany for many years to come,” says Kusch. “The ICF is the world’s premier coaching organization, and it is an honor to be involved in the early stages of something we believe will be a high-profile distinction for German coaching programs in the future.”

This press release was originally published on Business Wire on Monday, September 17.

The British Psychological Society (BPS) has completed a test review of the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), Hogan Assessments’ flagship assessment that describes normal personality. The 15-month process concluded with the HPI receiving perfect four-star ratings in the Documentation, Reports and User Experience categories.

“The Hogan Personality Inventory is a well-established personality measure, being one of the most well-known personality assessments globally,” according to the official report issued by the BPS. “There is a large amount of information provided by the developer/publisher, which is comprehensive and identifies the majority of the necessary information needed for a test user to evaluate the utility of the inventory.”

The HPI, originally authored and published in 1980 by Hogan Assessments’ founders,Drs. Robert and Joyce Hogan, was the first personality assessment specifically designed to predict business success. Today, the 206-item assessment is used by 70 percent of the Fortune 500 and is available in 56 countries and 47 languages. The favorable review completed by the BPS lends significant credibility to the accuracy, reliability and validity of the assessment.

“Having the British Psychological Society’s stamp of approval speaks to the quality of the Hogan Personality Inventory, further validating the decades of work we have put into this assessment,” Robert Hogan said. “We faced a lot of criticism from the scientific community when we first developed it, but we knew that our perseverance would pay off.”

In addition, the HPI received three-star ratings in the Validity, Norms, and Reliability categories, and was deemed by the BPS to be “a useful tool for use with working adult samples within the UK.”

“The standards by which the BPS measures assessment quality are world class,” Hogan said. “Quality has always been of the utmost importance to us, which is why we adhere to the ‘Kaizen’ approach of constantly improving our psychometrics.”

Sports are an excellent laboratory for understanding how leadership impacts organizational effectiveness. The criteria for success are clear and easily quantified (i.e., winning vs. losing). Moreover, frequent changes in personnel and leadership provide quasi-experimental evidence of how these factors play a role in success. In this essay, I consider the case of the Florida Atlantic University football program.

In the fall of 2011 there was a great deal of excitement in Boca Raton as it was the opening season for a brand new football stadium. The $70 million stadium seats around 30,000 people and is located in the heart of the campus. The season, however, was disappointing for FAU fans. The team finished 1-11 (1 win, 11 losses), dead last in the conference, and had an average attendance of 17,565 (ranking 103^rd among its FBS competitors). The legendary Howard Schnellenberger, who had announced his intention to retire prior to the beginning of the season, stepped down as head coach.

The team did not fare much better over the next five seasons. Carl Pelini was hired to begin the 2012 season, but subsequently resigned midway through the 2013 season for alleged illegal drug use. Charlie Partridge took over for the 2014 season and recorded three consecutive 3-9 records before being fired in November of the 2016 season. One month later, FAU hired Lane Kiffin as the head coach of the 2017 season.

Without a full season to recruit, Kiffin was faced with coaching the same players that had previously produced back-to-back-to-back 3-9 records. For this reason, what happened in 2017 is remarkable. Here are the highlights:

-An 11-3 win-loss record, their all-time best record as an FBS competitor

-Scored a team record 58 points in a game against Old Dominion

-Broke that record by 69 points in a game against North Texas the next week

-Scored 73 offensive touchdowns, tied for 3^rd most in the FBS

-Undefeated (8-0) in conference play

-Won the conference championship in a 41-17 rout of North Texas

-Boca Raton Bowl Champions in a 50-3 victory over a good Akron team

Same roster. Different leadership. Vastly different results. How was this possible? I watched the team play in 2016. Despite having the same players, the 2017 team looked entirely different.  In 2016, when a critical 4^th down came up, the team looked lost and panicked: “Should we punt?” “Should we go for it?” No one seemed to know. Watch the clip below to see how the 2017 team reacted to a 4^th and goal situation in the first quarter of the Boca Raton Bowl:

Popular wisdom will have you believe that a leader is someone who exudes confidence and charisma because they appear smart, interesting, and engaging. However, more often than not, these types of leaders wreak havoc on the workplace. A growing body of research suggests that humility is a far more important quality in a leader than charisma.

Organizations tend to favor people who “seem” leader-like. Individuals who are self-promoting, interesting, and politically savvy tend to get earmarked for promotion. These leaders know what it takes to get ahead and get noticed, and they strategically cater to audiences who can offer them power, influence, status, or access to resources.

Charisma is the elusive quality of being charming, captivating, and pleasant to be around. We are naturally drawn to charismatic people because we feel good in their presence. However, charismatic people also tend to have inflated views of themselves and their skills. They also tend to be more self-promoting than others. Too much charisma can make for ineffective leaders as their tendency to be narcissistic can alienate those working under them.

In essence, charisma is a double-edged sword. Too little and it’s difficult to persuade team members to support your vision. Too much and team members feel unsupported and disengaged. The strong overlap between charisma and narcissism means that it’s easy for charm to turn into arrogance and entitlement.

Humility, on the other hand, is vitally important to creating stability and engagement within teams. One of the most famous studies on the topic analyzes the success of 11 high-performing companies. The leaders in the highest performing firms had two things in common: they were fiercely competitive, yet personally humble.

Humility is a relatively new subject in the context of leadership and organizational effectiveness, primarily because humble leaders typically don’t stand out from the crowd. Preliminary research on the topic shows that a humble leader inspires collaboration and earns the respect of their team members. They also create working environments with higher degrees of satisfaction and productivity. Although the subject is relatively new, there are valid claims for making it measurable. Initial research shows that these skills indicate humility: modesty, sincerity, openness to feedback, recognizing others, low levels of arrogance, and low levels of narcissism.

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, emphasized the importance of humility as an essential attribute of leadership recently. “Good leaders combine personal humility, self-knowledge, and the ability to learn,” says Carney. “That means admitting mistakes, seeking and accepting feedback,and sharing the lessons you have learned.”

There is good news for those who are not naturally humble: research suggests that just by showing signs of humility, overly charismatic leaders can offset the qualities that make them unlikeable. A dose of humility can make a narcissistic boss seem more approachable, supportive, and open to feedback.

“Humility has the ability to counteract the potentially harmful effects of narcissism, which can lead to positive outcomes for the organization,” says Dena Rhodes, Research Consultant for Hogan Assessments. “This suggests that individuals can still have a narcissistic identity and be effective as a leader, as long as they have a humble reputation.”

The good news is that even the most arrogant of leaders can increase their effectiveness by showing humility, even if it’s not entirely genuine. Here are a few tips for avoiding the pitfalls of charisma:

1. Put the spotlight on others: make a concerted effort to recognize the achievements of team members and subordinates
2. Increase self-awareness: actively try to understand your limitations and show a willingness to acknowledge your mistakes
3. Be open to feedback: a trademark of humility is being coachable, which means opening yourself up to criticism and accepting that your way is not the only way
4. Check your sense of entitlement: work to earn the respect of your colleagues, don’t automatically assume you are entitled to it
5. Monitor your self-promoting behaviors: focus on trying to get along rather than getting ahead

With four and a half months left in the year, you still have time to get Hogan Certified in the US in 2018. Hogan’s certification and learning programs will equip you to leverage Hogan’s powerful assessment tools to solve critical business problems. Whether you want to select high performers, develop your high potentials, coach executives, or build stronger teams, the first step is to become Hogan Certified.

Hogan offers both Level 1 and Level 2 Workshops.

The 2-day Level 1 Workshop provides and in-depth understanding of how to use and interpret the Hogan Assessment Suite, offering a comprehensive tutorial of 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 remaining Hogan Certification Workshops across the US in 2018:

Level 1 Workshops

Chicago, IL – August 28-29

Minneapolis, MN – September 18-19

Atlanta, GA – October 2-3

Chicago, IL – October 16-17

Washington, DC – October 23-24

Tulsa, OK – November 6-7

San Antonio, TX – November 8-9

Boston, MA – December 4-5

Portland, OR – December 4-5

Atlanta, GA – December 11-12

Level 2 Workshops

Minneapolis, MN – September 20

Portland, OR – September 20

Atlanta, GA – October 4

Tulsa, OK – November 8

Portland, OR – December 6

Atlanta, GA – December 13

Register for a workshop today at www.hogancertification.com.

*This is a guest post authored by Rob Field, Learning and Development Director at Advanced People Strategies.

Every business I know is working to measure engagement. After all, the difference between good and great lies in discretionary effort. Drive higher engagement and get better results. What could be simpler?

How to make it happen and where the responsibility lies is an interesting question. Often measured, evaluated, and benchmarked each year by HR through surveys – real ownership belongs to the line manager who can create a working climate where people enjoy contributing and feel valued. You can put anything you like on the walls about the corporate culture and ‘how we work around here’, however, it only becomes a reality through interactions managers have with their teams and how individual team members treat each other. That sets the culture, which determines the level of engagement.

We become engaged by what is important to us. Our values and motives, the things that drive us to act in particular ways. All of this can be measured, accurately. Supporting managers to understand their motives and values as part of their ongoing development is critical to their effectiveness as leaders.

This is not about pandering to individual team members and being over accommodating. It is about how work is presented, how team members are brought into discussions, and spotting the opportunities to use not only the talents of individuals but the underlying motivations as well.

A simple example. In Hogan assessments terms; a leader who is low on recognition may not be driven to be seen nor want the plaudits of others. Sure, they may be happy to receive some recognition, but they won’t go out of their way to attract it. They may prefer to just get on with things. The organisation may even prefer that as they are not seen as needing too much attention. The climate they may unconsciously create for their teams could be one where contributions go unnoticed or assumed. The assumption is more likely that people work for the intrinsic reward of doing a good job. They will probably provide few rewards and praise only superior performance. This is not about being judgemental but consider the impact if you are motivated and engaged by being recognized and looking for high visibility pieces of work by which to do so. After all – do you not want people to repeat skills and behaviours that lead to great results and confidence?

The same applies to affiliation, having predictability and order, financials, aesthetics, and other areas that could be important to individuals. These could be the things that attracted them to the job and the organisation in the first place.

The ability to weave these important aspects into how leaders increase their effectiveness is essential to driving ongoing success and building high performing teams. Raising the awareness from the start.

Perhaps we should include this in the objectives of managers and ensure they focus some attention on it. The difference would be worth the effort.

*Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash.

A few years ago, as I was standing in the bookstore, I heard someone on the radio talk about a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that a computer algorithm, relying only on the things you “like” on Facebook, makes more accurate judgments of your personality than your friends. If you heard about this study, it might have made you feel a bit squeamish. Maybe it even made you want to delete your Facebook account. In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, it is certainly reasonable to wonder just how much big data companies (like Facebook, Google, Verizon, or Visa) know about you. Having personally reviewed this study before it was published, I was not quite so concerned. Let me explain.

The study itself showed that aggregated Facebook likes (i.e., the things that you like on Facebook) can be used to predict self-reports on a personality test. Further, when the total number of likes is large enough, the aggregated likes show a stronger relationship with self-reported personality than reports from your friends, family, spouse, or colleagues. This was widely reported to indicate that computers make better personality judgments than humans. I have three problems with this conclusion.

1) The data show that self-other agreement with human judges was about r = .49, while self-other agreement with computer-based judgments was about r = .56. In real-world terms, what these numbers mean is that if you judge yourself to be above average (the median) on a trait, your friends are likely to guess that you are above average 74.5% of the time, while the computer algorithm guesses correctly 78% of the time. This is a real difference, so I don’t want to downplay it, but it is important not to oversell it either.

2) One of the most interesting findings from this paper was the fact that both aggregated Facebook likes AND peer judgments of personality predicted self-reports of personality largely independently of each other. Average self-other agreement with human judgments was r = .42 when controlling for computer judgments. Likewise, average self-other agreement with computer judgments was r = .38 when controlling for human judgments. Both the computer algorithm and human judgments were related to different parts of self-reports. That is, peer-judgments of you and like-based judgments of you did not overlap very much.

3) Although the reports made it sound as if computers have some sort of knowledge that we do not, this is of course not true. The computer-based algorithm for making personality judgments is based entirely on the person’s behavior. That is, “Liking” something on Facebook is a behavior. The computer is taking the sum total of those behaviors and using them as a basis for “judgment.” Critically, these behaviors came from the person whose personality is being judged. Thus, one could argue that the computer judgments are merely linking self-reports of behavior or preferences (e.g., I like Starbucks) with self-reports of personality. In other words, the paper showed that how you describe your own personality is related to the things that you like. When you put it like that, it does not sound nearly as disconcerting.

I don’t mean to denigrate the study here. It was an interesting and well-conducted study on personality assessment. Still, what would be more interesting is the knowing the degree to which aggregates of Facebook likes predict (a) one’s reputation and (b) how one will perform in the workplace. Regarding the former, the data from this study indicate the relationship between Facebook likes and reputation is pretty weak, suggesting that Facebook behavior is mostly about identity, not reputation. Regarding the latter, there appear to be no studies speaking to the question.

*Photo by Michał Kubalczyk on Unsplash.