The existing paradigm in the business world holds that successful CEOs are ambitious, result-oriented, individualistic, and, above all, charismatic. The rise of agency theory, or the notion that incentivizing managers should improve shareholder returns, put greater emphasis on the need to hire leaders that appear leader-like. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom of what a leader looks like is, quite simply, incorrect.

Charisma is a very attractive characteristic in a leader. Yet, when promoted, these individuals create chaos and ruin for their organizations. Humility, rather, is a much better indicator of leadership success. Jim Collins, renowned author of Good to Great, conducted extensive research on organizational success. His work clearly demonstrated that companies led by modest managers consistently outperformed their competitors, and tended to be the dominant players in their sectors. Moreover, humble leaders tend to stay at their organizations longer than their arrogant counterparts, and their companies continue to perform well even after they leave because humble leaders often ensure a succession plan before they depart.

The Problem with Charisma

Organizations tend to be good at identifying people who “look” like leaders. Individuals who seem confident, bright, charismatic, interesting, and politically savvy tend to get earmarked for promotion. Personality assessments show that charismatic leaders rank highly on measurements of self-confidence (Bold), dramatic flair (Colorful), readiness to test the limits (Mischievous), and expansive visionary thinking (Imaginative). These leaders know what it takes to get ahead and get noticed, and they strategically cater to individuals and audiences who can offer them power, influence, status, or access to resources. While these individuals are highly interpersonally savvy and excellent self-promoters, they lack basic leadership and management skills.

Although some charisma can be beneficial, it often leads to lower levels of leadership effectiveness. One possible explanation is that highly charismatic leaders may be more strategically ambitious but less effective at the day-to-day operations. Emergent (read: charismatic) leaders, or individuals who stand out from the crowd, get promoted because they spend their time politicking and networking – trying to please their bosses by managing up rather than being concerned with those working under them.

Emergent leaders also create a culture of competition, ambition, and narcissism. Leaders like people like themselves, so senior leaders are more likely to choose successors who best reflect the status quo. Of course, competition and ambition can be positive qualities in the business world, but not if it comes at the expense of actual hard work.

Humility Breeds Effectiveness

Whereas charismatic leaders tend to focus on personal advancement, humble leaders tend to focus on team performance and guiding their employees. Effective leaders are more modest; they are willing to admit mistakes, share credit, and learn from others. Higher levels of humility also lead to higher rates of employee engagement, more job satisfaction, and lower rates of turnover. To be clear, humility does not imply the absence of ego or ambition. Rather, humble leaders are better able to channel their ambition back into the organization, rather than use it for personal gain.

Humility is broadly defined as 1) self-awareness, 2) appreciating others’ strengths and contribution, and 3) openness to new ideas and feedback regarding one’s performance. Leaders who are humble have a better grasp on organizational needs and make better informed decisions about task performance. They are also better able to ask for help than their charismatic counterparts. What’s more is that humble leaders help to foster a culture of development with their employees by legitimizing learning and personal development. Humility also encourages cultures of openness, trust, and recognition, which are important precursors to success.

Dig Deeper to Identify Humble Leaders

The challenge in hiring and developing strong leaders is in their identification. Charismatic, or highly emergent, leaders easily stand out from the crowd and their likability masks more important characteristics of performance. Humble, and typically more effective, leaders may fly under the radar and be passed over for hiring or promoting. Building selection and development programs that overcome personal biases and focus on objective indicators of success can help identify these low flyers. Organizations can benefit from the use of psychometric testing and 360 evaluation to counteract political factors by developing a data-driven approach that ensures organizations recognize and promote those who will be effective and humble leaders.

This article was originally published in Talent Economy.

Hogan is proud to officially announce the addition of RELEVANT Management Consulting to the Hogan International Distributor Network. Hogan has an intense focus for helping individuals, teams, and companies across the globe be the best they can be, and we are so happy to have RELEVANT improving our reach throughout Europe and beyond.

Leading this charge is RELEVANT owner, Dr.René Kusch, a renowned psychologist that is known for being a go-to Hogan Expert in German-speaking countries. Dr. Kusch has been working with Hogan Assessments since 2008 and is also a member of the global Hogan Coaching Network. He exemplifies the hardworking, but still hedonistic spirit of Hogan with his workplace mantra of “Relevance arises where goal-orientation, effectiveness, and fun come together.”

Together with Sarah Asskamp, Head of Operations, and their 10 consultants, RELEVANT consults global German organizations, but also supports consultancies, coaches, and trainers to develop, offer, and implement solutions for their own customers. Additionally, RELEVANT has already been working with other Hogan partners, distributors, and clients from all over the world for many years.

“Their contributions and experience have led to the implementation and execution of a wide range of projects,” said Dustin Hunter, Hogan’s Practice Manager of the Hogan International Distributor Network. “I’m proud of our team’s hard work in securing more world-class distributors like RELEVANT every year. It’s incredible to know that we are making a huge difference for companies all over the world from our global headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

RELEVANT is also extending Hogan’s collaboration with the International Coach Federation with the German Chapter and together we are sponsoring the first German Prism award for a coaching program with outstanding effectiveness and sustainability.

In addition to providing consulting services that leverage the predictive power of Hogan’s assessments for individuals and teams, RELEVANT also facilitates Hogan Certification Workshops throughout Germany, with 10 already scheduled from September 2018 to July 2019.

Sarah Asskamp, who directs the training program, says: “The impact we can have on the European workforce is far greater if we are able to educate and train HR practitioners, talent management professionals,coaches, consultants, and trainers to implement Hogan’s assessments.”

Kusch agrees: “As the saying goes, ‘give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.’”

For more information about RELEVANT Management Consulting, visit http://www.relevantmanagementconsulting.com/hogan/.

*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

THUOPER, Hogan’s Colombian distributor, embodies one of Hogan’s core values: developing future leaders. Ineffective leadership has plagued the global workforce for centuries, mostly because the characteristics that help people emerge as leaders are quite different from those that make an effective leader.

Of course, when leadership potential has been measured incorrectly for so long, there is no simple solution to fix the issue overnight. That’s why it has never been more important to look to the future and start exposing younger generations to the most accurate and effective tools for identifying effective leaders. 

In this edition of the Distributor Spotlight series, our friends at THUOPER provide us with an overview of an incredible program in which they are utilizing Hogan’s assessments for students who are selected to serve as CEO for a day.

One of the most common complaints against the education system of different countries is their apparent disconnection with the needs of companies. Generally, educational programs do not respond to organizational reality, and recent graduates find many difficulties when facing their first job.

The situation in Colombia is no different. Moreover, the lack of coordination and coherence between the academic world and the organizational world is worsening. Responding to this situation, THUOPER decided to take action on the matter. Since 2016 we have teamed up with CESA (College of Advanced Studies in Administration), a private university located in Bogotá that specializes in Business Administration, to create the CEOPPORTUNITY program.

As the name implies, CEOPPORTUNITY seeks to give students in their last few semesters of CESA the opportunity to live a day as a CEO. Each semester we match 10 of CESA’s best business students with 10 CEOs from some of the top companies in Colombia. Throughout this process students learn real business knowledge and are able to better understand the expectations of CEOs.

The program is highly selective, and students must endure an extensive application process due to there only being 10 placements per semester. The student must meet a semester grade requirement. Once this filter is done, THUOPER performs an assessment and interviews the students, where the aim is to show the alignment of their expectations with the objectives of the program and provide them with a first experience of an assessment center as well as a real-world interview.

The group of selected students is evaluated with a Hogan Flash Report and a Hogan Career Report. With this, we seek to equip them with perspective.  How they are perceived in the business world and, with that frame of reference, compare their profile to that of the leader with whom they will spend the day. They are given an opportunity to ask themselves: how do I see this leader? What do I see from their positive characteristics? What characteristics would I not want others to perceive in me? How could I have been perceived if I had gone through a similar situation?

At the end of the semester we hold a closing dinner attended by the 10 participating students with their CEO’s to discuss the benefits of the program, the power of the Hogan tests, and what both parties learned throughout the process.

There have been three CEOPPORTUNITY series, through which 30 students have had the opportunity to live out a day as a CEO. THUOPER and CESA will continue executing this program in future semesters, since the impact has been very beneficial. The three main achievements of this program include: giving local students knowledge of real-world work experience, educating this younger generation on an evaluation tool of global significance such as Hogan’s, and enriching the position of the Hogan brand in leading Colombian companies.

*This article was authored by Robert Hogan and Joan Jacobsen, and was originally published in The New Thinking Issue of Talent Quarterly. Visit their website to purchase the full issue as well as all previous issues.

Assembling a roster of all-stars isn’t easy—and keeping your squad together is even harder. Steal these five strategies and your team will be a perennial contender.

SUCCEEDING IN BUSINESS is a lot like succeeding in sports: The team with the most talent and best coach will almost always come out on top. But as any struggling squad will tell you, finding top talent isn’t exactly easy.

Let’s say, however, that you draft some homegrown stars and supplement your roster with a few big free agents. Even then you may not beat your competitors, because finding talent is one thing. Using it efficiently is some- thing entirely different.

But don’t throw in the towel. Here are five simple strategies you can use to sign franchise players, create a winning formula, and execute flawlessly.

STEP 1: Don’t Cheat Your Way to the Top 

Well-run organizations have always engaged in the systematic search for talent. For example, in China, the Ming Dynasty established an objective, multi-stage assessment process to find talented civil servants to serve the empire. After World War I, the German Army invented the modern assessment center as an objective method for identifying leadership talent.

Today, objective (and proven) assessment methods for talent identification are well known and commercially available; so are fraudulent methods for identifying talent. One of the biggest issues with today’s assessments is that most organizations have trouble distinguishing between valid and fraudulent methods. Make sure you learn the difference.

STEP 2: Understand Your Players’ Real Contributions 

Talent has serious financial consequences. The Vilfred Pareto Rule tells us that performance is essentially a fractal distribution: Twenty percent of the players on any team will account for 80 percent of the performance, while 80 percent of the players will account for 20 percent of the performance.

What’s true in team sports is also valid in sales, where 20 percent of the salespeople will account for 80 percent of the revenue. Along the same lines, 20 percent of employees will account for 80 percent of an organization’s personnel problems, and vice versa.

STEP 3: Steer Clear of Team Killers 

How should we define talent? The answer isn’t as straightforward as you think. Talent can (and should) be defined in terms of actual and measurable performance. However, in most organizations, it’s in the eyes of the beholders. Specifically, talent is almost always defined by supervisors’ ratings for performance.

In our experience, supervisors don’t know which employees are doing a good job. They think they do, but in reality, they only know which employees they like. And those employees may or may not be high performers.

Think back to your days in middle or high school. There were probably two groups of smart kids: The students whom the teachers thought were smart, and the students whom all the other kids knew were smart.

Unfortunately, the same process applies in the adult world of work. Inside many organizations, it’s all politics, all the time, and success depends on whom you know, not what you do.

In addition, supremely gifted athletes aren’t always good team players. Sports history is littered with examples of great athletes who fought with their coaches and teammates, so much so that we label these stars “team killers.” They generate mind boggling statistics for themselves while their teams underperform.

The same is true for law firms, healthcare providers, and research groups: Highly talented people who can’t share or collaborate often create more problems than they solve.

In our view, being willing and able to work well with others should be a key part of the definition of talent. All significant human achievements, from building the pyramids to landing on the moon to building a world-class company, require coordinated team e orts as well as stellar individual contributions.

STEP 4: Protect Your People from Incompetency 

Once any organization has successfully identified and recruited a talented player, it will have difficulty retaining that new team member because he or she has a 60 to 70 percent chance of working for an incompetent boss.

The stats are stark: In the industrialized world, 70 percent of employees hate their bosses. Bad managers destroy employee engagement, but most employees have no choice but to put up with their horrible bosses.

Talented employees have more options than average employees; they can easily move onto better jobs internally and externally. A major key to retaining talented employees, then, is to shield them from incompetent managers.

STEP 5: Don’t Be Fooled by Emergent Leaders 

So how do organizations find talented managers who won’t alienate their new recruits? In the corporate world, this is known as high-potential (hi-po) identification.

Many organizations identify the next generation of leaders, the hi-po talent, using nominations. Bosses handpick junior people who ooze with talent and potential for future leadership. But re- member: Bosses know who they like, but not necessarily who’s doing a good job.

Here’s where an important leadership study comes into play. Back in the 1980s, management guru Fred Luthans followed more than 400 young managers for a year and recorded their behavior daily. At the end of the year he found they naturally fell into two groups based on their performance.

The first group, which he called “emergent leaders,” received rapid promotions and pay raises. The second group, the “effective leaders,” managed high-performing teams.

The two groups only overlapped about 10 percent as managers; emergent leaders spent much of their time net- working and tending to office politics, while effective leaders worked with their subordinates and provided coaching and performance feedback.

The takeaway? Organizations tend to systematically overlook their most effective managers when trying to identify high-potential leadership. Instead, they choose as high-potentials those managers who are visible and self-promote, and tend to overlook those who are busy doing a good job.

Is it any wonder why there are so many incompetent bosses today?

The good news: While emergent and effective leaders have very different psychological profiles, it’s possible to distinguish between the two groups quickly and efficiently using modern assessment methods.

In other words, stop guessing and start testing. The future of your business depends on it.

*Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash

*This post was authored by Robert Hogan & Ryne Sherman.

There is a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated topics: self-deception and leadership. The two themes often come together in the lives of prominent politicians, for example, in the career of Barack Obama. Let us explain.

We are both fascinated by the idea that people often do things for reasons of which they are unaware. On the one hand, it is pretty obvious that people frequently act without knowing (or caring) why they behave as they do. On the other hand, why is that? For Freud, unconscious thoughts are created by what he called “repression:” one part of the mind (the Ego) recognizes that another part of the mind (the Id) prompts us to do things that will be great fun but which will get us in trouble. The Ego saves us from ourselves by repressing the impulses of the Id—most of the time. But from time to time, the Id escapes the Ego, and we do naughty things. Even then, however, the Ego protects us by “repressing” our awareness of what we have done and why. Freud goes on to say that maturity involves replacing repression with condemnation: immature people repress their socially inappropriate impulses; mature people acknowledge that they have socially inappropriate impulses but refuse to act on them.

The existentialists (Sartre, Camus) interpreted the Freudian unconscious in an interesting way. They understood that people often do selfish things without being aware of what they are doing. But they attributed this lack of awareness to “self-deception” (in French, mauvaise foi—bad faith), a tendency to avoid recognizing the reasons for one’s actions. Self-deception is nothing more than lying to oneself about the reasons for one’s actions. For the existentialists, then, self-deception is a form of cowardice—an inability to face up to the meaning of one’s decisions—and they argued that people have a moral obligation to overcome self-deception. So, we are left with two questions: (1) Are people often unaware of the reasons for their actions; and (2) are they still responsible for those actions?  Freud says “yes” and “no,” the existentialists say “yes” and “yes,” and we agree with Sartre and Camus.

Freud mistrusted politicians, whom he saw as ruthless psychopaths driven by the desire to dominate others—Freud had Hitler and Napoleon in mind. In our view, psychopaths are charismatic, charming, and ruthless, but they also tend to be impulsive, opportunistic, and lacking career agendas. Like psychopaths, narcissists also can be charismatic, manipulative, and ruthless, but unlike psychopaths, they tend to be strategic about their careers. In addition, most psychopaths are loners, whereas narcissists often build coalitions of supporters. We believe many politicians are narcissists—people who want power and control, feel they deserve it, and work to gain it.

Charisma and narcissism are closely related—to the point that charisma is a code word for narcissism.  And this has important implications for leadership. Charismatic people tend to be chosen for leadership positions, but charismatic narcissists make ruinous leaders. A substantial literature (cf. O’Reilly, 2017) shows that narcissistic CEOs are overly confident, unwilling to listen to feedback, and hostile and combative when challenged. These tendencies are associated with excessive risk-taking and a range of unethical behavior including tax avoidance, manipulating accounting data, and excessive personal compensation. The risk-taking leads to bad investments and ill-advised law suits, staff alienation and defections, and poor overall financial performance. Humility is the opposite of narcissism, and a growing empirical literature shows that humility in combination with appropriate self-confidence predicts leadership effectiveness and organizational success (Ou, 2012; Owens et al., 2013).

Turning back to political leaders, politicians want power and control, but they are surrounded by like-minded competitors. To gain power, they often claim that they only want to serve the public and work for the greater good, with no thought of personal gain. They claim to seek power in order to help those who lack power. And they can project this message so well that it becomes hard to see what is behind it.

The essence of animal communication is deception—most animal communication is intended to deceive competitors and predators. It follows that much human communication serves the same purpose. The difference between politicians and the rest of us is not that they are deceptive; the difference is that they are good at it and they know why they are doing it. In addition, the best liars are those who believe their own stories, and this brings us back to self-deception, to Barack Obama, and to Ben Rhodes’ new book on Obama’s leadership. Rhodes was recently interviewed about his book on National Public Radio. In that interview, Rhodes came across as bright and articulate, but also as narcissistic and self-deceived. This impression was confirmed in the following (astonishing) commentary on his book in Sunday’s (June 10^th) Wall Street Journal:

“Mr. Rhodes’ prose is engaging, and his Syria narrative, contrary to his slippery reputation, is astonishingly candid. We can attribute his honesty to a lack of self-awareness. He depicts himself, Mr. Obama and other members of the former president’s team as not only tragically indecisive and irresponsible but self-absorbed to the point of moral insensateness.  Yet there is no indication Mr. Rhodes understands that his account is damning.”

So, what is the point? First, Freud was right: politicians are not like the rest of us; they have a distinctive psychology that sets them apart from ordinary citizens. Second, Freud was wrong about that psychology. Even dictators like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad are not psychopaths; rather, they are narcissistic politicians who escaped the bonds of accountability. Unlike psychopaths, successful dictators are clear minded about their goals—they are pragmatic, rational, and make data-based decisions in order to secure their legacies. Third, our own elected politicians also tend to be narcissists (Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Woodrow Wilson, etc.); charismatic, charming, and self-deceived. Sincerity is the mark of people who have been taken in by their own acts. The problems occur when political leaders commit their countries to seemingly humanitarian projects that are actually intended to secure their own personal legacies: Woodrow Wilson in WWI; Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam; George Bush in Iraq…

References

O’Reilly, C.A.  (2017).  The Leadership Quarterly.  http//dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.08.001

Rhodes, B.  (2018).  The world as it is:  A memoir of the Obama white house.  New York:  Penguin.

Ou, Y. (2012). CEO humility and its relationship with middle manager behaviors and performance: Examining the CEO-middle manager interface. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, 72(7-A), 2478.

Owens, B. P., Johnson, M. D., & Mitchell, T. R. (2013). Expressed humility in organizations: Implications for performance, teams, and leadership. Organizational Science, 24, 1517-1538. doi: 10.1287/orsc.1120.0795

*This is a guest post authored by Dr. Nicholas Emler, Professor of Psychology at University of Surrey.

Social organizations generate immense power and great benefits. Today, we rely on social organizations to support every facet of our lives—from food production and distribution to water supply and waste disposal to the provision of health care and national security. However, that power can also be a source of massive harm.  It therefore matters whose hands control the levers of this power. And moral character matters immensely at this level because leaders have significant discretion to act, discretion denied to people lower in the organizational hierarchy.

There are some distinct moral challenges associated with the exercise of organizational leadership; unfortunately, some leaders are not up to these challenges.  This essay identifies seven moral challenges of leadership, and concludes by suggesting that moral failure may be commonplace at the top of social organizations.

The first and most elementary moral challenge concerns the fact that leaders occupy positions of trust; they are entrusted with managing the material resources of the organization. As criminology clearly shows, theft depends on opportunity and most societies are arranged so as to minimize the opportunities available to known delinquents. But matters are very different at the top of organizations; the opportunities and temptations – of personal enrichment at collective expense — can be huge and the strength of character to resist those temptations is often lacking. Think of Enron executives, Bernie Madoff, Jacob Zuma, or virtually any Russian oligarch.

The second challenge arises because leaders occupy positions of power – over subordinates—and the temptation is tyranny. People often have reasons to dislike others and wish them harm. But they seldom act on their wishes because aggression is not free; victims retaliate and the law intervenes. In criminological terms, there are credible deterrents. But as we move up organizational hierarchies, the deterrents become less credible and the cost of aggression fades away. Consequently, bullying, sexual predation, persecution, torture and mass murder can result. The examples here begin with Harvey Weinstein and Robert Maxwell (head of a British publishing empire and notorious bully) and extend to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung and the horrors they perpetrated.

The third moral challenge is based on the fact that leaders are in positions of authority, and are, therefore, responsible for maintaining fair procedures for administering justice.This might seem to be a benign challenge, but not managing it properly can be very costly to organizations. People care about justice—the fairness of the procedures to which they are subject and the outcomes they receive. And when they perceive matters to be unfair, they withdraw their commitment to organizational citizenship, a commitment on which all organizations depend. This leads to depressed morale, lowered motivation, and resentment-driven sabotage. However, the literature on organizational justice mostly concerns how the recipients of justice react; it tells us little about how to deliver justice in a manner acceptable to those recipients.

The fourth challenge reflects the fact that social organizations tend to embody a particular set of values. Think about the claims of competing candidates for political office; there will typically be a contrast in the values they endorse, for example, freedom versus equality. The elected candidate then has an obligation to promote those values. Leaders need to be clear about their value priorities. Without being clear about their values, they risk decision-making paralysis.

Fifth, organizations exist to do something, and achieving that mission is the responsibility of the leadership. Mission failure is also a moral challenge; mission failure is all too often due to incompetence. However, the problem ultimately is not the limited competence of leaders but their failure to acknowledge their limits. Complex organizations require expertise beyond the capacity of any single individual and good leaders have the humility to recognize this and seek expert advice from others. Bad leaders refuse to admit any limits to their omniscience. The results can be corporate collapse and financial ruin for thousands of investors, the catastrophic failure of health care organizations, battles lost with massive casualties, the economic ruin of entire countries (think Robert Mugabe), and mass starvation.

Sixth, leaders have a moral obligation to avoid collateral damage when pursuing the organizational mission. Much of the literature on corporate crime documents this moral failure. It is estimated that on the job injuries resulting from unsafe working practices are 7 times the injuries resulting from criminal assaults. Avoidable deaths from occupational accidents and diseases are between 5 and 7 times as frequent as deaths by homicide. In addition, evidence collected by US federal agencies show that about 20 million Americans a year are injured or killed by unsafe consumer products. Corporate executives may not intend these consequences but they are foreseeable, and often foreseen; the Ford Pinto and Thalidomide are but two examples.

The final and perhaps most difficult moral challenge to meet, is to use the opportunity provided by leadership of a powerful organization – most notably but not only a nation state – to do good, to address grievous wrongs and injustices, to root out corruption and oppression, and to face down tyrants. The list of leaders rising to this challenge is depressingly short. One reason may be that the complex causal linkages in social systems are difficult to grasp and interventions designed to fix one problem often have other unintended but damaging consequences.

Why are we so often poorly served by our leaders? Some of the reasons are noted above – the corrupting consequences of opportunity, the lack of effective deterrence, etc. But another reason lies in processes of leader selection. The extensive psychological literature on leadership selection and evaluation is largely irrelevant because it assumes the selection process is rational and empirical—e.g., assessment center methodologies. In most real organizations, however, people are chosen for positions of leadership through selection processes that are heavily top-down. And in top-down selection, politics and technical competence often trump questions about the moral integrity of candidates.

*This Q&A was originally published by HRPWR.com. 

Dr. Robert Hogan is an international authority in the fields of personality assessment, the assessment of management skills and organisational efficiency. He is the author of more than 300 articles, book chapters and books in total; the founder of Hogan Assessments and eponym of the Hogan test.  Dr. Hogan is a determining personality of 21st century applied business psychology, who is widely acclaimed internationally in scientific and business circles alike. We recently spoke with Dr. Hogan when he was in Budapest to speak at the Future of Coaching in Organisations conference.

May I start with a personal question? Have you always been interested in organisational psychology, or had you previously tried your hand at other fields of psychology?

I’m a retired naval officer. After leaving the navy, I worked with youthful offenders for one and a half years – my interest in psychology derives from these times. I was completely enchanted by the task of understanding how these young people had arrived at this point, many of whom were really smart and good at sports – how did they become youthful offenders? I wanted to find out what could be done to reverse the process which had led them to that point. After this, I decided to pursue a PhD in psychology, and I spent the first 11-13 years of my post-navy career studying crime.

How did you arrive at studying personality assessment, leadership and organisational development from there?

While I was studying the psychology of delinquency I realised that in truth I’m more interested in the normal personality – through criminals we can’t understand the normal personality, but through studying the normal personality we can understand what has happened to those who become criminals. This is how I got to the point of studying personality in itself, and how I got to the question, which is a very important question in life indeed: what shapes our career? How can we be successful in life? As this is something criminals can’t have: success in career. This was followed by the question of how to make a career within an organisation – since nobody makes a career in the desert alone… I started thinking about the topic of “people in the organisation”, then one thing came after another. I explored the literature of organisational theory, and I realised that this doesn’t exist: that nobody had ever talked about organisational theory before. Even though people create organisations, organisations develop cultures, and after this, the culture affects who can be inside and who remains outside… This is how someone becomes a criminal – they are the ones who remain outside – and this is how I started dealing with organisational psychology.

I have seen a video on the web page of Hogan Assessments, in which people are asked what they think the concept of personality covers. Now I would like to ask you: what is personality?

It’s about two things. One of them is what a person thinks about him or herself: this is his or her identity. The other is what others think about him: this is his reputation (in other words, his honour or credit). The first covers what a person thinks about who he or she thinks he/she is, the second is what others think about him or her. During the history of psychology, most psychologists have focused on identity, even though the most important part of our life is our reputation: since based on this we are hired, fired or promoted; people lend us money, vote for us and so on. So psychologists have missed this opportunity, because we focus exactly on this, on how we affect others. Our reputation is the key to everything. For instance politicians understand this very well – but psychologists don’t.

From where did you get the idea to measure reputation?

Freud phrased it something like this: “The ‘you’ that you know is hardly worth knowing” – as it’s something that you invented about yourself. The problem with all of this is self-deception: people lie to themselves most of the time. And one of their biggest lies towards themselves is in connection with who they are and what they do. What we can believe is what other people say about them. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Our reputation aggregates of all our past behaviors: this is our best data source for how we are going to behave in the future.

Can we always believe what other people say about someone?

We have to analyze all of the results. We can’t take the opinions of only one or two people. We have to ask at least ten or fifteen people, since anyone can be antagonistic towards someone – or is his or her good friend. That’s why we need a lot of data.

Does all the above mentioned mean that self-knowledge doesn’t play a part at all in a successful career – and it’s not important in the assessments?

Exactly! How do we know where self-knowledge comes from? We assume that it comes from introspection – namely, what we think about ourselves. But many, many successful people are incapable of introspection! They are just not capable: they become angry if you ask them to peer inward. Ronald Reagan was famous about not being able to do this; another example is Voltaire. So if very successful people are not capable, then introspection is not even important – is it?

I will have to think about that a bit…

All right! So the thing we have to speak about, is strategic self-knowledge. This means that we have to be aware of how others see us, and also of how we affect others.

If it’s true that a person’s reputation consists of all his/her past behavior, then how should we evaluate if someone’s personality has gone through a big change – how can we assess that? Can we assess it at all?

I don’t think that personality could ever change in a large measure. It’s very hard to change personality. What we can change is behavior: based on feedback, we can change something in our behavior. At the same time, personality has an important dimension, which we call coachability. This means that not everyone listens to feedback. Let’s just think about athletes: you get 9-10 athletes to every star athlete who are just as skilled, but they don’t become star athletes. Those who become star athletes listen to coaching. Without this, they can’t perform at their best: it won’t work if they don’t allow themselves to be coached.

So what you are saying is that coachability is something which can be measured, and if someone is coachable, there is a chance that his or her behavior will change later on?

Yes. And if someone reaches low scores in coachability, it means that he/she will never change. Because these people like themselves as they are – why should they change? (Or so they think.)

Hogan Assessments also deals with measuring leadership skills. What characterises a good leader?

That their subordinates like him/her and they trust him/her. And they believe him/her. I can also tell why they like a good leader. There are four reasons: first, they know that they can trust him or her, and that he or she won’t betray them. Second, they see that this person knows what he/she is talking about. She/he knows the field she/he is dealing with, and is really competent in it. The third is that she/he has good judgement: she/he makes very good decisions. Nelson – one of the best leaders I know – never made any bad decisions. And the fourth? These people have a vision which is attractive. If we would like to define the bad leader, just recall all the bad managers we have met so far: they lie, they don’t know what they are talking about, they make bad decisions, and they aim to realise bad values. What they are trying to achieve is not worth achieving. As a matter of fact, what I have just said is based on knowledge gained from millions of data points about what a good leader looks like. I’m not a philosopher, I approach the question from the viewpoint of an engineer. I really have to build on data. For building up a business or anything else, we need to support the process with data. We don’t build bridges from instinct either. (Laughs.)

Could you share your views about how digitalisation has changed, or how it is changing, personality assessment?

First, I have to lay down that I’m constantly thinking about this question: in fact, it’s been troubling me since 1965, so I’ve been worrying about it for a while. But I think that human nature has a biological core, which will never change. What we would like to measure does not change; the method of measurement can change at best. At the same time, I also think that the best way to collect data from a person is to ask him or her a series of sophisticated questions. I don’t know yet if there is any faster way of getting information about people. And the best way to get information about people is to ask other people about them. And how can we digitize this…? Digitalisation makes all this faster and more effective, we can ask more people within less time – but what we want to measure will always remain the same. Today we can collect the amount of data within 4-5 days which took me 2 years in the first occasion. And this is astounding!

As a conclusion, I would ask you a personal question again: what are you most proud of in your career?

There are four things of which I think I can be proud. I think I was the one who stood up and showed to the scientific world that personality is important, indeed: that it predicts workplace performance, moreover, in the case of all occupations. It predicts work performance more than anything else, including IQ. And personality doesn’t discriminate. Here there is no difference among the attainable scores between women and men, or between people coming from various places, and so on. Anyone completing the test can reach the same scores. In the second place, I also showed that leadership and leadership skills are important. So, first of all personality is important. Secondly, leadership ability is important, and thirdly, personality predicts leadership ability. And the fourth thing I’m proud of is that (through mapping the dark side of personality) we also pointed out the fact that 65-75% of present managers don’t perform well in their work. I think these are important contributions. And it can be said in every case that the scientific community has always had a different opinion. So when we pointed at these things, we met serious resistance from the scientific community. And I’m very proud that we did it!

*This article was originally published by Training Industry on May 1, 2018.

One of the best studies ever conducted on organizational effectiveness was done by Jim Collins and described in his book “Good to Great.” Collins identified 11 firms from the Fortune 1000 that had 15 years of below-average performance in their industry followed by 15 years of above-average performance. The key question of the investigation is, what took these 11 firms from “good” to “great”?

Collins ultimately concluded (somewhat reluctantly) that the key driver of change in organizational performance was a change in leadership. However, simply changing the leadership was not enough. Collins found that these 11 high-performing firms chose leaders with an almost paradoxical blend of characteristics: They were fiercely competitive, yet personally humble.

It is easy to understand why leaders who are fiercely competitive are more effective: They want to beat the competition. What is less clear is why humility – as opposed to confidence, charm and charisma – was characteristic of the most effective leaders. This article draws on recent research in personality science to offer three generalizations about humility, leadership and organizational effectiveness.

Generalization #1: Humble Leaders Are More Effective.

In a systematic series of studies, Bradley Owens demonstrated that employees working for humble leaders are more engaged, satisfied and productive and better organizational citizens. That is, they talk up the organization to others, building a positive reputation for their organization. Additionally, organizations with humble leaders suffer from less turnover and are themselves more collectively humble.

So, what is it that humble leaders do to create such positive results? At least three things: First, humble leaders give credit to their team members and let everyone share in the team’s success. Doing so builds trust among the team. If subordinates do not trust their leader, the mission is doomed to failure. Humble leaders build trust.

Second, humble leaders recognize their own shortcomings and are willing to ask for help when a problem is outside of their area of expertise. Because team members trust humble leaders, they are happy to help when their leader asks.

Third, humble leaders are coachable. They listen to feedback from others and use it to improve their own performance. Leaders who lack humility cannot get better, because they ignore feedback.

Generalization #2: Humble Leaders Are Overlooked.

Unfortunately, modern organizations often overlook their most effective (humble) leaders. Charisma, charm and self-proclamations of competence are strong predictors of leadership emergence (i.e., being chosen to lead), despite their lack of association with leadership effectiveness (i.e., building a winning team). Because humble leaders give credit to others and avoid the spotlight, senior leadership often overlooks and underestimates their accomplishments.

Our own data show that ambition (i.e., the tendency to take charge, compete and advance one’s career) is slightly negatively correlated with humility. In other words, one of the key factors associated with leadership emergence (ambition) is negatively correlated with a key factor of leadership effectiveness (humility). The grid below illustrates the situation:

As shown, if leaders are selected for their emergence characteristics (i.e., high emergence), the probability of choosing an ineffective leader is 60 percent! This is precisely why Collins referred to the 11 most effective leaders as holding a paradoxical combination of traits. A small fraction of leaders possess both ambition and humility.

Generalization #3: Lack of Humility Ruins Organizations.

Most businesses ultimately fail, and the primary cause of organizational failure is poor leadership. There are many ways that leadership can go wrong, but four themes – all related to a lack of humility – are readily apparent. The first theme of poor management is an exaggerated sense of self and entitlement. Such narcissists obviously lack humility but are quite adept at getting themselves into leadership positions (see generalization #2). Ultimately, these leaders alienate their staff because they make promises that they cannot keep, they take credit for all successes, and they blame anyone and everyone else for any failures. Talented employees quit or find themselves on the proverbial chopping block. When talent leaves, organizations fail.

The second theme of poor management is a lack of awareness about how one’s actions are affecting others. These leaders are insensitive to the “people side” of doing business. Further, they fail to recognize this insensitivity as a shortcoming. Subordinates see them as cold and uncaring. While humble leaders are open to listening to what other people feel and think, insensitive leaders are unwilling to listen to opinions and feedback from others.

The third theme of poor management is an exaggerated need for social support and approval. All people have some need for social support and approval, but some really poor leaders are desperate for it (think Michael Scott from “The Office”). Similarly, the fourth theme of poor management is insecurity and low self-confidence. Both of these traits are rooted in insecurity and fear of rejection. Leaders who lack humility are desperate for attention and approval of others. Indeed, much of their expressed arrogance and overconfidence is intended to mask a deep desire for the approval of others. On the flip side, however, people who are overly humble may also suffer from such insecurities. For example, agreeing with the statement “I’m not very good at things” may reflect either true humility or a lack of self-confidence. Leaders who are appropriately humble are seen as confident and suffer from neither diffidence nor arrogance.

Leaders are the most consequential members of any organization. Unfortunately, the current cultural attraction to leaders who are charming, charismatic and self-promoting (e.g., transformational leadership) is leading us in the wrong direction. Some of our most effective leaders are hiding in our organizations, masked by their own humility. For the future success of our organizations, finding them is critical.