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

We all heard it and probably all rolled our eyes to it…’The only constant is change’.

With organisations needing to constantly adapt and evolve due to competitive forces, global challenges or political decisions how are leaders meant to keep up?

Development programmes can provide frameworks and information to help create knowledge. We often see comprehensive change programmes with teams of people lead by programme managers. Effective at reviewing processes and creating the project plan and driving timelines to enable delivery. New systems, processes and products emerge. There are the usual statistics that over 80% of change programmes fail. Kotter would say that we need to attend to eight areas with the final of these being anchoring changes firmly in the corporate culture.

Change management is probably the biggest challenge leaders face.

Resistance can be present as well as those ‘embracing’ change who may be overcommitting. As products and services are changing, are the leaders changing along with them? They are the role models of the business. Emerging talent will be copying what they do as they grow their careers. Are they modelling the right behaviours? Charles Brown former Chairman of AT&T recognised this when he said ‘I think we can do the internal job of changing without fear of failure, once we’re given some decent understanding of what is expected of us. But the complexity of trying to change ourselves, when we don’t know what the future rules are going to be, injects a degree of uncertainty that creates a lot of anxiety.’ Leading change is a key component of successful leadership.

Knowing who you are as a leader and being able to lead yourself effectively can make a huge difference within the organisation.

How do we support leaders from being resistant over overcommitting? Challenging them to recognise their behaviours, making them conscious of their impact on others helps them become the role models required to create or modify the corporate culture. There are several areas to address to do this including considering how feedback is collected and provided within the organisation, how leaders get to understand who they are and how to keep them conscious of how they impact others. Failure to do so may jeopardise their effectiveness.

So, although we talk about change management, we can teach people the relevant skills. We need to support the leaders to impact the culture of the organisation and learn to change themselves in ways that better serve others. Using the right tools and considering how leaders are coached impacts on more effective change management.

Hogan Assessments Managing Director Ryan Ross, Manager of Client Research Kimberly Nei, and Managing Director of Europe Zsolt Feher will be featured speakers at the European Association of Test Publishers Conference on September 26-28 in Athens, Greece. In addition, Hogan will serve as a Gold Sponsor for the event.

The three will speak on three different topics at the conference. Feher, Ross, and Nei will speak during an Ignite Session that will focus on the “State of Affairs in HR Data Analytics – Let’s Not Get Overshadowed by Digital Disruption and Rising Stars.” Ross will speak at a Breakout Session on “Noncognitive Assessment – Applications and Opportunities to Transform Testing.” The third and final session by Nei and Ross is a Breakout Session titled “Mythbusters – Fact or Fake News?” All Breakout Sessions provide a rounded perspective on a topic, and include multiple presenters from a single organization, across multiple organizations, or panel sessions specifically where the end users of tests and assessments are involved.

There are significant anticipated changes throughout the assessment industry in Europe due to the political, technological, and societal landscape across the continent. The E-ATP Conference aims to learn how to keep pace with the innovations emerging in the industry, revisit the core principles of assessment, and to lead the transformation in assessment.

For more information about the event, visit www.eatpconference.eu.com.

“This porridge is too hot!”

“This porridge is too cold.”

“Ahhh, this porridge is just right.”

–Goldilocks

At Hogan, we’ve been talking a lot about Humility lately. We’ve spent much less time talking about its antonym – Charisma. However, colleagues have used the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) to study charisma and recently published their findings in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This post highlights their key findings, relates it to our own thinking about humility, and calls out some practical implications for coaching and leadership development.

In their paper, Jasmine Vergauwe, Bart Wille, Joeri Hofmans, Rob Kaiser, and Filip De Fruyt show that the HDS contains a “Charisma Cluster” of scales. Specifically, the Bold, Mischievous, Colorful, and Imaginative scales together form a measure of charisma that reflects a combination of confidence, risk-taking, social presence, and strong vision.

People with high scores on the Charisma Cluster describe themselves as talkative, inventive, energetic, and original. They also describe themselves as good-looking, persevering, and ingenious. In contrast, observers describe these individuals only as talkative, energetic, and original, not as good looking and persevering.  Thus, individuals with a charismatic personality have inflated views of themselves that are inconsistent with how others see them.

Second, and most importantly, the researchers examined the relationship between charisma and overall effectiveness in a sample of over 300 business leaders. Once again, self-ratings of overall effectiveness were inconsistent with coworker ratings: HDS charisma scores significantly predicted self-rated effectiveness (r = .29), whereas the charisma scores were uncorrelated with coworker-rated effectiveness. But the story didn’t end there.

There was a significant curvilinear relationship between HDS charisma scores and coworker-rated effectiveness. According to coworkers, a slight elevation on the charisma cluster – neither too little nor too much – predicted the highest levels of rated effectiveness. The Figure tells the story.

Coworkers indicated that those managers with scores slightly above the average in a large sample of working adults (i.e., about the 60^th percentile) were seen as the most effective leaders. After that, more charisma predicted decreasing effectiveness. In contrast, the higher the self-ratings for charisma, the higher the self-rating for effectiveness.  But other people are always the best judge of a person’s performance.

At about the 70^th percentile on the charismatic cluster, coworkers start to see the dark side of charisma—where confidence become arrogance, risk-taking gets reckless, social presence looks melodramatic, and strong vision becomes ungrounded grandiosity. But these highly charismatic leaders can’t see the downside, and in fact see themselves as extraordinarily effective leaders.Rob Kaiser (a coauthor) refers to this divergence of opinion at the highest levels of charisma as “the gradient of delusion.”

The moral of this story will be familiar to readers of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Leaders with just the right amount of charisma, neither too little nor too much, are the most effective. Some charisma is desirable; without any spark, leaders lack the confidence, charm, vision, and flair needed to inspire others. But when it comes to charisma, there is clearly such a thing as too much of a good thing.

This research has two practical implications. First, we should never rely on self-assessments of effectiveness or workplace performance. Reputation is where the action is and other people own your reputation.

Second, those working in coaching or leadership development need to develop strategies for bringing highly charismatic leaders back to reality. Coworker feedback is obviously one way to help charismatics calibrate their excessively rosy self-appraisals. Charismatic leaders can also benefit from working with a partner who provides a practical foil to their unrealistic self-beliefs. Such people need to be trusted by the larger-than-life charismatic; they need the insight not to be taken in by the charismatic’s charm and they need to be able to steer charismatic leaders back on track—and prevent them from going over the edge.

*This article, authored by Ben Dattner and Robert Hogan, was originally published in Harvard Business Review in 2011. It has been republished in the HBR 2018 Summer Issue.  

In his brilliant 1950 film, Rashomon, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa depicts the story of a rape and murder four times, from the perspectives of four characters. The message is clear: Different people can see the same events in dramatically different ways.

In the workplace this phenomenon is particularly evident when it comes to underperformance and failure. An outcome that an employee regards as satisfactory may be seen by his boss as entirely unacceptable. When a project is an unequivocal flop, colleagues disagree over the reasons why. These reactions, and their effect on workplace relationships, often become more problematic than the original event. As a result, how people respond to negative feedback is of great importance to managers and organizations and is a major determinant of career success.

Consider the case of a pharmaceutical company seeking FDA approval for a new use of an existing drug. (Some details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.) Wendy, a talented researcher, was put in charge of the large-scale data analysis required to file an appli cation. She considered several approaches and recommended the one she thought best balanced the need for accuracy and comprehensiveness with the imperative to complete the work quickly and on budget. Her boss, George—the company’s head statistician—agreed with the plan, and together they presented it to the vice president of medical affairs, Don. Although Don would have liked a more thorough approach, he recognized that it would be more expensive, and he signed off on the recommendation.

After months of work the analysis failed to demonstrate the efficacy of the drug for the new use, and the application to the FDA had to be scrapped. Reactions varied. Don blamed the statistics department, and especially George, for recommending the approach it had taken. George did not think that he and his team were at fault, and he was angry with Don for allowing financial pressures to influence their choice in the first place. The two men struggled to work together. Wendy, meanwhile, felt she had personally fallen short and began having trouble focusing on her other assignments.

How could three people have such different views of the same situation?

A Matter of Type

Personality psychology provides a research-based behavioral science framework for identifying and analyzing how people respond to failure and assign blame. Using data on several hundred thousand managers from every industry sector, we have identified 11 personality types likely to have dysfunctional reactions to failure. For example, there is the Skeptical type, who is very smart about people and office politics but overly sensitive to criticism and always on the lookout for betrayal; the Bold type, who thinks in grandiose terms, is frequently in error but never in doubt, and refuses to acknowledge his mistakes, which then snowball; and the Diligent type, who is hardworking and detail oriented, with very high standards for herself and others, but also a micromanaging control freak who infantilizes and alienates subordinates. These types represent roughly 70% of the U.S. population. (See the sidebar “Recognize Your Type.”)

The 11 types can be divided into the three broad categories proposed by the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig in the 1930s, which were based on a test that he had developed to assess anger and frustration. Some people are extrapunitive—prone to unfairly blaming others. Some are impunitive: They either deny that failure has occurred or deny their own role in it. And some are intropunitive, often judging themselves too harshly and imagining failures where none exist.

In our pharmaceutical example, Don, an Excitable type, exemplifies extrapunitive tendencies. He takes the statistics team to task instead of accepting any personal responsibility or attributing the failure to the drug itself. Extrapunitive responses are all too common in the business world. Seemingly every time executives testify before Congress—whether it’s Tony Hayward, then BP’s CEO, disavowing blame for the oil spill, or Richard Fuld, then Lehman Brothers’ CEO, disavowing blame for the financial crisis—they point fingers at any organization except their own. Interestingly, long before they found themselves in the hot seat, both Hayward and Fuld were faulted for other instances of mismanaging blame. (HBR tried to reach Hayward and Fuld to give them the opportunity to respond but received no reply.)

The chief statistician, George, a Bold type, was impunitive, denying that he and his team had anything to do with the bad outcome. One well-known executive who has been accused of this sort of behavior is Carly Fiorina, a past CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Disgruntled former subordinates have described her as a self-promoting attention seeker who ignored integration challenges and day-to-day operations following HP’s 2002 merger with Compaq and took no responsibility when the combined company failed to live up to its potential. When the HP board suggested that she delegate greater authority to her team and more power to the heads of key business units, she refused and was subsequently dismissed. (When HBR contacted Fiorina’s chief of staff about this article, she declined to comment.)

Though less common than extrapunitive and impunitive personality types, people with intropunitive tendencies can also be problematic. The researcher Wendy, a Diligent type, exhibited this behavior by taking on excessive blame. This may have been due in part to her gender: Because of their socialization and other cultural influences, women are more likely than men to be intropunitive.

The underlying theme of our research is that many managers perceive and react to failure inappropriately and therefore have trouble learning from it—leading to more failures down the road. Many of us have at some point assigned (or avoided) blame in a self-serving way, only to suffer negative fallout; on the flip side, we may take self-criticism too far, resulting in paralysis and stagnation. To foster and thrive in a productive work environment, we need to recognize and overcome these tendencies.

How to Change Your Stripes

Fortunately, managers at all levels of organizations, and at any stage of their careers, can fix their flawed responses to failure. Here are some key steps you should take:

Cultivate self-awareness.

First, it’s important to determine whether you fall into one of the three categories. Several personality tests can help you assess your interaction style. Although the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably the best known, others have more empirical support. One well-established model we’ve found particularly helpful is the Big Five, which measures openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, along with subfactors of these dimensions. It does a good job of illuminating how you deal with failure in yourself and others. For example, you may find that you score high on the achievement-striving subfactor of the conscientiousness dimension, indicating that you may become easily distressed if you don’t meet ambitious goals. Or you might score high on the angersubfactor of neuroticism, suggesting a tendency to disproportionately fault others for minor errors and to exaggerate their gravity.

Another useful exercise is to reflect on challenging events or jobs in your career, considering how you handled them and what you could have done better. You might ask trusted colleagues, mentors, or coaches to evaluate your reactions to and explanations for failures. Pay close attention to the subtleties of how people respond to you in common workplace situations, and ask for formal or informal 360-degree feedback; you may be surprised at what you discover.

For example, one media industry CEO we’ve worked with, an Excitable type, saw no problem with his habit of forcefully and publicly pointing out subordinates’ minor errors. During an executive-coaching process he learned that his employees perceived him as extrapunitive. He realized that they had a more hierarchical worldview than he did and that he had underestimated how criticism from him—the boss—might affect them. He also came to accept that small mistakes should be treated differently from big ones, and that feedback on them should be balanced with encouragement.

Self-awareness is also helpful for people in the other two categories. If you find that others often see failure where you don’t or if you have a hard time pinpointing times when you’ve failed, you might be impunitive (or at least risk coming across that way). At the other extreme, if you’re constantly anxious about failing or if colleagues often reassure you that things aren’t as bad as you think, you may be intropunitive.

Although not everyone has the time, inclination, or resources to get the kind of coaching or counseling necessary to surface and address deep psychological issues with respect to failure and blame, everyone can undertake and benefit from this sort of reflection.

Cultivate political awareness.

Even if you’ve analyzed your behavior and think that you act appropriately with respect to blame, your colleagues might disagree. As the media industry CEO learned, you must know your audience and recognize that each situation is different. Behavior that was appropriate in the past might be perceived as extrapunitive, impunitive, or intropunitive in a new role or company. Whereas self-awareness helps you understand what messages you’re sending, political awareness helps you understand what messages others are receiving. It requires that you know how your organization defines, explains, assigns responsibility for, and attempts to remedy failure.

Take the case of a COO who had recently joined a health care nonprofit. As part of a large-scale change effort, he was asked to lead a task force that would identify inefficient processes and make recommendations for improvements. Other members of the executive team were assigned to lead other groups. Because he was very busy with his day-to-day work, the COO and his task force fell behind. When the CEO held a meeting to discuss the various groups’ progress and share their findings, the COO, a Reserved type, simply described his team’s activities, making no mention of their missed deadlines and failure to deliver any results. This made the CEO angry; he perceived the COO’s behavior as impunitive and felt that it set a bad example for the other task forces. Fortunately, the CEO was not a blaming type. After the meeting he privately told the COO that although falling behind schedule might have been unavoidable, he had to take responsibility for the delay. The COO realized that the nonprofit’s culture was different from the cultures he’d experienced at other companies. In his previous jobs, leaders were expected to hide their shortcomings, not acknowledge them as a means of showing their commitment to improving. The COO had to learn how to criticize himself, appropriately and publicly, in order to succeed in his new job.

Political awareness involves finding the right way to approach failure within your specific organization, department, and role. An intropunitive person might be effective at a small, highly collegial company but have to change his ways at a larger, more competitive one, where rivals might take advantage. An extrapunitive boss who only slightly softened her criticisms when independently running a sales department might have to tone them down further when coleading a cross-divisional team.

Embrace new strategies.

Once you’re aware of your bad habits, you can move toward more-open, adaptive responses. The strategies needed can work for any of the dysfunctional types. The first is to listen and communicate. It sounds obvious, but most of us forget to gather enough feedback or sufficiently explain our actions and intentions. Especially when it comes to credit and blame, never assume that you know what others are thinking or that they understand where you are coming from.

The second is to reflect on both the situation and the people. At the end of each project or performance cycle, think about things that might have pushed you or others into extrapunitive, impunitive, or intropunitive reactions. How did you respond? How did your colleagues? Was everyone on the same page? If not, why? What effect did situational and interpersonal factors have on the outcome?

The third strategy is to think before you act. When a failure seems to have occurred, don’t respond immediately or impulsively. It’s not always possible to right the wrong, but it’s almost always possible to make things worse by overreacting in a highly charged situation. If you become extrapunitive, others may become impunitive. If you become intropunitive, others may pile on. Take the time to consider several possible interpretations of the event and to imagine various ways you might respond.

The fourth strategy is to search for a lesson. Mistakes happen. Sometimes a colleague or group of colleagues is at fault. Sometimes the responsibility lies with you. Sometimes no one is to blame. Look for nuance and context and then create and test hypotheses about why the failure happened, to prevent it from happening again.

When the talented chief technology officer of an internet company, a Skeptical type, discovered that his department’s high turnover rate was caused by what employees described as an extrapunitive leadership style, he resolved to use these strategies. Previously he would excoriate his team if projects ran late or did not achieve their goals, refusing to listen to any explanations. The problem, he now learned, wasn’t that his employees lacked competence; it was that they didn’t always understand his instructions and were afraid to request clarification. So his first step was to check in with them to make sure everyone knew what he wanted. If results were unsatisfactory nonetheless, his initial response was still to criticize—but now he also spent time analyzing how the people and the situation had contributed to what went wrong. He started taking “deep dives” into failed projects, assigning blame only after careful consideration. Because of this approach, staff members began to share more information with him, which helped everyone identify weaknesses and oversights that had affected results. They also grew more comfortable telling him about minor problems earlier, making the problems less likely to cascade. Morale and productivity improved, and turnover decreased.

Let’s look at how these strategies can benefit the other types. An executive who learns that he is coming across as impunitive, as the COO at the health care nonprofit did, can ask others for feedback about whether the quality, quantity, and timeliness of work products represent success, failure, or something in between. Someone with intropunitive tendencies might make a list of all the situational factors that contributed to poor outcomes. Wendy eventually realized that she was hurting her career by taking too much responsibility for failure. So she started communicating more closely with her colleagues at the outset of a task to inoculate herself against worrying later on that she had acted without support. She pushed others to do their homework, share their opinions, and raise any objections; she also paid attention to subtle signals that she lacked consensus. The next time a drug trial she was involved in failed, she thought carefully about the reasons, soberly considered her role, and decided not to blame herself.

How to Influence Others

Just as important as understanding your own tendencies is recognizing when your bosses, peers, or subordinates might fit into the categories we’ve outlined. Having insight into their motivational biases and emotional reactions to failure can help you give them feedback in the right way and at the right time—feedback that increases their self-awareness and political awareness and ultimately helps them change their ways. Of course, sometimes dysfunctional people cannot be influenced; if this is the case with your boss, your best option may be to seek other career opportunities inside or outside your organization. However, people often conclude too quickly that their bosses can’t change.

The chief of staff at an investment firm had an extrapunitive manager, a Cautious type, who was highly successful and widely respected in the industry but completely uninterested in personal improvement. Like the CTO described earlier, he gave little direction to his employees and then snapped at them when they failed to meet his deadlines or expectations. Although the chief of staff was not herself a victim of his outbursts, she sympathized with the junior executives who were. She identified one area of constant contention: questions about how to classify investments. The boss typically told staff members to “figure it out,” and the time they spent doing so often led to delays in their analyses. She came up with a solution (forming a committee to create guidelines, which would then go to the manager for approval) and waited for the right time—when he was in a good mood and not too busy—to present it. He agreed, the committee was appointed, and things went more smoothly. The chief of staff had helped her colleagues and protected her extrapunitive boss from himself.

It’s also possible to constructively influence people who have impunitive and intropunitive tendencies. Rather than criticizing his new COO publicly and making him defensive, the CEO at the health care nonprofit gave him supportive coaching. At the pharmaceutical company, George helped Wendy see the broader organizational context for the drug application’s failure. 

Handling failure and blame the right way is key to managerial success. We believe the taxonomy we’ve presented will not only help you see your own role and responsibilities more clearly but also help you better understand the perceptions of others. And we hope this knowledge will enable you to approach failure with an open mind, react to it in a balanced and strategic way, and, most important, learn and help others learn from it.

*This press release originally appeared on Business Wire on May 8, 2018.

A&D Resources, an international consultancy company, operating with 15 years’ experience with assessment and development of individuals, teams and organisations, and an authorized Hogan Assessments distributor, will host an event featuring Dr. Robert Hogan, well known authority on personality and business psychology, at 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 30 at Hotel Sofitel Legend the Grand in Amsterdam.

The event is about “Dealing with Poor Leadership,” and Dr. Hogan will address “Absentee Leadership,” a current topic of concern in the HR and talent management circles, even though, it has plagued organisations for centuries.

“Absentee leadership is a real factor that slowly unhinges otherwise well-run companies,” says Hogan. “Absentee leaders are everywhere, they destroy employee engagement, and they are very hard to identify because they are invisible.”

Trish Kellett, Director of the Hogan Coaching Network, will present “Coaching the Dark Side of Personality,” and Tom Cook, Principal Consultant at A&D Resources, will talk about “Dancing in the Dark.”

“Dealing with poor leadership is a challenge all organisations face in some capacity,” says Adam Gade, A&D Resources Chief Commercial Officer. “Our goal with this event is to share knowledge about important indicators of poor leadership and related research & Hogan products.” For more information regarding this event, please email info@adresources.com.

About A&D Resources

A&D Resources specialises in assessment and development of individuals, teams and organisations, as a supplier of personality tests and consulting services. A&D is the official Hogan Assessments Distributor in Denmark and the Benelux countries. As an official distributor, A&D has access to the Hogan Distributor Global Network and the ability to serve global organisations. For more information, visit www.adresources.com.

The phrase “Fortune favors the bold” is appealing on the surface, especially to those who watch others take extraordinary risks without anything to lose themselves. And, in reality, often times fortune does NOT favor the bold, particularly when starting a new business.

However, that did not deter our friends at IAssessment from launching their business under extreme conditions of risk and uncertainty. And, even in the direst of circumstances, the company has thrived and grown Hogan’s presence exponentially in the Spanish market. 

In the latest edition of the Distributor Spotlight Series, IAssessment’s Managing Partner, Juan Antonio Calles, tells the story of how the company started and the work they’ve done to improve the Spanish workforce.

When we signed our collaboration agreement with Hogan, we were at the dawn of the worst economic crisis in decades in Spain. Our friends and colleagues showed concern and surprise for the launching of a new venture in such uncertain and turbulent times. Now? Why not wait? Are you crazy? These were the words we most commonly heard in those days.

And our answer was the always the same: “Now is when decisions about people in organizations need to be based, more than ever, on scientific, objective, and professional criteria. We can´t wait, because we have spent years looking for a partner to open business opportunities for us and strengthen our consulting proposal to the Spanish market. And yes…we are a little crazy…”.

Eight years later we have among our clients some of the biggest and well-known consulting businesses and organizations in the country, while developing an important international practice. Being a Hogan distributor has allowed us to consolidate our consulting services by offering a mix based on knowledge, proximity to real business issues and professional excellence that only a few can offer. And we have done this through our non-negotiable values: collaboration, transparency, respect, fair-play…and lots of hedonism.

And we have never stopped being a little crazy, imagining a better future…that is almost here, and for which we are already working.

Digital experts agree that hyperconnectivity, netarchy and network-based organizations are key factors in the digital era. We are permanently connected with an average of 150 people, each of whom is connected with another 150, so we can impact 3M people. Threat or Opportunity?

Globalization allows 1,3M professionals in Spain to work virtually today, and we expect 52% of European professionals to work in project mode by 2020. Are professionals ready to work in liquid organizations, to specialize in value-adding knowledge, and to grow a personal brand that brings them business?

Automation is an important issue. It will affect 30% of current jobs and professions in 2025, according to Oxford University, and it will bring coexistence with robots on the job.

This paradigm change has a big and deep impact on how professionals face this new era, as many of them work in non-digital organizations that will need to change their business model or value proposition, thus changing the personal competences and skills needed to perform in the digital era.

Right now, Hogan Assessments can help identify a new career goal to many professionals, leveraging their bright side and values, not forgetting their dark side, to achieve enough digital employability to fit into liquid organizations in which to develop a new successful career.

IAssessment´s main strategic goal is to support professional refocusing to adapt to the new paradigm, by offering digital employability support programs. Based on Hogan methodology, our programs allow professionals to gain awareness on their reputational strengths and improvements, and start developing digital competencies that are aligned with their talent, capitalizing their long previous non-digital experience…in other words, to keep on being a successful professional.

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

Leadership…

A pretty vast topic. The debates around effective leadership always evoke some pretty heated debate and numerous perspectives. We all have our stories of the successful and inspirational leaders we have worked for and with, the qualities they possess and how they have engaged those around them.

In leadership it can be easy to become caught up in status, power and control, however, for leaders, focusing on those around them and within their teams is crucial to success. Cheryl Williamson wrote in Forbes ‘You cannot be an effective leader if you feel you are better than your subordinates’.  Teams with these types of leaders tend to have higher turnover and experience lower productivity.

So for me, the question is – How engaged are your employees and teams? Would your business benefit from higher engagement?

With organisations constantly changing, the support for leaders can often be about developing the skills to remain agile, deal with change and remain effective.

Research is indicating that humble leaders are more effective. They give credit to the team, share success and are more coachable. A Catalyst survey in 2014 showed that humility is one of four critical leadership factors for creating an environment where employees feel included. It found that when employees observed altruistic or selfless behaviour in their managers — a style characterized by 1) acts of humility, such as learning from criticism and admitting mistakes; 2) empowering followers to learn and develop; 3) acts of courage, such as taking personal risks for the greater good; and 4) holding employees responsible for results — they were more likely to report feeling included. This was true for both women and men.

There is also a connection, and evidence, demonstrating that employees who perceive altruistic behaviour from their managers are more innovative, suggesting new products or ways of working. They were also more likely to be more engaged.

So whats the issue? Finding the humble! In an age of self-promotion, humble people will be hidden among the many. They aren’t charming their way to the front, regaling tales of their achievements to anyone who will listen. Humble leaders may get overlooked. They are more likely giving credit to the team for a job well done, sharing the success and being a good organisational citizen.

With all the upside, they are worth finding and investing in. Whether internal promotion or external hiring, it is possible to measure altruism and humility.

Curious?

You should be. It could add real value.

I find it annoying that Economics is regarded as a more advanced discipline than Psychology. For example, there is a Nobel Prize in Economics but not in Psychology; this is odd because the field of “behavioral economics” is nothing more than applied cognitive psychology. Several years ago, I started reading The Economist magazine in order to understand what the economists have to say about how to organize human affairs. The big question in economics concerns identifying the policies that are best suited to develop national economies. Therefore, if Economics is a useful discipline, then economists should have something to say about how to grow an economy. If they do, then we can take their (very important) message to sub-Saharan Africa, Cuba, or Venezuela.

The April 14^th, 2018 issue of The Economist contains a startling admission: professional economists have no clue about how to promote economic development; specifically, economists have no idea why rich countries became rich in the first place. The problem is, economists study “structural factors” (e.g., tax policy, access to capital, property rights legislation)—objective features of government that can be quantified—and this is the wrong place to look for answers.Consequently, economists have no serious advice for poor countries—or anyone else.

The Economist magazine goes on to note that the most promising approach to understanding economic development is to study “…the ways in which culture and politics constrain economics…” This is because economic development depends on “…decisions about economic governance taken by…leaders, which will in turn be influenced by social and geo-political forces that economists scarcely understand and generally ignore.”

Three observations come immediately to mind. First, it seems to me that the challenge of developing a successful business is much the same as developing a successful economy although on a much smaller scale. Second, there is some consensus among psychologists about how to develop a successful business, and organizational psychology is all about how leaders make decisions regarding the economic governance of their businesses in response to the social and geo-political forces that economists generally ignore. And third, there are important differences in leadership effectiveness, which translate into important differences in organizational effectiveness. Specifically, leadership drives organizations, some leaders are better than others, and some organizations outperform others. Crucially, we can also evaluate leadership potential with our well-validated assessments—something economists cannot do.

It seems obvious that economic development depends on effective leadership. Effective leaders create cultures and build teams to implement plans and strategies that allow their organizations to outperform their competition. Some leaders do this better than others—and some cultures and visions produce better results than others. I know very little about leadership in post-WWII South Korea, Taiwan, or Hong Kong—all of which have developed successful economies—but Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) in China and Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) in Singapore were largely responsible for the economic development of their countries through the plans, practices, and procedures they were able to implement.

As for the industrial revolution that made Western Europe and the northeastern United States rich, Hopper and Hopper (The Puritan Gift, 2009) suggest that a relatively coherent set of values (a particular culture) was the key to their rapid economic development. That is, the ruling elites in Western Europe and the New England colonies shared a set of values that, in conjunction with the development of new technology, were the key to their economic development. I would add that the potential leaders of the industrial revolution inherited productive cultures rather than (as is the case today) having to create them. The values that defined these cultures included being committed to a higher purpose, seeing financial success as a sign of progress toward realizing that purpose, and practicing a leadership style that minimized hierarchy, encouraged individual initiative, and persuaded people to work together.

But my point is, psychologists understand leadership and how effective leadership creates organizations that can outperform their competition. People innately respond to effective leadership because, as group living animals, they unconsciously understand that what is good for their group is good for them. That is to say, I believe psychologists know more about economic development than the economists. The problem concerns translating this knowledge into action—i.e., finding effective leaders who are dedicated to the common good rather than to self-enrichment.

The test publishing industry is unregulated. As a result, many commercial test publishers ignore validity, and sell the psychometric equivalent of snake oil. However, when most reputable assessment vendors care only about their bottom line, they have little incentive to care much about the validity of their assessments. And, because of the high stakes involved in global employee selection and development, this is one of the most deceptive and harmful business practices of the 21^st century.

Simply put, valid assessments predict performance; assessments that lack validity cannot predict performance. In this new video, Bob Hogan expands on the importance of validity in assessments, and explains the steps necessary to establish validity.

*This is a guest post written by Joel A. DiGirolamo, Director of Coaching Science for the International Coach Federation.

I enjoyed reading the thought-provoking paper “New(ish) Directions for Vocational Interests Research”by Hogan and Sherman. It is jam-packed with concepts, models, and logic that offer fodder for many thought exercises.

I certainly agree with the assertion that “values are the real underlying subject matter of vocational psychology.” When looking more broadly, however, it seems to me that the following hierarchy exists:

Traits & Needs

↓

Values, Beliefs

↓

Attitudes & Interests

For example, imagine two individuals, Carrie and Linda, both with a trait or need to nurture. Now imagine that Carrie has a value or belief that strong security is necessary to nurture individuals. Linda, on the other hand, values inclusion in order nurture those on the periphery of a society. Taken to the next level, we can imagine that Carrie’s security value or belief could promote her taking on a conservative attitude and an interest in the military. Meanwhile, Linda’s inclusion value might cultivate a liberal attitude and an interest in protecting immigrants. Thus, we see that a common trait or need can manifest itself in significantly different behaviors. This example also illustrates Allport’s assertion that traits tend to be nondirectional and attitudes tend to be directional.

The statement, “In our view, people don’t have traits, they have goals, intentions, and agendas, and it is these motivational terms that explain their behavior—which traits describe,” greatly depicts the role of traits and the idea that motivation is really a moderator. We all have traits, needs, etc., but it is motivation that gets us off the sofa and is therefore a moderator toward action or behaviors.

Many theories and research studies related to interests and job satisfaction have been written over many decades. I believe there is a confounding factor in the motivation to work a specific job, however. As many describe, higher satisfaction is somewhat correlated with interests. Yet this doesn’t seem to account for those individuals who take specific jobs solely for the money they make. These individuals may be financially satisfied with their jobs but are not satisfying their intrinsic desires. I’ve always felt that individuals work either for meaning or money and that some are fortunate to derive both from their job.

In a related view, the table below is how I look at an individual’s job satisfaction in relationship to employer job satisfaction, which I am using as a proxy for job performance. In the top two quadrants, the employee may find meaning in their work and thus happy with their job even if they are not doing it well. The lower right quadrant may be a person who is working solely for money and thus unhappy with their job, but their employer is happy with what they are doing. The people in the lower left quadrant may be those individuals some refer to as unemployable. They’re both incompetent and unhappy.

As we look back at the material covered in the Hogan and Sherman piece, we can get a sense of deep understanding as to where interests that lead to job satisfaction come from. Backtracking from interests to values to needs and traits can bring greater understanding as to what may be driving an individual’s job satisfaction and possible conflicts therein. Returning to my example of the individual who takes a specific job simply for the money, we could easily imagine that this individual has a need for financial security. Perhaps they also have a trait of wanting to help people and have a good set of mathematical and financial skills. Maybe they have an interest in both financial work and helping others to become more financially stable. However, the only job they currently can find that they view as financially secure is one that does not help others, creating a possible internal conflict between the need for financial security and helping people. When queried as to their job satisfaction, it is easy to see how this internal conflict could leak out into conflicting measures of job satisfaction.

And so, we see the value this piece brings to bear; it highlights and takes a fresh, clear look at vocational interests in the context of the traits, needs, values, beliefs, attitudes, and interests. It is my hope that this piece enlivens and brings greater depth to the discussion on vocational interests.