Hogan European Summit

April is a hectic time of the year for the crew at Hogan Assessments, and this year was no different. In fact, our staff was widely represented in both the US and Europe during a week full of events.

The week began with a group of Hogan representatives traveling to Budapest, Hungary to attend the Hogan European Summit, which was organized by Hogan’s Managing Director of Europe, Zsolt Feher.

Held at the famous Gerbeaud Café in historic downtown Budapest, the event aimed to foster collaboration among our European distributors to facilitate growth across the continent and enhance Hogan’s brand visibility.

Dr. Hogan delivered the opening keynote address to set the tone for the Summit, which was followed by discussions regarding EU PR and marketing strategy by MITTE Communications, 360 and Global Talent Survey updates by Peter Berry Consultancy, an interactive strategy session, and product updates.

Hogan CEO Scott Gregory discussed absentee leadership on day two. This is a relatively new topic in the industry, and was thoroughly covered by Scott in an article he wrote for Harvard Business Review. The keynote was followed by sessions covering strategy for selection research and presentation, a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) update, distributor case study presentations, a Q&A session with Hogan Leadership, and an afternoon of sightseeing in Budapest.

We’re truly honored to have such a strong network of European distributors, and we look forward to future opportunities to bring everyone together in an effort to boost Hogan’s global presence.

ICF “Future of Coaching in Organisations” Conference

Several members of the Hogan team remained in Budapest for the International Coach Federation’s “Future of Coaching in Organisations” Conference held at the Akvárium Klub. The event, featuring Hogan as the primary sponsor, aimed to bring the future of coaching into focus, and identified which new trends, technologies, and tools will determine organizational development and coaching.

The event featured several world-renowned coaches, and included presentations from Hogan’s Dustin Hunter and Zsolt Feher, as well as a keynote address by Dr. Hogan on “Coaching the Uncoachable.” Overall, the event was a huge success, and offered Hogan Assessments the unique opportunity to develop an even stronger rapport with the international coaching community and the European market. On behalf of the team at Hogan Assessments, we would like to thank our friends at ICF for such an incredible experience.

Hogan Completes 10^th Consecutive Year as SIOP Platinum Sponsor 

Every year, Hogan Assessments is one of the most visible organizations at the annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Conference, and this year’s event in Chicago was no different.

Celebrating the 10^th consecutive year as the Platinum Sponsor, the team at Hogan was strongly represented with 20 accepted submissions, again making Hogan one of the top non-academic organizations with the number of speakers featured on symposia, panel discussions, and posters.

Hogan staff members across all departments put in hundreds of hours of work in the weeks and months leading up to the conference to ensure Hogan is positioned as the premier organization in attendance. We would like to thank all of them for their hard work and dedication to making this year a huge success.

We would also like to thank everyone who was able to attend the annual University of Tulsa Wine Reception. When Bob and Joyce Hogan founded the TU I-O Psychology program decades ago, they had no idea it would develop such a strong pipeline of prestigious psychologists from future generations, including Hogan’s new CEO, Dr. Scott Gregory. Being able to connect with TU alumni at SIOP on an annual basis during this reception is a tremendous honor.

In closing, we would like to congratulate Sara Weston, who was the lucky recipient of the Apple Watch we gave away at the conference for posting a photo of the Hogan booth. The campaign was a lot of fun for everyone involved and, although only one person got a watch, Hogan donated $5 the ASPCA for every entry. So, your entry helped support a fantastic cause!

*This is a guest blog post written by Nicholas Emler, Ph.D., a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Surrey.

Leadership was for too long grievously neglected by mainstream psychology, so it is good to see the topic more regularly getting serious scholarly attention; there is now a substantial body of informative research, in marked contrast to the situation 25 years ago. However, not all the scholarly attention has been beneficial. My concern on this occasion relates to some recent work (Antonakis, 2018) on the link between leadership and charisma.

Antonakis makes useful points in this article, noting that charisma has suffered from fuzziness of definition.  And his interpretation of charisma as persuasive signalling is an interesting route to rigour in research on charisma. However, the idea that successful leaders use rhetorical and presentational devices to enhance their persuasive impact on audiences is not new (see Atkinson, 1984) and many of the insights of this earlier work have clearly been absorbed by professional politicians. Witness the now ubi quitous use of projection screens to allow speakers apparently to maintain eye contact with audiences while actually reading from a script.

Antonakis correctly observes that a leader judged charismatic by one audience can be seen as a dangerous demagogue by another but this does beg a very large question. Bad leadership can do immense damage, far beyond the effects of even the most energetic criminal individual. Promoting charisma as a desirable (and trainable) quality – the line taken by Antonakis –  does nothing to address this. Indeed, quite to the contrary. Archie Brown, in his excellent The Myth of the Strong Leader, observes that charisma “is often dangerous and frequently overrated”. And the evidence that he is correct – on both points – is beginning to stack up. Boards of publicly traded companies have for some years supposed that they should appoint CEOs with charisma. The people they appoint following this dictum may deliver short-term profits but in the longer run they create chaos and ruin.

Having charisma and being persuasive can get you elected or promoted but does nothing to guarantee that you have either good judgment or the moral qualities needed successfully to meet the challenges of leadership. This relates to an important distinction, now recognised in the leadership literature, but neglected in Antonakis’s article, between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. Qualities of the person associated with one are barely related to qualities associated with the other. Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, among the qualities that research is beginning to identify as predictive of effectiveness is humility (Owens, Johnson, & Mitchell, 2013; Vera, & Rodriguez-Lopez, 2004). Humility goes with recognising one does not have all the answers – necessarily true of anyone providing leadership to a complex enterprise – and being willing to seek and listen to advice. Hitler, Musssolini, and the reverend Jim Jones may all have had charisma but none was burdened with humility (and the same looks to be true of some current world leaders).

Persuasive signalling matters for the reception and impact of one’s message but surely what should matter far more is the content of the message.

References

Antonakis, J. (2018) Moving psychology forward – with charisma.  The Psychologist, March, 44-47.

Atkinson, M. (1984). Our masters’ voices: The language and body language of politics.  London: Routledge.

Brown, A. (2014).  The myth of the strong leader: Political leadership in the modern age.  London: The Bodley Head.

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

Vera, D., & Rodriguez-Lopez, A. (2004). Humility as a source of competitive advantage. Organizational Dynamics, 33(4), 393-408.

Culture can best be defined in terms of the values that guide the behavior and decision making of a social unit—a team, a family, a business, etc. Culture is not vague and touchy-feely; cultures can be easily and reliably assessed using any number of commercially available survey instruments. Cultures have real, concrete behavioral consequences, and they directly influence the performance of business organizations. As Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management practices, observed: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” That is, no matter what strategy a company might adopt, the culture will enable or prevent that strategy from being implemented.

A concrete example might help. Several years ago, we were contacted by a newly opened, high end hotel in London because it was struggling financially. We assessed the top management team using our measure of values and found the following. On the one hand, the top management team had very high scores on the Customer Service, Aesthetics, and Hedonism scales, which meant that they cared deeply about quality, style, and providing a superb and enjoyable customer experience; these values are perfect for hospitality. On the other hand, the top management team scored low on the Power and Commerce scales—which meant that no one cared about making money or beating the competition—and this explained their poor financial performance.  

There are four points about values that are worth noting. First, when people join organizations, they bring their own values with them, and the degree to which their values align with the values of the culture powerfully affects their subsequent performance. As Clarke Murphy, the CEO of Russell Reynolds Associates, observes, “We hire for talent but we fire for fit.” No matter how talented people might be, if their values are inconsistent with the culture of their organization, they will not succeed.

Second, the culture of an organization reflects the values of the executive team. On the one hand, the executives will largely share values—and those who don’t share the values of this team will leave. The values of the executives indicate the kinds of behaviors that are paid attention to and rewarded or punished accordingly. Over time, this process creates cultural homogeneity (Professor Ben Schneider calls this Attraction, Selection, Attrition–ASA). But no matter the terminology, culture is driven from the values of the people at the top.

Third, values are largely unconscious. People rarely reflect on their values because they are part of “the world taken for granted;” values are to people much like water is to fish—values are just part of the environment in which we operate. External feedback is usually needed to become aware of our values and our workplace culture.

Fourth, not all values are equally valuable. For example, some values like greed and selfishness create dysfunction in the groups and businesses where they exist; dysfunctional cultures seldom realize lasting success.

Finally, all successful teams share essentially the same values; these include tolerance, fitting in with the team, loyalty, hard work, a commitment to excellence, and an intense desire to beat the competition.

Hogan representatives Dave Winsborough, VP of Innovation and head of Hogan X, and Blaine Gaddis, Sr. Manager of Product Research, will both present at this year’s ATP Innovations in Testing Conference in Scottsdale, AZ next week. The conference, which brings assessment industry professionals together, provides a venue for attendees to learn from and collaborate.

Winsborough will facilitate a Featured Speaker Session titled “Disruption of Traditional Assessment Systems: Are We the Walking Dead?” The session will focus on how digitization has created a fundamentally different testing landscape, and how these changes have enabled significant forces that disrupt traditional assessment. Given the choice between being disruptors or being disrupted, this session also seeks to discuss which kinds of response should be taken. The session will occur at 4:30 pm on Monday, March 6.

Gaddis will participate on a panel presentation on “Psychometric Test Security Approaches to Mitigating Cheating and Faking.” In this session assessment experts within I/O Psychology and Education fields will discuss the impact of faking, psychometric approaches to detecting faking and cheating, the use of response distortion measures and analytics, and the use of both technology and “psychometric forensics” to detect cheating.

Also participating on the panel are John Jones, Kelly Dages, and Andre Allen of General Dynamics Information Technology and Joe Orban of Questar Assessment, Inc. The session will take place at 2:30 pm on Monday, March 6.

If you’re planning to attend the conference, stop by and say hello to your friends at Hogan. If you’re unable to attend, follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.