It seems more trouble is brewing in the military’s upper ranks. In the same month the Army released a report detailing its problem with toxic leaders and their role in the rash of soldier suicides over the past year, the Washington Post is reporting misconduct among the nation’s top brass. From allegations drinking on duty in the Air Force to sexual misconduct and even assault in the Army and Navy, no branch was exempt.

What is the source of this widespread corruption? From the article:

Martin L. Cook, a professor of military ethics at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., said the recent eruption of misconduct is “frankly a puzzle to everybody.” One factor, he added, may be that as officers climb higher in the ranks they become insulated and fewer people are willing to challenge or question them.

Although this pattern of derailment is new, or more likely just newly reported, in the military, it is all too familiar to politics and the corporate world.

Judgment is a multi-part process in which an individual (a) processes the available information, (b) makes a decision, (c) receives feedback, and (d) adjusts their decision-making based on that feedback.

Business and political leaders are faced daily with heavy decisions. As they rise up the ranks, their circle of peers and advisors grows smaller and feedback scarce and more biased, putting them at greater risk of bad judgment.

In the political arena, Mitt Romney was so insulated from realistic feedback in 2012 that he was reportedly shocked as Obama won a decisive victory. In the private sector, leaders who made and then doubled down on bad decisions launched the country into a financial crisis from which we’re still recovering.

Whether in the private sector, politics, or the military, the net effect of those poor decisions is the same:

Cook said, military leaders recognize “they’ve got a major trust problem with the American people . . .”

“Personality is about what people do and judgment is about why they do it,” says Dr. Robert Hogan in this presentation given at Mentis Consulting’s Hogan Summit 2013. This 30-minute talk focuses on good judgment and decision making. Using examples and case studies from notable entrepreneurs and politicians around the world, Dr. Hogan illustrates how people’s decisions relate to leadership and how this affects their business.

What drives individuals to betray their coworkers,
and what companies can do to identify them?

An individual’s ability to exercise leadership is hinged on his or her ability to persuade others to follow. According to the Hogan Leadership Model, followers look for four essential qualities in a leader: integrity, judgment, competence, and vision. Of these, integrity is most essential.

In a recent survey, Hogan asked more than 1,000 individuals about the qualities of their all-time best boss. Eighty-one percent of respondents said trustworthiness was their most important personality characteristic. Conversely, 50% described their worst boss as deceitful.

“People need to know that the person in charge won’t take advantage of his or her position,” said Dr. Robert Hogan, founder of Hogan Assessments. “That they won’t lie, steal, play favorites, and betray subordinates.”

In a separate study, Dr. Hogan and Hogan co-founder and former vice president Dr. Joyce Hogan gathered personality data and performance ratings from the immediate supervisor and subordinates of 55 managers at a large transportation company. Statistical analysis revealed that subordinates ratings of their managers’ overall effectiveness was directly tied to the degree to which a manager was trusted.

Unfortunately, as the as the past decade of scandal, corruption, and Congressional hearings proved, there are an alarming number of dishonest people in leadership roles. Our latest complimentary eBook, Trust and Betrayal, examines who these people are, and how companies can prevent them from damaging their workforce.

In their book chapter “The Mask of Integrity,” published in Citizen Espionage: Studies in Trust and Betrayal, Drs. Joyce and Robert Hogan, outlined four characteristics that typified the ideal betrayer:

Charisma – According to Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, vice president of research and innovation at Hogan, there are three ways to influence others: force, reason, or charm. Force and reason are rational – even when people are forced to do something, they obey for a good reason. Charm, on the other hand, is based on emotional manipulation and has the ability to trump rational assessments.

Self-absorption – The second characteristic of an ideal betrayer is an unusual degree of self-absorption, or, more to the point, a relentless drive for self-advancement. Betrayers possess a ruthless dedication to self-advancement to the extent that other people lose their value as humans and become objects to be manipulated.

Self-Deception – The third characteristic that typifies the ideal betrayer is self-deception. A major tenet of psychoanalysis and existentialism is that people are prone to deceive themselves about the reasons for their actions.

Hollow Core Syndrome – The final characteristic of the ideal betrayer is a pattern of personality characteristics called the hollow core syndrome. The hollow core syndrome refers to people who are overtly self-confident, who meet the public well, who are charming and socially poised, and who expect others to like them, but who are privately self-doubting and unhappy.

Unfortunately, this charm, confidence, and talent for ingratiation provides betrayers the tools they need to find employment at and quickly ascend the ranks of large, hierarchical organizations, and the private self-doubt associated with the hollow core fuels their pursuit of the money, power, and prestige offered by senior management positions. Trust and Betrayal, a new eBook from Hogan, examines what companies can do to identify and mitigate the effects of betrayers in their ranks.

Virtually any job involves some level of decision-making; from simple, routine decisions that are easily trained and quickly learned (such as sorting or filing), to complex decisions with huge impact for which there may be no clearly correct answer (such as a major strategic shift at a multi-billion dollar global organization). The key to effective decision-making is exercising good judgment when assessing the situation, evaluating options, and choosing a course of action. This sounds obvious, but judgment is difficult to define and hard to develop. So how do you improve the exercise of good judgment in your organization?

First and foremost, it’s important to recognize that judgment is more than an individual attribute. Organizations can create a climate that promotes good judgment and decision-making. In a poor quality environment, even individuals with great personal judgment can make consistently poor decisions. Here are a few tips to help get things right on both fronts.

Practice Informed Skepticism

Informed Skeptics are critical consumers of information. They seek out data and listen to those close to the issue to build up their understanding of the subject. They question the assumptions underlying the data, and don’t take conventional wisdom for granted. They evaluate and consider information thoroughly in order to arrive at sound conclusions. They are informed by the data, but not beholden to them.

In Hogan terms, these people may score low-to-moderate Adjustment (detecting problems), low-to-moderate Interpersonal Sensitivity (challenging behaviors), and high Learning Approach (informed and analytical). They may also have an elevated HDS Skeptical score, a high MVPI Science score, or both.

In contrast, intuitive decision-makers rush to judgment based on their own experience. They rarely seek out new information, and tend to make decisions themselves without input from others. These people are often confident and charismatic, but may lack substance. On the other end of the spectrum, empiricists rely exclusively on the data, rarely questioning the underlying assumptions. They may fail to recognize when the external environment has changed, rendering previous assumptions invalid.

Identify relevant data points to inform decisions

Big data is a buzzword these days, and deservedly so. The amount of information available and the potential implications for virtually all business functions is enormous. But there are two things to consider in the big data movement. The first is that, although more data than ever are being collected, there are also more irrelevant data than ever. It’s critically important to identify relevant and meaningful data and metrics to help drive good judgment.

The second consideration is what I’ll call 'smart' data. Smart data allow you to link data points from one application or activity to related data points somewhere else, making new connections across functions to uncover new patterns. Smart data help link your recruitment activity to your candidate pool, your selection tools, your training and onboarding programs, your performance management system, your high potential identification program, and your leadership development program. New patterns for the entire employment life cycle can be explored. If the data you have all sit in separate silos and cannot be combined without colossal effort, then you have piles of 'dumb' data, and they can’t deliver the same value.

The generation of relevant, informative data is therefore a structural aspect of an organization. It takes deliberate effort and purposeful design to create databases that link meaningful data to one another. Poor quality information produces a 'garbage in, garbage out' result.

Make data widely available throughout the organization

Organizations often restrict access to information in varying degrees, but good judgment is required at virtually all levels of an organization. To improve the quality of decisions on a widespread level, data have to be available to inform these decisions. Absent that information, the ability to exercise judgment is constrained, and a culture of poor decision-making can develop.

A new trend emerging in startups is the transparent organization. In the most extreme cases, all data – from company financials to individual performance reviews – are freely available to everyone. Is that too much? Almost certainly (see the point about relevant data). But the spirit of providing information to those who need it is on target.

On the other hand, providing too little information leads decision-makers to rely on the information available, which may be outdated, irrelevant, or misleading. Consider the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in which captives grew up immobilized and could only see shadows of objects out of view, and hear sounds of those objects reflected and distorted off of a wall. The captives perceived the shadows and sounds to be reality, unaware of the reality of the objects casting the shadows and making the sounds. In the absence of information, decision-makers will act based on shadows and distorted sounds, all but ensuring that decision-making will suffer.