Shortfalls of leadership development programs include overlooking the importance of context, ignoring the psychology of behavioral change, and using the wrong definition of leadership in the first place. Ouch! But the Hogan protocol addresses each shortfall with data-driven personality insights and a coaching approach designed for leadership development solutions.
Leadership development experts Trish Kellett, MBA, director of the Hogan Coaching Network, and Jackie Sahm, MS, vice president of integrated solutions, designed this coaching guide to help Hogan assessment users develop clients effectively and astound organizations with results. The book includes a foreword from Robert Hogan, PhD, founder and president, explaining how the Hogan coaching approach differs from that of traditional leadership development.
“Many high-level executives have had other coaching experiences,” said Sahm. “They’ve been poked and prodded and assessed in many ways. But when they take Hogan’s assessments and have a capable coach, they understand this is not your run-of-the-mill executive coaching. How they understand themselves transforms. Then, if they’re willing to do a little bit of work, they can transform their relationships with other people.”
Coaching the Hogan Way covers everything coaches need to help leaders gain strategic self-awareness and implement behavioral change. Part one focuses on the seven leadership development shortfalls and provides a solution for each one. Part two covers the stages of the Hogan coaching protocol. To illustrate these, it includes a narrative executive case study with sample notes and questions for reference. “This is very much a how-to book. If you’re presented with a coaching case, you follow our protocol and—like magic—you will turbocharge your coaching initiative and be successful,” said Kellett.
Using this guide, Hogan-certified professionals can apply Hogan’s assessment-driven approach to solve what is broken in leadership development. Kellett emphasized that an initial assessment is crucial for effective development. “The development plan that’s part of our protocol focuses on specific, measurable results that enhance the leader’s individual effectiveness, their team’s performance, and more broadly, business results,” she said.
Coaching the Hogan Way demonstrates how to implement the protocol using personality assessments for successful outcomes. Grounded in executive leadership assessment data, the five phases of the coaching protocol empower leaders to implement meaningful, lasting behavioral change.
Knowing how to develop high-potential employees starts with identifying them. A high potential is usually considered to be someone with the personality characteristics, experience, and readiness to step into senior leadership. So, how can organizations build an effective high-potential development program?
Recently on The Science of Personality, Christopher J. Duffy, MBA, managing partner at Hogan Assessments, spoke about high-potential employees—a group that organizations spend a tremendous amount of time and resources to define, identify, and develop.
“There is no silver bullet to this equation,” Christopher said. “The most effective high-potential programs usually take considerable resources and support.”
Let’s discuss who high-potential employees are, how to identify them, and how to develop them.
Who Are High Potentials?
When organizations talk about high-potential employees, they usually mean people with the potential for leadership succession. Organizations are looking for people to step into critical upper leadership roles.
The search for successor talent starts with making an accurate evaluation of the readiness that employees show in their current positions. Organizations must effectively prepare and develop those individuals for whatever their destinations might be.
Every organization has a slightly different definition of what counts as potential, which makes identifying high potentials more complex. To some, the criteria for high potentials are related to workplace politics, reputation, or even a golf handicap. To others, the criteria come from performance metrics and other analytics.
“Multimodal high-potential programs are the most effective,” Christopher said. They tend to combine contextually specific expectations for the future role, as well as clear psychometrics and past performance data. Finding successor talent isn’t a quick or standardized process. Identifying characteristics of high-potential talent to align with organizational needs requires intention.
Personality Characteristics of High Potentials
The specific definition of a high-potential employee differs based on the organization and role. Nevertheless, our personality data have shown three broad skill groups that help high potentials become successful leaders.
Functional – A high-potential employee has mastered the core foundational characteristics of following processes and being rewarding to work with.
Social – A high-potential employee excels at creating and inspiring followership within their group and can self-manage the dark side of charisma.
Effective – A high-potential employee shows the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team related to their leadership role. They engage and influence that team to achieve collective outcomes.
High potential isn’t just one metric. It’s a combination of characteristics related to job competence, socioemotional skills, and team performance.
How to Identify High Potentials
Ideally, a successful high-potential program would begin with psychometric data from the Hogan assessments. A multimodal approach brings personality data into the discussion for individual development. It adds scientific rigor to what has traditionally been a subjective process.
“If you can put the assessment as part of the identification process at the front end, it can be a fantastic way to make sure that you’re not missing something,” Christopher said. Organizations might fail to identify high potentials, especially if they seem quiet. Excellent high potentials can sometimes get passed over because they may not have a strong drive for self-promotion. Organizations might also misidentify high potentials, especially if they seem loud. People who act charismatic can sometimes lack the leadership skills to succeed in strategic roles.
Even if the pool of high potentials is already predetermined or fixed, Hogan assessment data are extremely beneficial. Psychometric data effectively identify gaps that could emerge as high potentials advance along the leadership track. Organizations should identify a targeted, personalized plan to address each high potential’s specific development needs. “The most effective component of the high-potential program is making sure we have a clear plan for what to do next with these individuals and really help them prepare for that destination role,” Christopher added.
Goals and Mistakes of High-Potential Programs
“Leaders are able to adapt through strategic self-awareness to ensure they’re effective,” Christopher said. “We need high potentials to be able to recognize and understand where they might have to flex their natural style to be most successful.”
High potentials who may have low social energy might nevertheless build reputations as connected leaders by going out of their way to be present with their teams, making specific efforts to build cross-departmental relationships, and being mindful about how they solicit and implement feedback. A high-potential program shouldn’t convert everyone into an extravert; instead, it should create awareness of how successful leaders show up in their organization.
Where high-potential programs go wrong is a lack of long-term focus and direction. Putting too much effort into identification and too little effort into development will not yield a successful outcome. “I encourage clients to think along a three- to five-year horizon for developing high-potential employees,” Christopher said. He also challenged organizations to define a clear, transparent path for a future leader’s advancement to reduce turnover at higher levels of seniority.
How to Develop High-Potential Employees
A good high-potential program is a process, not an event. “At Hogan, we’re in the business of assessing individuals and providing them with insights around who they are, how they lead, and how they can develop. The worst thing you can do is put those insights on the shelf and forget about them,” Christopher said. Personality insights are extremely relevant throughout a person’s entire career—but especially when they are making transitions.
A high-potential program ought to be a long-term development program that continually reinforces the insights that were created through the high-potential identification process. Developing high-potential employees also tends to be successful when peers are encouraged to collaborate. Peer development can help high potentials stop viewing each other as competitors and invest in each other’s progress.
Insights for Coaching High Potentials
Having a certified Hogan coach is essential to help high potentials realize they will likely need to evolve or change. “High potentials think more of the same will produce results,” Christopher said, calling that belief a common mistake. Being conscientious, detail oriented, and hardworking brought high potentials success and recognition to a certain point in their careers. Those skills may not serve them well as successor talent, though. Leaders need to think strategically, learn to delegate, and understand their new scope and scale.
“Strategic self-awareness is absolutely critical for individuals to make that bridge to doing things in a different manner,” Christopher said. High potentials need coaching to help them deconstruct what has worked for them in the past and think differently about how to evolve or change their approach in the future. Leaders who are effective know when to resist their natural tendencies and apply different behavioral strategies to benefit their teams.
Organizations must provide ongoing development for a high-potential program to be effective. “The advice I leave with our audience is there is no one-size-fits-all for high potentials. I fully believe in being mindful of the programs that you create,” Christopher said.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 101 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
Effective leaders exhibit four metacompetencies of leadership. These are (1) being emotionally intelligent, (2) being achievement focused, (3) being strategic, and (4) being inspiring. In this article, we explore the research behind these metacompetencies and how they influence leadership effectiveness.
The four metacompetencies were developed using a combination of Hogan personality assessment data and 360 assessment data. Peter Berry, managing director of Peter Berry Consultancy (PBC), an authorized distributor of Hogan’s assessments in Australia and New Zealand, presented the competencies research on The Science of Personality. Peter has previously spoken about 360 leadership assessments on the podcast.
Measuring and Improving Leadership
Leadership may well be the most important resource for any enterprise. Think about leadership this way: What is the impact of a good leader building performance, engagement, retention, and business results? Conversely, what is the impact of a bad leader destroying those things?
“The light-bulb moment was realizing that leadership can be improved,” Peter said. “It starts with self-awareness, then it goes to self-management, and eventually to self-mastery.”
To thoroughly evaluate and improve leadership, Hogan personality data and Hogan 360 data are combined. Personality has to do with reputation, and 360 relates to behavior. “Joining the two tools enriches the whole leadership and coaching program,” Peter said. “One without the other is only half the jigsaw.”
The Four Metacompetencies of Leadership
The PBC database houses more than 30,000 data points from 360s across the globe. Of those 360s, 1,300 are from CEOs. PBC analyzed the characteristics of leaders who scored at the 75th percentile and above—the best of the world’s senior leadership. What distinguished that group from other leaders? Emotional intelligence, achievement focus, strategic skills, and motivational skills.
“We also found that there was another competency, which was like the price of admission, the foundation or building block,” Peter said. “It’s conscientiousness.”
Leaders need a certain degree of conscientiousness, dependability, and reliability at all organizational levels. Even a CEO must report to the board accurately.
Correlated data from 360s and personality assessments consistently led to the same four metacompetencies for effective leadership.
Emotional Intelligence, or EQ
Emotional intelligence (EQ) helps to define career success. “Our research using the 360 data showed that high EQ leaders are calm and even-tempered. They are self-aware around their improvement opportunities. They manage their emotions maturely. They have excellent people skills. They know how to make people feel valued. They are friendly, warm, and thoughtful,” Peter said.
In terms of the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), emotional intelligence relates to the scales of Adjustment, Interpersonal Sensitivity, and Prudence. Adjustment describes resilience and how a person responds to stress. It’s intrapersonal. Interpersonal Sensitivity relates to building relationships and social skill. And Prudence connects to integrity—building trust through reliability and consistency.
Altogether, these three scales contribute to both the emotional and social competencies necessary for high EQ. “High EQ people drive employee experience, engagement, and high-performing teams,” Peter said.
Achievement Focus
Delivering results and accomplishing goals are another key metacompetency for effective leaders. Being achievement focused means having a clear business plan with measurable goals that are clearly and frequently communicated to the team.
“We’re all here to produce outcomes that benefit customers or communities or society,” Peter said. He described the achievement-focused leader’s cadence of strategic planning and operational tasks. Vision sharing and team building should occur approximately quarterly. The rest of the leader’s time should be devoted to tactical excellence in team performance. “Having a clear line of sight with that relentless focus on results and outcomes is just crucial for a high-performing team,” Peter said.
Strategic Skills
As leaders rise through managerial levels, their time tends to become less operational and more strategic. They work less in the business and more on the business. “Managerial competencies are your baseline, but you’ve learned to add some really sophisticated leadership skills on top,” Peter said.
Being strategic means thinking about long-term opportunities, being visionary, setting stretch goals, and driving innovation. A strategic leader is constantly looking for improvement opportunities while remaining able to pivot. Peter described strategic leaders as able to bring their view of the next three to five years into the one-year business plan. They recognize what it will take to become a competitive industry leader. They combine big-picture thinking with a deep understanding of the organization’s purpose and values.
Motivational Skills
The ability to motivate and inspire the workforce is the hallmark of an effective leader. “They’re consciously focused on morale and employee engagement, being positive role models, building strong collaborative relationships, and demonstrating strong leadership skills,” Peter said.
Being inspiring has many positive outcomes. One is that the employee experience is high, typically measuring in the top quartile compared to competitors. Another is that employee retention remains high. Finally, engagement is also high, meaning that productivity is high.
The ability to inspire is related to the HPI scale Ambition, as well as to HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity. Data from 360s show that high Interpersonal Sensitivity is essential in making others feel valued, motivated, and engaged and in building a positive work environment. “That combination [of scales] is just awesome in driving the culture of winning,” Peter observed.
360s and Leadership Development
The most prevalent global coaching trends focus on executive presence, emotional intelligence, strategy and vision, and influencing skills. Those are the same capabilities that leaders need to advance through the four metacompetencies of effective leadership.
Leadership development helps to build team effectiveness to deliver strategic outcomes and a culture of employee engagement. Individual development comes from having a targeted development plan rooted in the motivation to improve. The Hogan assessments and the Hogan 360 together can reveal nuanced insights about leadership strengths and challenges.
“The best leaders are the best learners,” Peter said. “We encourage people to have a curious mindset. Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 99 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
When organizations select a leader, they are making a multiyear investment in development. As leaders prepare to move to higher managerial levels, they need to develop skills to equip them for success in their changing role. The skills of leadership aren’t technical skills such as Scrum, SEO, or SQL. Rather, they are socioemotional skills such as setting vision, building relationships, driving change, and making decisions. These skills evolve with leadership advancement. Experienced talent professionals recognize the importance of leadership development strategies at every managerial level.
Leadership development does not equate solely to executive development. At Hogan, we don’t define leadership by job title but as the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team. Thus, people at every managerial level—from entry-level supervisor to C-suite executive—can benefit from leadership development. As the demands of leadership shift across managerial levels, development objectives should change too.
Sometimes leaders need to develop new skills. Sometimes they need to reduce their use of certain skills. At other times, they need to apply existing skills in new ways. Consider integrity, for example. While integrity is a core skill at all managerial levels, how a leader demonstrates integrity when managing a three-person team looks different from when they are leading an entire business function.
How a leader’s actions appear to others matters. Fostering the development of socioemotional skills in leaders is a long-term process that focuses on reputation. Reputation is related to behavior. With sustained behavioral change, reputation change can occur—a meaningful outcome of leadership development.
Keep reading to learn how similarities and distinctions in the leadership skills required across managerial levels should inform leadership development strategies.
What Are the Managerial Levels?
Broadly, managers are employees with authority over organizational resources. They perform a variety of these tasks: organizing, planning, prioritizing, assigning, and directing work across the organization. Managers at any level succeed or fail based on the accomplishments of the people they lead. If they build and maintain high-performing teams, they’re leaders by Hogan’s definition.
Hogan identifies three managerial levels: (1) entry-level supervisors, (2) middle managers, and (3) executives. Entry-level supervisors manage teams and employees and report to middle managers. Middle managers manage other managers, teams, and employees and report to executives. Executives manage business units and report to stakeholder teams.
The objective differences among the three managerial levels are the positions they manage and the positions to whom they report. However, the functional differences among managerial levels can be considerable. The impact of a leader’s actions increases in breadth and scope as they gain organizational responsibility. For instance, a digital marketing manager, a marketing director, and a chief marketing officer all differ in more than just their job descriptions. The socioemotional skills they need to be successful in their day-to-day tasks of leadership differ too.
Distinctions Between Entry-Level Supervisors, Middle Managers, and Executives
To explore the similarities and distinctions in necessary competencies across managerial levels, Hogan conducted a job analysis. Hundreds of subject-matter experts rated key skills for entry-level supervisors, middle managers, and executives. Then, Hogan data scientists used the results to average, rank, and compare how important each skill is for each job level. The results show that some skills are shared among all managerial levels, some skills overlap, and some are unique.
Shared Skills
Managerial levels share many job skills. Integrity, accountability, decision-making, and teamwork are all examples of shared competencies ranked highly by our subject-matter experts.
When skills are shared across job levels, they tend to differ in scope. Take teamwork, for example. Teamwork for entry-level supervisors involves actively participating in day-to-day tasks. Teamwork for an executive is more remote, requiring the executive to rely on the team’s expertise to accomplish tasks.
The scope of decision-making changes in a similar way. Quinn, as an entry-level supervisor, will likely make frequent, rapid decisions to help individual contributors accomplish tasks. Their decision-making will involve tactics for executing strategy set by others. When Quinn becomes a middle manager, they will make decisions with more strategic impact, given their increased accountability. Reaching the executive level, Quinn will likely make wide-impact, high-stakes decisions about organizational strategy, which will be executed by others. Overall, decision-making evolves gradually from how to implement executives’ vision to how to inspire others.
Overlapping Skills
Data suggest that middle management is a transitional managerial level. The required skills middle managers share with entry-level supervisors are focused on outcomes. The competencies they share with executives are focused on relationships.
Both entry-level supervisors and middle managers need to work hard and overcome obstacles. These speak to the importance of accomplishing tasks. Those who manage frontline employees or individual contributors, whether singly or in groups, likely require more skills related to the job function. For instance, a manager of a team of bank tellers probably relies on their knowledge of customer service to overcome obstacles more often than the regional banking director.
Both middle managers and executives need skills related to widening their network and sphere of influence. Building relationships, building teams, and inspiring others all concern how a leader behaves with other people. Getting along with others at work matters deeply at every managerial level, of course. At higher organizational ranks, however, cooperation becomes even more integral to performance success.
Unique Skills
Subject-matter experts ranked some skills as key only at certain managerial levels. Generally, competencies progress from operational to strategic across managerial levels.
Entry-level supervisors need the skills of dependability, problem-solving, stress management, and time efficiency. Collectively, these skills focus on accomplishing immediate tasks and fulfilling short-term responsibilities. At the executive level, leaders need the skills of driving change and listening to others. These skills emphasize long-term organizational success rather than individual or team success.
Of course, the unique competencies for a given leadership role will also vary based on the organization and its industry.
Leadership Development Strategies Across Managerial Levels
Oftentimes, leadership development strategies are focused mainly or exclusively on executives. Implementing leadership development at an earlier managerial level helps leaders navigate the widening scope of relationships and influence along the path from supervisor to executive. Identifying high potentials for leadership development opportunities at initial positions of management could lower recruitment costs, improve retention, and increase leader effectiveness. Early leadership development allows leaders to build, refine, transform, or expand essential skills in preparation for advancement. Encouraging leadership growth within the organization means facilitating seamless transitions from one level to the next, fostering a culture of continuous learning, and investing in leadership development for long-term success.
Understanding how leadership competencies evolve from one managerial level to the next can help organizations to optimize their leadership development strategies. Nevertheless, it’s important to note that the same approach won’t work for every leader at a given level. Tenure, education, experience, and even exposure to bias are all factors that can shape a leader’s unique development needs. Even for two leaders at the same managerial level, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work.
This is why data-driven personality assessment is key to executing these goals successfully. Leadership development strategies backed by valid, reliable personality assessment produce measurable outcomes. At every level, Hogan’s assessments provide leaders with awareness of their strengths and limitations as others are likely to perceive them. With 72 quadrillion possible score combinations, Hogan’s assessments enable talent professionals to individualize the leadership development experience for every leader’s unique needs. Personality assessment can also be instrumental to helping leaders build and maintain high-performing teams by facilitating talent acquisition, as well as both team and individual development. Ultimately, personality predicts performance, and understanding how enables organizations to excel.
Your leadership development strategies can—and should—have measurable outcomes.
Deidre Hall, MA, MS, is a talent analytics consultant on the data science team at Hogan Assessments. She conducts research studies to validate customized assessment-based solutions using Hogan tools to help client organizations improve their selection and development processes.
Cody Warren, MA, is a senior consultant on the direct team at Hogan Assessments. He collaborates with clients to address their unique assessment needs and to implement selection, development, and research initiatives.
“Humble leaders create engagement,” said Robert Hogan, PhD, founder and president of Hogan Assessments.
Humility is a complex characteristic to translate into behavior. Sometimes the word humility is even used as a generalization for meekness or deference. Instead of humility, most people are likely to think of charisma as an essential trait in engaging leaders. Although charismatic people may often sit in leadership roles, humble people are more effective at the task of leading.1
Humble leaders create engagement by building trust with others through their actions. By drawing a clear line linking humility and engagement, Dr. Hogan underscored the importance of leader behavior and employee trust. It takes a humble person to build and maintain a high-performing team—someone who listens to feedback, shares credit, takes responsibility, and focuses on advancing organizational goals, rather than personal goals.
Read on to learn more about the connection between humility and coachability, why trust is a pillar of engagement, and how leaders can develop humility.
What Is Humility?
Humility is an aspect of personality that concerns whether a person is likely to accept feedback and learn from mistakes.
Coachability
How we tend to respond to growth and learning experiences affects how others interpret our behavior. People who seem self-accepting, kind, and modest about their work are viewed as humble. In contrast, people who seem overly self-confident, stubborn, and unwilling to acknowledge their faults are viewed as arrogant. Put another way, humility relates to feedback receptivity, and arrogance relates to feedback resistance.
Dr. Hogan describes the feedback component of humility as coachability. “Humility is all about being coachable. It’s about being able to admit you made a mistake and learn from experience,” he said. The highest-performing athletes are not only talented. They are also willing to listen to feedback and refine their performance. Unsurprisingly, the highest-performing leaders show the same qualities: talent and coachability.
Self-Confidence
Humility is different from weakness or low self-confidence. Humble people tend to acknowledge their limitations, spotlight others’ contributions, and listen to and learn from others. Their egalitarian values make them likely to consider alternate viewpoints, which can result in better decision-making. Their awareness of their limits makes them likely to delegate successfully.
“Humility is not about lacking self-confidence,” said Dr. Hogan. “Self-confident and humble is the proper combination for effective leadership.”
Humble leaders often demonstrate unassuming confidence, show assertiveness, and set forth a clear vision for the organization. More than 15 years of research about effective business leaders show that they combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.”2 Such leaders are driven to improve performance, both theirs and their teams’. They exert their energy on behalf of the group, not for their individual gain. This behavior earns trust.
“People who seem humble are also trustworthy,” Dr. Hogan said. Trust, however, seems to be a scarce commodity in the workplace. In the US, only 21 percent of employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organization.3 Anecdotally, 65 to 75 percent of leaders fail, suggesting that comparatively few leaders demonstrate humility.1 “Humble leaders listen to feedback, admit their mistakes, and delegate properly—and that creates engagement. Trust is the principal factor in engagement,” he continued.
Globally, only 23 percent of employees are engaged at work.4 “When engagement’s up, all the good things happen; when engagement’s down, all the bad things happen,” Dr. Hogan quipped. He called engagement a critical factor in team productivity, as well as an accurate predictor of significant business outcomes. Engagement is certainly tied to revenue; the low engagement or active disengagement of 77 percent of global workers costs the global economy an estimated 8.8 trillion US dollars.4
Organizations that value charisma above capability often overlook their most effective leaders. Some of the most wildly successful CEOs of all time were “modest and humble, as opposed to self-dramatizing and self-promoting.”1 Leading with humility yields intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational profits, as reflected in the stock prices of companies led by humble people.2
How Leaders Can Develop Humility
Humble leaders seek feedback and continual improvement. “Humility allows leaders to stop making repeatable mistakes,” said Dr. Hogan.
Leadership development goals that focus on building humility include acknowledging mistakes and asking for and listening to feedback. Actively recognizing others’ achievements, understanding one’s own limitations, and monitoring self-promoting behaviors are also extremely important. A qualified Hogan coach can be an invaluable asset to a leader who is working to earn trust from others.
“The first step for a leader to develop humility is to acknowledge that you’re not very humble. You need to understand that without it, you’re going to fail,” Dr. Hogan said. Someone who utterly refuses to learn from experience will likely develop a reputation for poor judgment and have difficulty retaining followers.
The actions of humble leaders are focused outward. Humble leaders seek to improve team performance, not just individual performance. They channel their ambition back into the organization, rather than toward themselves. They build a culture of psychological safety based on trust, openness, and recognition. And by modeling behavior, they foster a culture of development and encourage learning and growth.
Krista currently resides in China, and Anne-Marie resides in Australia. Not only are cultural differences a focus of their professional expertise, but cross-cultural business is also a part of their direct experience.
Keep reading to learn more about cultural differences in who becomes a leader, how to lead an international team, and ways organizations can leverage personality assessment data to select and develop globally minded leaders.
Cross-Cultural Personality
The Hogan point of view on cross-cultural personality is anchored in socioanalytic theory. Socioanalytic theory holds that humans across the globe evolved to get along, get ahead, and find meaning. “We have found that this is true no matter what society in the world is being measured,” said Krista.
The individual differences in how people pursue these universal goals equate to our unique personality characteristics. “We do not see certain genders, ethnicities, or other groups of people having significantly different trends,” Krista added. “This is why using personality is a fair and equal way to select and develop our talent.”
In other words, personality scores are mostly the same across cultures. Significant differences in personality do not exist between different groups, markets, or countries.
Leadership and Culture
Where we do see personality differences is in top leadership positions across different countries and markets. Some cultures value different outcomes, while others may value the same outcomes but achieve them in different ways.
Anne-Marie provided an example from Hogan personality data, comparing Canadian and French leaders. “Both of those markets’ leaders value getting ahead, so leaders tend to score higher on [the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory scale] Power. However, they will differ in how they do so,” she explained. In Canada, a low-density population country, leaders tend to gain power by being warm and showing tact and diplomacy. In France, a high-density population country, organizations tend to promote and value leaders who are not afraid to confront or challenge others directly and publicly. Putting that in terms of Hogan scales, Canadian leaders tend to score higher than French leaders on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) scale Interpersonal Sensitivity.
Differentiating Between Country and Culture
While it is possible to measure personality across national boundaries, it is not possible to do so across nebulous cultural boundaries. No one can pinpoint where culture starts and ends. For instance, French culture influences leaders in France and Canada, but also in Belgium, Congo, Haiti, Switzerland, and many, many other countries. Other cultural influences are present in most of those places, as well.
“Within a country’s borders, a lot of different factors influence what type of leaders are promoted to the top,” Krista said. Giving an illustration from China, she explained that business leaders tend to place less emphasis on agency and more on conscientiousness. These characteristics make them much more willing to build consensus and act within a group than to lead using the individualistic, charismatic style seen in other countries.
Leader Emergence and Leader Effectiveness
Leadership emergence relates to leaders who tend to be promoted, while leadership effectiveness relates to leaders who build and maintain high-performing teams. The two types of leadership may be found in the same individual, but they often aren’t.
Personality still predicts the same set of outcomes in all cultures, so what makes a leader effective in one culture is likely to make that leader effective (or ineffective) in other cultures, too. “If you’re a high [HPI] Adjustment individual, there’s the same set of consequences for you no matter what culture you’re in,” Krista observed.
“There may be differences in leadership emergence, but the same things seem to predict leadership effectiveness,” Anne-Marie agreed.
How to Lead an International Team
When explaining how to lead an international team, Anne-Marie and Krista advised leaders to evaluate their mindset and rely on data:
Understand your leadership style – Knowing the leadership style of your own market is key to recognizing differences. “Being unaware of unconscious biases and the impact it might have on their efficacy and reputation . . . we don’t want leaders to fall in the trap that their strengths that have helped them be successful in a specific market in the past will necessarily be as effective,” Anne-Marie said.
Understand cultural expectations for leaders – Knowing the expectations for leaders and team members is key to successfully working with them. “As a leader, understanding where your team members are from, the culture that they’re from, and even the leadership style within that culture can be very helpful,” Krista said.
Rely on data – Avoid generalizing or making assumptions about cross-cultural leadership. Well-validated personality assessments, such as Hogan’s, can provide data-driven insights to help decision-makers understand the values and behaviors that inform local, organizational, and team culture. Consider the unique personalities of individuals, and be sensitive to exceptions that may seem to subvert the norm.
Selecting and Developing Globally Minded Leaders
Organizations need to use valid personality assessments to select leaders who can manage individuals from different cultures effectively. The leaders who are most likely to promote a culture of inclusion are those who will leverage diversity, remain humble about what they know, and consider others’ backgrounds before acting. Hogan has researched inclusion competencies in leadership and can help organizations identify people who are likely to embody these qualities.
Similarly, international companies can use personality assessments to better develop their current leaders to make them more successful at managing people across cultures. “We encourage organizations to emphasize the importance of understanding the target culture’s leadership norms for cross-cultural business success,” Krista said.
Depending on the expectations of others within the organization, a leader might need to adapt their interpersonal style. For example, an American leader of a Chinese team might give indirect feedback and cause confusion, while a Chinese leader of an American team might give direct feedback and cause offense. While directness and indirectness both exist across cultures, what can vary are the cultural expectations surrounding a leader’s communication methods.
“Don’t underuse assessments,” Krista said. She encouraged organizations that conduct cross-border business to assess their organizational culture, how teams across an organization interact, and how individuals within a team interact.
“Look beyond general cultural stereotypes,” Anne-Marie said. “Invest some effort in becoming aware of your own culture’s leadership expectations and what some implications are in terms of unconscious biases. If you’re a leader, that will be very important in working with people from different backgrounds or people in general in today’s globalized market.”
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 90 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
All great human achievements, such as the Great Wall of China and the moon landings, are the result of coordinated group effort. In addition, every organization, no matter how successful, must innovate and adapt to survive. This is why innovation is an important concern for well-run organizations. Furthermore, as economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, innovation is at the heart of all economic progress.1 This raises the question of how specifically to manage innovation or alternatively how to lead a creative team.
The established leadership literature primarily concerns leading teams that have defined objectives and indices of success—usually sports teams, military units, or industrial functions. With these teams, efficiency, precision, and repeatability are often the desired outcomes. But many types of business organizations depend heavily on creativity: TV and movie studios, architectural firms, opera troupes, corps de ballet, intelligence gathering and analysis organizations, marketing and advertising businesses, etc.
Before proceeding, we should answer two questions. First, what is creativity? Creativity concerns finding new solutions to existing problems and then implementing those new solutions. Second, who is likely to be on a creative team? Such teams would not contain creatives like Einstein, Freud, Rembrandt, and Beethoven—geniuses are unemployable. Rather, we are concerned with managing teams composed of employable adults whose jobs are to develop innovative products and solutions.
According to social psychologists,2 the best way to lead a creative team is to create a culture that encourages creativity. But there is more to leading a creative team than fostering a culture of creativity. Social psychology ignores individual differences—not everyone has the skills needed to lead a creative team. So what are those skills?
Skills to Lead a Creative Team
Studying people who have successfully led creative teams can provide insight. One such person would be Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist, a cofounder of Pixar, and a former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Another would be J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, the director of the Manhattan Project (which developed the first atomic bomb), and the director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.3,4 Reading about the performance of Catmull and Oppenheimer suggests that five “competencies” are needed to lead a creative team effectively.
Expertise
First, leadership should be a resource for the group (and not a source of privilege for the incumbent). This means that leaders need to be genuine experts in the field in which the team is working. Expertise is needed for a person to be credible and to be a resource for the group. Expertise can’t be faked or assumed; it must be demonstrated.
Conflict Resolution
Second, leaders must be good at conflict resolution because conflicts between talented team members inevitably arise. Persuading people to coexist, cooperate, and communicate is an essential leadership task; it is not an add-on or a distraction, even though it may seem to be at the time. As the very smart leader of an engineering team once told me, “You spend 90 percent of your time dealing with people problems and 10 percent of your time actually on task.” Catmull and Oppenheimer were known to be skilled at getting difficult people to cooperate. Oppenheimer had to work with the notoriously challenging Edward Teller, a gifted physicist and incorrigible troublemaker, whereas Catmull had to try to control Steve Jobs.
Drive for Results
Third, effective leaders want to win, be industry leaders, and beat the competition. This means pushing the team for results. Self-expression and self-actualization are the byproducts, not the central objectives, of real work. Considerable political skill is needed to push a team for results without alienating the team members. Catmull is and Oppenheimer was intensely driven and competitive.
Psychological Toughness
Fourth, effective leaders need real psychological toughness because they must deal with pressures from inside the team (e.g., Teller and Jobs) and demands from outside the team. Oppenheimer had to manage the legendary Major General Leslie Groves, US Army Corps of Engineers.
Kenneth D. Nichols, a civil engineer who worked for Groves on the Manhattan Project, described him as “[. . .] the biggest SOB I have ever worked for. He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. [. . .] He is extremely intelligent. [. . .] He is the most egotistical man I know. [. . .] Although he gave me great responsibility and adequate authority to carry out his mission-type orders, he constantly meddled with my subordinates.”5
Similarly, Catmull had to please “the suits” above him at Disney who were focused on cost control. The faceless Disney employees wouldn’t have been as terrifying as General Groves, but they were still capable of making Catmull’s life miserable. Skill and toughness are required to advocate effectively for the team’s agenda while managing internal disputes and fending off external, often politically motivated, challenges.
Ability to Recognize Talent
Finally, and as noted previously, social psychologists hold that effective leaders of creative teams need to foster a culture of creativity. But how do you do that? Consider the example of Deion Sanders, who became head coach of the hapless and winless University of Colorado football team in December 2022. He was phenomenally successful from the start. When Sanders was asked how he planned to change the culture of the University of Colorado football team, he said he didn’t care about the culture, he only cared about the talent of his players and their ability to perform to his standards. He meant that, if you have talented players and they are performing at their best, the culture will take care of itself. The same is true for leading a creative team: leaders need to recruit talented and creative people to the team, give them the resources they need, cut those who can’t perform, and the culture will take care of itself.
This blog post was authored by Hogan Founder and President Robert Hogan, PhD.
References
Schumpeter, J. (1942). Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Harper Brothers.
Amabile, T. (1996). Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity. Westview Press.
Catmull, E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House.
Bird, K., & Sherwin, M. J. (2005). American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Knopf.
Nichols, K. D. (1987). The Road to Trinity. William Morrow & Co.
Crises provide opportunity for women leaders to distinguish themselves as effective and decisive. Research about how women leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic has yielded six critical crisis leadership skills of powerful women.
An organizational psychologist whose research areas include gender-related issues in the workplace, Kelsey has published research about crisis response, ethics, and creativity. On the podcast, she discussed the origin of her book, leadership during crisis, and six skills in which women in leadership excel.
A New Model of Leadership from Powerful Women
The inspiration for Kelsey’s book title came from a South African safari, where she learned that lions are far less effective hunters than painted wolves. Whereas lions kill only 30% of the time, painted wolves, also called African wild dogs, kill 80% of the time because they use pack tactics. “Why are we telling people to like lions?” Kelsey mused. “We have a whole animal kingdom to choose from.”
Her interest in women in leadership intensified during the beginning of the pandemic while she researched the effectiveness of different leaders. She observed parallels in the leadership approaches of women heads of state and began writing.
The book references a Time article assessing 11 countries considered to have the best pandemic responses.1 Although they constituted only 11 percent of the global heads of state at the time, women led six of the countries.
Two leadership skills stood out to Kelsey as she assessed the leaders listed: decisiveness and quick actions. A negative stereotype casts women as indecisive and risk averse. The women described in the article acted in the opposite way. They were able to assess the data pragmatically, identify acceptable risks, and implement clear, effective decisions with empathy.
Leadership During a Crisis
The skills that the leaders demonstrated accord with Hogan research into leadership during crises. One key competency that people look for in a leader during crisis is decisiveness, which entails evaluating data and sticking to decisions. Kelsey theorized that one of the reasons these women leaders were so effective was that they exceeded the extremely high performance standards imposed by society. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel holds a PhD in quantum chemistry, for example.
“Several stereotypes hold women back,” Kelsey observed. The tendency to think of leaders as male can be difficult to change. In a leadership class that Kelsey teaches, more than 90% of students choose a male leader as the subject for their semester-long project.
One contributing factor in the gender disparity among heads of state may come from stereotypes about agency and communality. People tend to associate men with agency and women with communality. People also tend to associate only agency—not communality—with leadership. These socially established concepts can influence our perception of who should lead.
Kelsey noted that when men show communality, they tend to be applauded. But when women show agency, they can be penalized for displaying ambition. “Those stereotypes infiltrate our decision-making and our thinking,” she said. “We don’t get to see the actual skills that the leaders or potential leaders bring to the table.”
Six Skills for Women Leaders
In Painted Wolves, Kelsey outlined six skills that made women leaders successful in managing a crisis such as a global pandemic:
Preparation – Women tend to have to be overprepared and overqualified to reach elite leadership roles. Instead of relying on charisma and improvisation, women in leadership have the advantage of thorough preparedness.
Issue-driven focus – Instead of viewing themselves as the solution to all problems, women in leadership want to help fix a specific problem or issue. In many cases, they want to find the pragmatic solution, not be the heroic solution.
Collective leadership – Painted wolves work as a pack, not lone hunters. Modern leadership, whether in politics or business, is based on achievement via collective effort. In Hogan terms, effective leaders build and maintain high-performing teams.
Willingness to learn – Countries that were effective in their pandemic responses had experienced similar crises before. Just as those leaders applied past knowledge to the present crisis, leaders must be willing to seek and apply accurate feedback about their performance.
Emotion management – Women leaders are not emotionless; rather, they use their emotions appropriately. High emotional intelligence allows them to manage their own and others’ emotions.
Risk taking – Leaders need to demonstrate confident risk taking. However, the risks women are willing to take can be different from those of men. During the initial stages of the pandemic, women were more likely to take economic risks by shutting down their countries, whereas men were more likely to risk lives by keeping their countries open.
“We can learn so many things from these women that are applicable for all of us. They just happen to be the ones who demonstrated them on a global scale,” Kelsey said.
More Opportunities for All
Rather than seeking to place women in leadership positions, Kelsey advocated for a more broadly inclusive approach to leadership. Gender is neither the only nor the main criteria for diversifying global leadership. She challenged people to ask this question: “How can we create more opportunities for everyone so we can have more effective leaders overall?”
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 85 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
Leadership in Africa today is insightful and innovative. Where is African leadership heading in the future?
Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp held a panel discussion with three of Africa’s top experts in leadership development from our authorized distributors in Africa.
Seniora El-Hage is the managing partner and head of consulting at Phoenix Consulting, which serves the region of North Africa and the Middle East. She is fascinated by team dynamics and global leadership and has represented Hogan for six years.
Gicheha Gitau is the senior principal and head of people analytics at Career Connections, based out of Kenya. Accredited in Hogan assessments and a facilitator in Hogan certification, he is on a journey to leave the world a better place than he found it using IO psychology.
Jani Wiggett is an IO psychologist and director at JVR Psychometrics, which serves South Africa. An avid runner who grew up in a family of psychologists, she has been associated with Hogan Assessments for 15 years.
Let’s dive into the evolving landscape of leadership in Africa, characteristics of African leaders, and the outlook for future leadership development in Africa.
The Landscape of Leadership in Africa
Our three experts all observed that leadership development is viewed as more important than ever throughout many African countries. In fact, Career Connections assesses 4,000 leaders annually across different sectors. “Africa is a talent hub competing on a global scale,” Gitau said. “Organizations are realizing the direct impact of leadership on employee engagement, productivity, diversity, and the overall organizational culture.”
Leadership development is and will remain critically important to organizations across industries and nations. Wiggett mentioned that corporate and political leadership can cause either great good or great harm. Because of this, many African organizations are aware of the implications of effective leadership for culture, community, and employee well-being. El-Hage also commented on the recent shift toward recognizing the importance of leadership development in Africa: “African companies now prioritize leadership assessments and invest in continuous development programs to grow leaders who can drive their organization.”
The landscape of leadership in Africa has evolved within the last few years in response to changes in the labor market. Our experts walked us through the context for these changes and trends they have seen in their regions.
Political, Economic, and Social Change in Africa
Knowing the political, economic, and social context of an organization’s country is essential to understanding its perceptions of leadership. Wiggett referenced South Africa’s former apartheid regime, which excluded millions of people from access to basic human rights. She also mentioned the country’s current economic disparities, social inequalities, and unemployment rate. El-Hage pointed out that transformational leadership, including transparency, accountability, and ethics, has been a significant trend in the North African region.
Data-Based Decision-Making and Artificial Intelligence
Although this trend isn’t necessarily unique to the African continent, leaders in Africa have certainly been giving more attention to data-based decision-making. As well as embracing technological innovation, African leaders also want to invest in leadership development using well-validated personality assessments.
Understanding digital innovation, especially how to leverage artificial intelligence, is top of mind for organizational leaders in Africa. Gitau described this prevalent attitude as entrepreneurial aspiration for sustainable growth and inclusive prosperity. El-Hage added that some leaders question the effect that artificial intelligence will have on human employees, a reflection of their focus on ethics and community.
Personality Characteristics of African Leaders
African leaders remain strong in the global leadership characteristics of creating trust, setting vision, using good judgment, and building an environment that fosters well-being, among others. A cultural aspect that may differentiate African leaders from those in other parts of the globe is their interpersonal sensitivity. “African leaders tend to excel in interpersonal skills and show their genuine interest in their team members’ well-being and their relationships,” said El-Hage, who also emphasized African adaptability and resilience.
Universal concepts of leadership, such as demonstrating integrity, might appear different in one organization or culture versus another. Exactly how a leader behaves to display integrity can be somewhat context dependent, while valuing integrity itself is not.
Leaders may be more likely to excel in their respective countries or industries given specific personality strengths. For example, JvR Psychometrics recently studied more than 320 South African managers and found that the highest performers also had high scores on the Hogan Personality Inventory scales Ambition and Inquisitive.1
As well, Gitau commented that the generally higher HPI Ambition scores among African leaders likely help them to establish and communicate strategic vision. “Storytelling is deeply ingrained in our culture, so leaders in this region often use narrative to inspire and motivate their teams for that shared vision to be able to drive change,” he said.
How Organizations Can Invest in Leaders
With increased focus on leadership effectiveness, many African organizations are seeking to improve their talent strategy and leadership development programs even more. “Effective leadership is crucial for organizations that are seeking long-term success and sustainability,” said Gitau. He recommended a talent strategy based on personality assessment, robust succession planning, and executive coaching with 360-degree feedback.
Wiggett emphasized the importance of both defining and measuring effective leadership. “A leader needs to know what their team requires, and the only way in which they know is to have self-insight and good judgment,” she said. Leadership development based on this principle should begin early in a leader’s career. El-Hage added that development is a continuous cycle. “Once areas of development are identified, organizations could also encourage executive coaching and mentoring,” she said. “Regular feedback and performance evaluations are vital for leadership growth.”
The Future of African Leadership
Each of our experts was asked to describe the future of African leadership. Their answers showed their optimism and excitement for the rising generations of African leaders:
El-Hage – “The future of African leadership holds great potential. With the ongoing education, the technology, the inclusion, the flexibility and resilience, African leaders have a great opportunity to shape a brighter and more prosperous continent for the generations to come.”
Gitau – “I see a shift towards more purpose-driven leadership. The future of leadership in Africa will generally drive positive change to position the region as a significant player on the global stage.”
Wiggett – “The future of African leadership is bright. The longer-term implications of the complexity, the hardship, the inequality, the environment that we find ourselves in in many countries in Africa is going to result in people being more resilient.”
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 80 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
Reference
van Lill, X., Stols, A., Rajab, P., & Wiggett, J. (2023). The Validity of a General Factor of Emotional Intelligence in the South African Context. African Journal of Psychological Assessment, 5(0), a123. https://doi.org/10.4102/ajopa.v5i0.123
How should we approach leadership development for college students? How can we use such efforts to empower the next generation of women leaders?
Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Jennifer Tackett, PhD, professor and director of clinical training, and Haoqi Zhang, PhD, associate professor of computer science, both at Northwestern University. The conversation focused on their collaborative effort aimed at empowering the next generation of women leaders through the Northwestern Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
Jennifer and Haoqi began collaborating through a mutual friend working at an interdisciplinary entrepreneurship center at Northwestern University. Though Jennifer is a clinical psychologist and Haoqi is a computer scientist, both found a connection through a shared interest in fostering growth in individual college students. Now they are coleaders of a new Northwestern Buffett Global Working Group, Empowering the Next Generation of Women Leaders.
“For students to do well in research or really anything, they needed to understand themselves better,” Haoqi said. Jennifer provided a personal example about the perspective shift that is necessary for someone to view themselves as a leader. After taking the Hogan assessments, Jennifer learned that her Hogan Personality Inventory Ambition score is below the 10th percentile. As a tenured professor in numerous leadership roles, she was at first surprised by that data point.
But as Jennifer learned more about what the Ambition scale represented, she realized that her drive and energy to succeed tended to emphasize collaboration over competition and quality over achievement. “Low ambition scores do not mean that you cannot be a successful leader. They mean that your leadership motivations and potential are coming from somewhere else in your profile,” she said.
This insight aligns with our research at Hogan about the difference between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. “We need to be more curious about what a successful leadership profile looks like for women and for people who don’t fit that specific demographic prototype,” Jennifer added.
Women Leaders in Education
Descriptive data show that women perform better than men by nearly every educational metric. For the last couple of decades, the differences have been increasing steadily. “It’s not a fluke,” Jennifer said. “It’s clear that female college students are outperforming their male counterparts.” Yet the top leadership roles are still predominantly held by men. “How do we understand why women who are performing so well and clearly showing great potential and achievement aren’t moving into societal leadership roles down the line?” she asked.
That question has motivated her and Haoqi’s research. It’s a complicated puzzle that isn’t likely to be solved with just a few data points. “Sometimes we can be rather narrow in what we measure,” Haoqi pointed out. “We want to think about student development on educational metrics but in other ways as well.” Education is an important route to leadership success, but it isn’t an exclusive one.
Leadership Development for College Students
Women and members of other historically excluded groups at universities tend to have less access to leadership development programs than white men with high socioeconomic status. “Leadership development programming in university settings is both ubiquitous and unsystematic,” Jennifer said. Different programs for different people may be designed for different outcomes, but all are likely built on the pervasive concept of a leader as a cisgender white man. “Ultimately, if we are interested in diversification of the leadership pipeline, we’re going to have to dismantle that system and expand our understanding of what a leadership development program looks like.”
“Broadening a perspective is needed if we’re going to make a change,” Haoqi affirmed. He told a story about a dance professor who teaches students to fall in various ways so that they may gain alternative perspectives. When Haoqi applied that mindset to an engineering and computer science setting, he perceived that vulnerability, honesty, and accepting mistakes can help leaders learn alternate perspectives from their failures. “When we start to see leadership to be inclusive of those things, we’ll also see that the opportunities to teach the skills, the mindsets, or the dispositions that good leaders should have opens the doors to think about leadership development not just out of leadership centers but also in all parts of campus,” he explained.
At Hogan, we identify having good judgment as a core aspect of leadership. Good judgment involves being able to make reasonable decisions based on the available information, as well as learning from failure. In addition to gaining better judgment and critical thinking skills, Haoqi wants future leaders to see themselves as being fallible and to recognize that making mistakes is OK. “Part of my work with students is helping them to look inside and learn this kindness toward themselves,” he said.
Gender Discrepancy in Top Leadership Roles
Only a small fraction of global CEOs are women. Through his work developing students, Haoqi has noticed that certain socioemotional skills are among the most important to overcome systemic barriers. These include risk assessment, critical thinking, dealing with failure, experimentation, and asking for help, which would help distinguish future leaders for advancement.
Jennifer pointed out that a strength of the Roberta Buffett Institute is its interdisciplinary, global nature. “That international perspective both complicates things but also allows you to start dissecting some of these systemic issues in a very different way,” she explained. She also speaks with successful women leaders to seek contextual nuance and psychological themes in their collective leadership journeys. “The retrospective aspect could be a very fruitful compliment to this work,” she said.
Jennifer and Haoqi’s initiative has made meaningful gains and shown significant promise. But to continue to flourish, it will need the following:
Space for innovation – Student leaders need the creative latitude for experimentation to grow socioemotional skills.
Resources – It takes time, money, and effort to run an initiative focused on empowering women leaders.
Community support – Finding instructors willing to coach and mentor student leaders can also be challenging.
Mindset shift – Investment in a development program means rejecting the most profitable, streamlined path for university education and reimagining what the university experience can mean for women leaders.
In looking to the future, Jennifer and Haoqi agree that scalability is likely one of the next hurdles. They also want to create a more nuanced definition of leadership to dismantle how people think about leaders—and how we build leadership development efforts for college students.
“A lot of what becoming a leader is about starts with people looking at themselves differently than they did before,” Haoqi said.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 77 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!
