Every organization experiences some degree of change. It’s a constant in business. This fact makes change management a key capability for leaders. How they lead through change affects their personal, team, and organizational success. It also makes responding to change a key theme in leadership coaching. Hogan practitioners can coach leaders through it by helping them build a repertoire of behavioral skills specific to a context of change.

While change is prevalent, it doesn’t always arise from the same circumstances. Some leaders face mergers or acquisitions, some face role changes, and some face new organizational strategy or culture. When delivering development feedback to a leader, Hogan practitioners need to understand the context. For example, a leader who was hired to address a specific problem and a leader who is part of a high potential program have two distinctly different contexts for development.

The Hogan practitioner’s role is to help leaders build strategic self-awareness about their approach to change management so they can enable their teams to succeed. To explore the best practices for coaching leaders through change, we interviewed three experienced coaches in the Hogan Coaching Network. These experts in personality assessment interpretation and feedback shared insights about how to prep for leadership coaching sessions, tried-and-true techniques for feedback delivery, and how they advise leaders about change management.

How to Prepare for Coaching Through Change

The first step is understanding the leader’s personality assessment data. When interpreting the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) in a change management context, it is important to consider Adjustment and Interpersonal Sensitivity. Adjustment can indicate a leader’s stress tolerance and resilience, while Interpersonal Sensitivity can describe their communication style and approach. A leader with a low Interpersonal Sensitivity score might be oblivious to morale, while one with a high score might avoid necessary conflict. These two HPI scales can also reveal a leader’s socioemotional skills, such as perceiving and influencing others’ emotions or responding to stress with composure. This matters because a leader whose team is undergoing change will need to cope personally while also guiding team members through a similar experience.

Regarding the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), a Hogan practitioner should assess the leader’s broad category of derailers: Moving Away, Moving Against, or Moving Toward. This can indicate whether the leader’s tendency during stress is to withdraw, manipulate or persuade, or seek approval, respectively.

Practitioners should also read assessment results across the HPI, HDS, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) to evaluate the leader’s likelihood to embrace change. HPI Prudence and Inquisitive, HDS Skeptical and Cautious, and MVPI Tradition and Security can all suggest how a leader might respond to the need for change. “People don’t resist change as much as they fear their ability to cope with it,” explained HCN Coach Ray Harrison.

In addition to interpreting assessment results through a lens of change, Hogan practitioners should also gather additional data for leadership coaching. Harrison emphasized the need to be explicit about the details of the appointment charter. Other data might include the critical few objectives of the role, identification of what person or group is driving the change, employment history and education, stakeholder analyses, 360-degree interviews, previous performance assessments, employee survey data about culture, leadership and organizational values, and more. Contextual research can be effective for leadership coaching when paired with Hogan Leadership Forecast Series (LFS) results, which provide robust feedback about a leader’s performance capabilities, challenges, and core drivers.

Hogan practitioners should keep the big picture in mind when prepping for a development session. It’s important to encourage leaders because change initiatives are stressful. Emphasize positivity to counteract fears. Help them understand the strengths and skills they already possess to succeed.

How to Deliver Feedback About Leading Through Change

Ideally, the assessment debriefing and developmental coaching should take place over several sessions over several weeks or months. The sessions will likely move through three broad phases: (1) advance data gathering, (2) the Hogan debrief, and (3) leadership coaching. The advance phase with the leader is one or two sessions to get to know them and discuss their expectations for coaching. The debriefing phase might also take place over two sessions, the first to present the data and the second to discuss their response and takeaways. The leadership coaching phase could be six to eight sessions in which the practitioner and the leader build the leader’s development plan and evaluate its implementation.

As in other types of debriefing sessions, a practitioner’s main approach should be asking a lot of open, nonjudgmental questions to elicit self-reflection. What characteristics of your personality do you see as assets? What expectations does your organization hold for you? What is your biggest concern about success? What alignment do you notice between your values and the organization’s values? What do you think the effects of the change will be on your team? How do you tend to feel or respond when . . . ? What surprises you? What resonates with you? What messages are you hearing? What have we not talked about yet?

“In times of massive change, there are dangerous opportunities to grow,” said HCN Coach Brian Chitester. Hogan practitioners can give leaders a behavioral repertoire to help them moderate overused strengths and manage their derailers. Personality data can help identify occasions when leaders might need to act against their inclinations. For instance, a leader with an extremely low Interpersonal Sensitivity score can learn how to balance their direct, candid communication style with sensitivity and active listening skills. Leaders who understand how behavioral change can affect their reputations positively will be most motivated to grow.

Above all, practitioners should start and stay positive. Chitester advised practitioners to help the leader see which characteristics give them natural advantages in achieving their goals.

Change Management Advice for Leaders

Although each leader’s personality is unique, some common pieces of change management advice are likely to apply to leaders in nearly every situation. “Just about every leader is leading through change. Most organizations are trying to change in one way or another,” HCN Coach Betsy Reeder pointed out.

1. Use a change model.

Having a model for change is helpful to keep leaders and teams on track. Leaders should adopt a model and stick with it. While there are numerous effective change frameworks, each of the three HCN coaches separately mentioned Leading Change by John Kotter. Kotter presents an eight-step process for organizational transformation founded on the viewpoint that “only leadership can motivate the actions needed to alter behavior in any significant way.”¹

2. Build up the team.

Effective change starts with team alignment and grows from there. Communicating well with the team is necessary throughout every phase of change management. Of particular importance is securing the team’s commitment. Instead of imposing a unilateral decision, leaders should allow team members to participate in decision-making whenever possible. This will increase the team’s sense of ownership and control of the change initiatives.

3. Listen, listen, listen.

Reeder advised leaders to be intentional about listening to and understanding the team. Team members who are heard can become positive change agents within their organizations. Leaders also need to listen to feedback about themselves. Strategic self-awareness is developed through understanding, commitment, and action, a process that relies on listening.

4. Be optimistic.

Everyone handles change differently. Leaders who choose to speak and act with positivity can leverage what makes them successful with confidence. Optimism is catching, after all.

Contributors

We thank our HCN contributors for sharing their collective decades of experience in using Hogan assessments to help leaders navigate change:

• Brian Chitester is the president at Chitester Leadership and Executive Development.
• Ray Harrison is the managing director at Executive TransforMetrics.
• Elizabeth “Betsy” Reeder is the regional vice president at The Leader’s Edge/Leaders by Design and executive coach at A.J. O’Connor Associates.

Reference

1. Kotter, J. (2012). Leading Change. Harvard Business Review Press.

Leaders cannot anticipate every specific situation—not when the world is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Knowing how to lead in a VUCA environment doesn’t mean making infinite contingency plans. Instead, it means having flexibility, solving problems, driving change, and handling the unknown. Strategic leadership in the face of VUCA means being versatile when your plan doesn’t go as planned.

Given the way that the 2020s have been going so far, the near future seems likely to continue to present VUCA challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic, Great Resignation, Russo-Ukrainian War, economic recession, and more have brought extraordinary hardship to boardrooms and living rooms. Organizations need people who are comfortable leading during crises and confident forming strategies when all the facts cannot be known.

Read on to find out why understanding VUCA is so important and how personality data can predict leaders who are more likely to respond successfully to VUCA situations.

What VUCA Is and Why It Matters

VUCA isn’t just a catchall phrase for challenging environments. Understanding its nuances enables leaders to be versatile.

What Is VUCA?

The acronym VUCA originates from the US Army War College as a description of the state of the world since the late 1980s. Here’s what the terms that comprise it mean and how they apply to leaders¹:

Volatility – A volatile world is characterized by sudden changes that require rapid response. A leader with flexibility can deploy well-honed skills quickly and change direction as appropriate.

Uncertainty – An uncertain world is characterized by the inability to know exactly what is happening now or what may happen next. A leader who anticipates problems can forecast potential flaws in solutions, detect errors, and experiment.

Complexity – A complex world is characterized by distinct but interconnected variables that influence decision-making. A leader who drives change can assess a broad range of response options and champion new methods, systems, or processes to improve performance.

Ambiguity – An ambiguous world is characterized by circumstances with multiple meanings that require unbiased objectivity to assess. A leader who can deal with ambiguity shows self-awareness and comfortably handles unpredictable or unknowable situations.

Another way to express the characteristics of VUCA is by how much information can be known and the degree to which the results from our actions can be predicted.² In complex or ambiguous situations, leaders tend to have less information available. In volatile or uncertain situations, they tend to have more. Usually, leaders can make accurate predictions in volatile or complex situations, while it’s often harder to forecast the effects of one’s actions in uncertain or ambiguous situations.

Why Does VUCA Matter?

Handling VUCA crises is just another part of leading an organization effectively. Analyzing which specific VUCA conditions a crisis brings will help leaders understand what responses are most fitting and how to implement them.

Every organization will face a crisis at some point, but it’s nearly impossible to know what the crisis will be. That is why a broad, principled approach to a VUCA world tends to be more successful than outlining specific details for every individual contingency. Cybersecurity threats and tsunamis are significantly different crises, but responses to both share the basic need to safeguard and secure people, property, and data.

Because crises are so common, responding well to VUCA challenges is a crucial capability for leaders today. A significant indicator of effective leadership is versatility, which is defined as “the ability to read and respond to change with a wide repertoire of complementary perspectives, skills, and behaviors.”³ Organizations need versatile leaders to overcome crises.

VUCA and Leader Personality

Hogan assessments measure personality characteristics that correspond to competencies that show a leader’s likelihood to respond to a VUCA world with versatility. Those competencies include dealing with ambiguity, anticipating problems, flexibility, and driving change.

Our research on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) suggests that higher scores on the Adjustment, Ambition, and Interpersonal Sensitivity scales predict a versatile leader. A leader who scores this way is likely to be resilient when faced with challenges and remain calm under pressure, while driving the team toward results and creating an environment that fosters connection and trust.

Our research also indicates that lower scores on the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) scales Excitable, Skeptical, and Reserved predict a versatile leader. These leaders tend to be prepared for setbacks and react calmly when they need to work through problems. They are likely to create an environment of collaboration and remain tolerant, open-minded, and optimistic, while also being perceptive of others and the situations around them.

Finally, lower scores on the Security scale from the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) predict a versatile leader who is likely tolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty while maintaining a reputation for being an assertive and innovative leader.

Implications

The legacy of a leader is often determined by how they handle a crisis. In recent years, the business world has seen its fair share of crises. While some leaders have faltered, others have risen to the occasion.

Versatility seems like a core characteristic related to performance in VUCA circumstances. Versatile leaders can deal with ambiguity, anticipate problems, be flexible, and continue to drive change. Hogan’s research shows several core scales across assessment tools that seem to be key predictors of versatility. These scales predict a leader that should be unflappable under pressure, driven to succeed, open to new opportunities, perceptive, and collaborative. These leaders are not likely to overreact or quit in the face of challenge; rather, they will engage in versatile leadership by evaluating the current situation and responding with diverse perspectives and talents to overcome challenges.

VUCA responsiveness is an important component of strategic self-awareness in leadership development. Not every leader is naturally skilled in the face of uncertainty. Hogan provides leaders an opportunity to understand their personalities. Leaders who are self-aware in this way can learn to strategically leverage positive behavioral tendencies and mitigate those that may get in the way of success during a crisis.

This blog post was coauthored by Jessie McClure, MA, senior consultant, and Ryan Rush, PhD, consultant.

References

1. Kaiser, R. (2016, November 30). Leading in a VUCA World. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/its-vuca-world-framework-leading-todays-disruptive-rob-kaiser/
2. Bennett, N., & Lemoine, G. J. (2014, January). What VUCA Really Means for You. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2014/01/what-vuca-really-means-for-you
3. Kaiser, R. B. (2020). Leading in an unprecedented global crisis: The heightened importance of versatility. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 72(3), 135–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000186

When Thenamaris, a ship management organization based in Athens, Greece, discovered a need to strengthen talent development aboard its vessels, the marine personnel performance and development team knew that the approach had to be grounded in science. They connected with ICAP People Solutions, an authorized Hogan distributor, to further explore how personality affects leadership performance. Together, Thenamaris, ICAP, and Hogan began a talent development initiative they dubbed the Ulysses Project.

Lasting for two and a half years, the Ulysses Project featured job analysis research to give Thenamaris insight into the qualities that help their seafaring leaders succeed in deck management and engine management positions.

More than 500 multinational officers completed Hogan’s three core personality assessments: the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), Hogan Development Survey (HDS), and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI). To date, more than 350 of those officers have received one-on-one, confidential, and personalized feedback for development based on their results.

After the project concluded, the Thenamaris team gave Hogan a trove of feedback on the resounding success of the Ulysses Project. They spoke highly of their experience working with Hogan and ICAP and filled us in on some of the lessons they learned from using personality assessments to enhance their talent development strategy.

Here are just a few of the takeaways.

On Collaborating with Hogan and ICAP

To administer the assessments and deliver feedback to the participating officers, Thenamaris developed a team of internal Hogan facilitators early in the project. Several people completed Hogan’s foundational certification workshop. As part of the process, they completed the Hogan assessments and received feedback on their results.

The value was immediately apparent. One marine personnel manager remarked, “I completed my HPI, HDS, and MVPI questionnaires and received one-on-one feedback. I have realized firsthand how useful this effort can prove on a personal level. I do therefore expect that it will prove equally useful at a company level.”

(Spoiler alert: It did prove useful!)

As the project progressed, Hogan and ICAP’s collaboration, patience, and understanding impressed Thenamaris. Encouraged to ask questions, they found that Hogan and ICAP were available to help them whenever needed.

“Both Hogan and ICAP teams kept an open mind to collect as much information as possible to understand the peculiarities of the shipping industry, the challenges of the seafarers’ profession, and the differences between managing people onboard and ashore,” they reported.

This new experience for Thenamaris looked like “one more day at work” for ICAP and Hogan—in a good way. Hogan and ICAP’s expertise, experience, and project management capabilities gave Thenamaris extra confidence in the endeavor. Thenamaris’s team also appreciated the robust project planning, effective time management, and the high focus on quality.

“Working with partners with solid scientific and professional backgrounds made our lives easier all the way,” they said.

Early on, the Thenamaris team knew they could trust Hogan and ICAP and gain buy-in for the initiative from their leadership team. Most importantly, they were certain that the results of the project would be meaningful for the seafarers.

And they were.

On Using Personality Assessments for Talent Development

From the Ulysses Project, Thenamaris learned how personality assessments could strengthen talent development initiatives. Following are some of the most notable insights they gained.

Deeper Development Discussions

The Hogan assessments proved to be critical tools for going deeper in development discussions in a short amount of time. During a few of the feedback sessions, the personnel team gained insights into some seafarers’ personalities that previously were unrecognized—and it helped to explain past incidents aboard the ships. Now, Thenamaris has a new scientific lens for building high-performing leaders and teams.

Meaningful and Constructive Feedback

For many seafarers, the Ulysses Project was their first time receiving feedback more thorough than “bravo,” “good job,” or “well done.” Some employees even commented that it was a lifetime opportunity. Many others responded with gratitude for the experience and the opportunity to talk about their work with honesty.

Actionable and Applicable Feedback

The feedback provided was actionable, practical, and immediately usable. One second engineer testified, “I gained better insight and knowledge of how to manage my actions. I understood that it is more important what others think of me, rather than what I do. I was able to understand how to take advantage of the findings and try to apply them in my day-to-day life, even before joining my next vessel.”

Strengthened Trust and Engagement

The Thenamaris team realized that their genuine interest in the seafarers’ development and their willingness to listen had a positive impact on trust and employee engagement. Some seafarers approached them to ask for advice months and even years after their feedback sessions. Others reported that the feedback gave them epiphanies about their careers—for example, perfection isn’t necessary to pursue a promotion, but development is. For many seafarers, the experience offered a renewed perspective on their career trajectories.

Benefits for All

The seafaring leaders weren’t the only people who developed from the Ulysses Project. Those administering the assessments learned about themselves and their own areas for development during the process. In addition to what they gathered from their individual Hogan profiles, they also improved their skills in cross-cultural awareness, listening, showing empathy, and stepping outside of the comfort zone.

But that’s not even everything they learned! Want to know more about the Ulysses Project and its impact on Thenamaris’s talent and business?

The decision to change your behavior based on personality assessment results is hard. Arriving at that choice requires a leader to have an open mindset, strategic self-awareness, and Hogan coaching. Hogan practitioners who hold feedback sessions and ongoing development discussions need to understand how to predict feedback resistance and guide leaders past it to receptivity. Their conversations about behavioral change must be collaborative and empowering to address feedback resistance and compartmentalization.

By understanding characteristics that might dispose people to feedback resistance, Hogan practitioners can strategically direct a feedback session toward a positive outcome. Our earlier blog post about predicting feedback resistance discussed scale scores that can help practitioners anticipate the likelihood of feedback resistance when they are interpreting results. During a debrief or ongoing development conversation, a practitioner needs insights and strategies for overcoming feedback resistance as it may occur.

Read on to learn ways to turn resistance into receptivity.

How to Overcome Feedback Resistance

How can Hogan practitioners help developing leaders move from resistance to receptivity? Arlene Pace Green, PhD, principal and founder at Enelra Talent Solutions and member of the Hogan Coaching Network, provided insight and advice for overcoming feedback resistance.

Set Expectations

Even before meeting with the leader, it is wise to set expectations for what the session is intended to achieve. People who have never been coached before might have incorrect assumptions about the purpose or scope of development. Because many organizations provide coaching for leaders who are in or will be in role transition, acknowledging changes in circumstances is a good way to begin discussing change and adaptation. Leaders may be less likely to resist developmental change if they perceive it as a positive association with their new role.

Dr. Green often uses a questionnaire before her first session with a leader to help set expectations as well. Some of the questions concern reputation, values, career objectives, and even life goals. The self-reflective mindset helps leaders recognize that coaching is about them and for them, which can excite their curiosity and minimize resistance.

Get Buy-In

During a feedback session, it is important for Hogan practitioners to find a hook to capture the interest of the leader. The hook is the answer to the question “What’s in it for me?” from the leader’s perspective. A leader’s openness to receiving feedback is enhanced when they recognize the value of the process.¹

Dr. Green suggested looking at their Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) results for the hook. “You have to connect the feedback to their values,” she said. “It has to be something they care about.”

Helping a leader understand how their reputation relates to their values is a key technique in overcoming feedback resistance. A leader who scored high on the Recognition scale may be more willing to address her performance risk of lack of focus (high Imaginative) if she believes that she might be distracting her team from gaining a high company ranking. A leader who scored high on the Affiliation scale may be more willing to acknowledge his overused strength of self-promotion (high Colorful) if he realizes he could be creating resentment among his peers.

In addition to values, another motivation that practitioners can use to overcome feedback resistance is the influence of stakeholders like bosses, clients, or teams. A leader who tends to withdraw in social situations (high Reserved) might decide to prioritize socioemotional skills if she realizes that her clients want her to participate actively in their network.

When giving feedback, especially about the performance risks in the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), address elevations in the context of impact on performance. If a leader is unaware of or in denial about performance impact, buy-in is especially necessary to encourage the leader to receive developmental feedback about minimizing negative performance implications.²

Avoid Derailment During Sessions

Dr. Green recommended using a strategic structure for the feedback session to place developmental feedback in context. She gives an overview of the assessments and then discusses results from the MVPI, the HPI, and the HDS, in that order. “I tell them that the assessments show what they want, what will get them there, and what could hold them back,” Dr. Green said. This framework places the leader and their motivations at the center of the conversation.

To lessen the possibility of derailment during a feedback session, Hogan practitioners should establish an atmosphere of collaboration and openness. According to Robert and Joyce Hogan, PhD, our founders, and Rob Kaiser, president of Kaiser Leadership Solutions, “Derailed [leaders] are often self-absorbed, unwilling to take responsibility for their shortcomings, and unable to learn from their mistakes—factors that make them resistant to performance enhancement.”³ Whether or not a leader is disposed to resist feedback, it is good practice for practitioners to be prepared to respond to signs of derailment during a session.

When debriefing assessment results, practitioners should be sensitive to verbal and nonverbal cues that a leader is disengaged, ambivalent, or defensive. As a best practice for delivering Hogan feedback, a practitioner should neither overreact nor underreact to feedback resistance. Resistance likely reflects a gap between the leader’s identity and their reputation.

One excellent strategy for addressing resistance during a session is the PAUSE method: (P) point out the resisting behavior you have observed, (A) ask the person to explore the reaction using neutral language, (U) understand and acknowledge what the person is saying, (S) suggest a new focus or reframe the feedback, and (E) exercise judgment about when to explore further or move on. Asking questions that provoke reflection and approaching the conversation without judgment will help defuse strong emotions.

Create a Meaningful Development Plan

Development isn’t just about helping to mitigate derailment, but it’s also about helping people to learn to leverage their strengths. As Dr. Robert Hogan wrote, “Development consists of adding behaviors or skills to one’s repertoire as the skills become necessary.”⁴ A meaningful development plan is one that outlines actionable short-term objectives that serve a leader’s overarching, long-term professional goals.

A skilled Hogan coach can help maximize development outcomes by helping the leader understand assessment insights in the context of their job and the impact their reputation has on their performance. Ongoing development for leaders means support from a coach while the leader practices new adaptive behavioral skills. An investment in ongoing coaching also allows the coach to monitor the leader’s progress over time and adjust the development plan as needed.

The leader-coach relationship also influences how resistant or receptive leaders are to feedback over time. Successful coaching relies significantly on rapport. A study of executive coaching outcomes found that “eighty-four percent of participants identified the quality of the relationship between executive and coach as critical to the success of the coaching.”⁵ Feedback resistance fades and disappears when leaders see how much coaches care about their success.

Acknowledge Personal Lives and Challenges

Don’t take feedback resistance personally.

Occupational development is the purpose of professional coaching, but this often overlaps with personal development. Strategic self-awareness necessarily touches upon a leader’s personal life too. Feedback resistance might have nothing to do with work at all. Perhaps the leader is worried about the political situation in their home country, or an injury has kept them away from their habitual exercise routine for months. It’s impossible to always know all the circumstances or challenges that might contribute to feedback resistance.

Keep a positive perspective, even in the face of resistance. Development is hard and often requires a concert of factors working together before a leader will express sincere interest in implementing behavioral change.¹

References

1. Warrenfeltz, R, & Kellett, T. (2016). Coaching the Dark Side of Personality. Hogan Press.
2. Hogan, R., Hogan, J., & Warrenfeltz, R. (2007). The Hogan Guide: Interpretation and Use of Hogan Inventories. Hogan Press.
3. Hogan, J., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2011). Management Derailment. In S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Vol. 3. (pp. 555–575). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/12171-015
4. Hogan, R., & Warrenfeltz, R. (2003). Educating the Modern Manager. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2(1), 74–84. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMLE.2003.9324043
5. McGovern, J., Lindemann, M., Vergara, M., Murphy, S., Barker, L., & Warrenfeltz, R. (2001). Maximizing the Impact of Executive Coaching: Behavioral Change, Organizational Outcomes, and Return on Investment. The Manchester Review 6(1), 3–11.

One leadership skillset concerns advancing into positions of authority and getting to the top of organizations. At Hogan, we call this emergent leadership. A separate skillset concerns leading those organizations to success. We call this effective leadership.

Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, and Blake Loepp, PR manager, discussed the core issue of the difference between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness.

“Leaders who know when to go with their strengths but also know when their strengths lead them in the wrong direction—those are the leaders who are the most effective,” said Ryne.

Let’s dive into this conversation about what makes an effective leader.

What’s the Difference Between Leadership Emergence and Leadership Effectiveness?

Finding numerous studies of leadership in academic literature isn’t hard. Leadership as a topic is in high demand—any bookstore is filled with leadership books. Both academic and popular writing on leadership, however, fail to distinguish between these two key topics of emergence and effectiveness. They hold the common assumption that if you are a leader in an organization, you must, by definition, be effective. But reality proves that many organizations are led ineffectively. Having a leadership role and being a good leader just aren’t the same.

• Leadership emergence – In Hogan terms, emergent leaders get into leadership positions. They belong to the C-suite, or they hold board positions. They climb the corporate ladder, so to speak.
• Leadership effectiveness – Effective leaders build high-performing teams. They can create and maintain a team that produces results. An effective leader is judged by the success of the team’s accomplishments.

Studying leadership emergence isn’t too difficult. If you survey the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, you’ll find that most leaders are men named John who have strong political skills. Studying leadership effectiveness is much more difficult. Team results are hard to quantify because more than just the leader is involved in what makes a team successful in an organizational context.

Compared to the average leadership memoir or academic study, what we think about leadership at Hogan sounds quite different. “It’s about leading organizations to success,” said Ryne.

Personality and Leadership

Personality data are quite predictive of who becomes an emergent leader but are much less definite about who becomes an effective leader.

Personality and the Emergent Leader

In terms of the Big Five or the five-factor model, there is strong metanalytic evidence for who tends to become an emergent leader or who gains status in an organization. Broadly, this person has high emotional stability, high extraversion, high openness to experience, and high conscientiousness. Agreeableness was unrelated to getting into leadership positions.

“When you combine the Big Five personality traits, we see a strong prediction of who’s going to become a leader. Personality predicts leadership emergence really well,” Ryne said.

Personality and the Effective Leader

Leadership effectiveness is, as we said, difficult to measure. Objective data, such as stock market value, are influenced by many factors other than organizational leadership. Intangible characteristics, such as integrity, business competence, good judgment, and vision, are related to personality but aren’t quite the same thing.

What constitutes good criteria for determining leadership effectiveness?

Hogan and Kaiser Leadership Solutions, one of our solutions partners, studied thousands of top leaders in the US and Europe using 360-degree feedback data. The leaders were rated on a single item of overall effectiveness by their subordinates, peers, and supervisors (if they had any). “It’s just simply from one to 10, how effective is this person as a leader?” Ryne explained. “If people who know you and work with you on a daily basis say you’re effective, then that probably means you’re effective.”

Ryne said he was stunned by the unexpected results. The data showed that personality is only weakly related to leadership effectiveness . . . but that’s only half the interpretation.

Personality data predicts behavior extremely well. It predicts if you’re likely to be too forceful, too demanding, too enabling, too strategic, too operational—it predicts leadership ineffectiveness. “Personality is much better at predicting the ways leaders go wrong than the ways they go right,” Ryne said.

Leadership effectiveness isn’t necessarily about having specific personality characteristics but about balancing those different behaviors. In other words, it’s about versatility. Ryne continued: “Effective leaders are versatile leaders. To be a versatile leader, you have to adapt your behavior. You can’t just stick to one strategy all the time.”

There is no one, single personality profile for leadership effectiveness because leaders who cannot or do not adapt their behavior aren’t effective. Versatility is the key, not the ability to focus on operational details or to push for results. Knowing how to adapt to the situation, including when to act against your natural tendencies, is what makes leaders effective. At Hogan, we call this strategic self-awareness.

How to Find Effective Leaders

Effective leaders understand their strengths, weaknesses, and behavioral tendencies. These leaders have the strategic self-awareness first to know when their usual mode of behavior is less advantageous and then to self-correct. Based on past experiences that challenged their natural inclinations, they can leverage adaptive behavioral skills to be tactical when they need to be tactical and strategic when they need to be strategic.

If someone is a strong operational leader, for example, they have likely gained a role where their organizational skills, compliance, process focus, and conscientiousness about details and rules have paid off for them and their teams. In some circumstances, though, it would benefit them, their team, and their organization if they emphasized strategy and adopted a long-term focus. An effective leader knows when that shift is required and brings contextual balance by adapting their behavior and relying on the strengths of others.

How should organizations go about choosing their leaders, then?

Be wary of charisma, which is predictive of leadership emergence. The most obvious candidate for a leadership position may be able to bring strategic vision but fall short on effective leadership. Don’t place too much emphasis on emergent characteristics like political aptitude.

Use assessments to determine alignment between a person’s strengths and weaknesses as a leader and the current organizational needs. Consider the right characteristics and skills to help you solve problems in the short term and grow in the long term. Finally, consider which people can adapt and flex when the situation calls for it.

Look for future leaders from within. High-potential leaders are people who understand the business well, have a history of good judgment, and are trusted by their teams and peers. They are people others are willing to follow. “I wouldn’t be looking for a particular personality profile,” Ryne said. “I would be saying, ‘Given your individual personality profile, how can I develop you personally to be more effective as we move you into a leadership role?’”

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 70 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

You’re giving feedback during a debrief, and suddenly the leader goes quiet. You can feel the rapport evaporate. This unpredictable shift caught you by surprise, and you wish you could have anticipated it in preparing for the feedback session. Predicting feedback resistance is not impossible, however, with all the Hogan personality data you have at your fingertips.

Hogan practitioners can successfully navigate feedback sessions and ongoing development discussions with leaders who compartmentalize or resist feedback, turning resistance into receptivity. Practitioners need to be aware of the likelihood of feedback resistance while interpreting results and during the session itself. By understanding the characteristics that might dispose people to resist feedback, practitioners can purposefully direct a feedback session toward a positive and empowering outcome: helping leaders cultivate strategic self-awareness and behavioral modification strategies to improve their performance.

In this article, we will cover five types of feedback resistance. The hostile, defensive, arrogant, and indifferent feedback resistance types all tend to be individual, while the fifth type, cultural, emerges from the organizational environment. Our next article about feedback will cover strategies for overcoming feedback resistance.

Let’s dive right in.

Types of Feedback Resistance

Certain scores or scale combinations on the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), Hogan Development Survey (HDS), and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) might point to a likelihood of feedback resistance. For instance, someone who scores moderate (70%–89%) or high (90%–100%) on the HDS Cautious scale may resist change in how they work. By no means does this imply that every person with a high Cautious score will seem defensive during feedback or development. It does, however, indicate that a Hogan practitioner should deliver feedback mindfully, taking care to ask questions and demonstrate openness.

Note that the following overview of types of feedback resistance is not exhaustive. Neither are the scale scores we highlight for each type. Remember, feedback resistance is as unique and complex as each personality.

Hostile

Someone who offers hostile feedback resistance may have some combination of these scale scores: low Ambition (HPI), high Excitable (HDS), high Skeptical (HDS), and low Altruistic (MVPI).

Negative performance implications associated with low Ambition are lack of vision, energy, and drive, and lower confidence, which may cause them to view change as too hard. High Excitable is associated with moodiness, feeling easily frustrated and disappointed, emotional volatility, and being prone to quit in frustration. Someone with a high Skeptical score may take criticism personally and seem tense, upset, or angry. A person who scores low on the Altruistic scale can be perceived as tough, assertive, forceful, outspoken, and willing to confront problems.

Depending on the unique circumstances of a feedback session—up to and including the leader’s momentary frame of mind—hostile resistance might manifest as argumentation, emotional outbursts, or rejection.

Defensive

Defensive feedback resistance might be more likely in a leader who has some combination of these scale scores: low Adjustment (HPI), low Interpersonal Sensitivity (HPI), low Learning Approach (HPI), high Excitable, high Skeptical, and high Science (MVPI).

Someone who scores low on the Adjustment scale, while generally responsive to coaching and feedback, might seem overly self-critical, stress-prone, and anxious. Negative performance implications of low Interpersonal Sensitivity are criticism and skepticism. A low Learning Approach score may indicate an intolerance of development and a belief that traditional or non-skills-based learning is unpleasant or unhelpful. High Skeptical and high Science scores together could suggest someone who is suspicious about or mistrustful of claims not backed up by objective, verifiable data.

Defensive feedback resistance likely stems from negative beliefs about the reliability, purpose, or usefulness of development and may emerge in self-deprecation, anxiety, or doubt.

Arrogant

People who exhibit arrogant feedback resistance may have some combination of these scale scores: high Sociability (HPI), high Learning Approach, low Cautious, high Colorful (HDS), and high Recognition (MVPI).

A high Sociability scale score is associated with attention-seeking behavior and competition for the center stage. A high Learning Approach scale score is associated with valuing learning above doing and seeming like a know-it-all. Someone with a low Cautious score is likely to seem comfortable with risk and nonchalant about making mistakes. A high Colorful score may indicate someone who seems self-promoting, overcommitted, easily angered, and quickly bored. A leader with a high Recognition score probably values attention and public acknowledgement and may be described by others as seeming self-important or conceited.

Arrogant feedback resistance may emerge as a disbelief in or denial of the need for change and an attempt to preserve an inflated self-image by using performance, authority, or charm.

Indifferent

Indifferent feedback resistance may appear in someone who has some combination of these scale scores: average or high Adjustment, high Skeptical, high Reserved (HDS), high Leisurely (HDS), and high Imaginative (HDS).

Someone with average Adjustment might seem nonchalant about work, whereas someone with high Adjustment might tend to discount or ignore negative feedback because of strong self-confidence. A person scoring high on the Skeptical scale may seem indifferent to feedback because they are unpersuaded that change is necessary. Negative performance implications of high Reserved scores include interpersonal insensitivity, self-absorption, distant or absent communication, and disinterest in matters perceived as unrelated or unimportant. A person with a high Leisurely score could exhibit passive-resistant behavior by appearing neutral or agreeable but feeling resentful and ignoring feedback. A high Imaginative leader may discount others’ opinions and behave in an eccentric, distractable, or preoccupied manner.

Indifferent feedback resistance in a leader may resemble a lack of enthusiasm, withdrawal, unresponsiveness, distraction, or boredom, and it may also conceal other emotions.

Cultural

In a workplace environment in which individual growth and change are not celebrated, feedback resistance or compartmentalization may be more likely to occur. This may appear in an environment characterized by some combination of these values: low Power (MVPI), low Altruistic, high Tradition (MVPI), and high Security (MVPI).

A culture with low Power values would be unlikely to reward growth and challenge or display interest in achievement. Negative cultural implications of low Altruistic are an emphasis on personal responsibility and self-reliance to the degree that support or resources for development are lacking. A high Tradition culture is comfortable with established procedure and consequently tends to be resistant to change. A high Security culture will tend to favor rules and conformity and resist ambiguity, risk, performance appraisal, and innovation.

Cultural feedback resistance might appear as a lack of support for development or change and a fear of risk or failure.

Getting to Feedback Receptivity

Keep in mind that, for some scales such as Adjustment or Learning Approach, feedback resistance might be a behavior that can emerge with more than one score range. Low Adjustment could be a factor in feedback resistance in one leader, but so could high Adjustment in another. As always, individual self-awareness, the context for development, and scale combinations influence how feedback resistance might appear. After predicting the likelihood and type of feedback resistance that the leader might exhibit, a Hogan practitioner can strategize the best ways to minimize that resistance during a feedback session.

When we perceive and appreciate the everyday personality strengths, potential derailers, and the motives, values, and preferences that underlie individuals’ actions and choices, we gain a more complete picture of how to enable their success.

Look out for our upcoming blog about techniques for overcoming feedback resistance to learn how to personalize feedback to empower leaders.

Tracey DeSilva, vice president of learning and development at Bayer, has accumulated years of experience that have helped her become the trailblazing leader she is today. She credits being intentional in her earlier professional years as one of the main factors in her leadership success.

Focus on Job Skills, Not Job Title

DeSilva says she was intentional about lining up her personal and professional life, while focusing on learning new job skills rather than the job title. While the title may look very appealing to people who aspire to leadership positions, the skills, knowledge, and connections necessary to carry out the responsibilities are more important. Failing to master the necessary skills early in one’s career could potentially delay promotions or lead to failures later as a leader.

Be Visionary—Don’t Micromanage

As her roles became more challenging, DeSilva admits that she found the effort to be visionary to be a worthy one. As a leader, she was responsible for

• creating the vision for her team,
• managing other people’s careers,
• understanding team members’ goals, and
• creating an environment that supports their development.

She describes her leadership style as one that lacks micromanagement. Having a leader that allows team independence is critical for fostering individual professional growth. A leader that inspires the team and provides them with the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them ultimately allows team members the range to develop their own working styles and advance within their careers.

Seek Executive Coaching and Mentorship

Although DeSilva embraces the challenges that come with leadership positions, like many other leaders, she too experiences the inevitable pressure and burnout that comes over time. Investing in mental well-being is critical to coping with burnout, pressures from having to meet wider company goals, and market instability.

DeSilva stresses the importance of mentorship and formal executive coaching. Although leaders can become overwhelmed, they must ensure that they are not placing that burden on their teams. Finding a mentor or coach who is completely objective is key to managing stress and helping leaders effectively deal with workplace pressures.

Thankfully, Bayer agrees with this sentiment and, through its leadership development programs, provided six months of formal coaching and specialized programs to create an environment that encourages health and wellness. Leaders not only encourage their team members to use these programs, but also serve as mentors to colleagues.

Lead Authentic Meetings to Increase Engagement

Leaders such as DeSilva watched themselves and their colleagues undergo changes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In times like this, a leader’s ability to adapt and respond to changes while remaining empathetic is critical.

While companies have ensured that employees have the necessities to work from home, it is up to the leaders to cultivate an authentic feeling of connectedness virtually while increasing engagement.

DeSilva explained that she established new ground rules to create a more authentic feeling for her teammates working virtually. She understands that working from home has meant a shift in priorities for her team members, especially primary caregivers. Although Zoom happy hours started out fun, they often felt too manufactured. Instead, she has made it a priority to regularly reach out for a more personal discussion with each team member. These emotional check-ins not only allow leaders to build relationships, but also understand how their team members are managing ever-changing professional and personal demands.

According to Princeton HR Insight’s 2022 HR Marketing Report, “Senior-level initiatives have an increased focus on leading during times of rapid change and empowering vs. directing to increase the engagement of their teams.”

Final Message to Future Leaders

Be intentional. Focus less on job titles and more on the skills that you will learn in each role. Speak routinely to the people who can influence your career trajectory while actively growing your network. Lean into discomfort and growth, and do not wait to feel fully confident to show up for a new challenge.

Editor’s note: A version of this post was first published by Princeton HR Insight, whose principal consultant Rebecca Feder is a member of the Hogan Coaching Network. Hogan extends special thanks to Shea Clarke of Princeton HR Insight, who authored the original spotlight, and Tracey DeSilva of Bayer for her exemplary leadership.

This post was authored by Hogan Founder Robert Hogan, PhD, and Chief Science Officer Ryne Sherman, PhD, and edited by VP of Market Innovation Allison Howell.

In every area of human endeavor there are people who make a living doing things, and there are people who make a living criticizing what others do. Movie critics, literary critics, music critics, architectural critics, foreign policy critics, and business critics. Elon Musk is indisputably the first camp, but as the world’s richest person, he is a natural target for critique. In recent weeks, Musk has faced enormous criticism for business decisions; however, nothing in his biography suggests Musk is narcissistic, malevolent, or experiencing psychosis.

Who Is Elon Musk?

Musk was born 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. His father, Errol, was a wealthy engineer, entrepreneur, investor, and property developer, and half owner of an emerald mine in Zambia. His mother was Canadian, which allowed him to immigrate to Canada in 1989, and then move to the US in 1991 where he attended the University of Pennsylvania, earning degrees in Physics and Economics.  

In 1994, Musk moved to Palo Alto to attend graduate school at Stanford University, but quickly decided to join the “internet boom.” With his rich and talented brother, and a loan from his father, he founded Zip2, a kind of travel search engine (for which Musk did the coding) and later sold to Compaq for $307 million in cash. He then founded X.com, an online financial services business, merged with Confinity, an online bank that owned PayPal, and then became CEO. Musk fought with Peter Thiel over search engines, was ousted by the board, but made $175.8 million when Theil sold PayPal to eBay in 2002.

In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, a commercial spacecraft business. After a rocky start, a $1.6 billion contract with NASA launched it properly. In 2015 SpaceX started Starlink, a chain of satellites intended to bring internet services to remote locations, and which has been a major resource for the Ukrainian military in their war with Russia.  

In 2004, Musk invested $6.5 million in Tesla, an electric car startup, and then became CEO and product architect in 2008. This move met criticism from those who argued the electric vehicle market had no future and that the larger automotive market was already heavily saturated. At the time of this writing, Tesla is the 6^th most valuable company in the world, just behind Amazon (5^th) and ahead of Berkshire Hathaway (7^th). In 2016, Musk founded Neuralink, a company intended to explore connections between computer driven artificial intelligence and neuroscience. In 2017, Musk founded the Boring Company, a high-tech tunnel boring business. In 2017, Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter, his favorite on-line messaging platform, widely regarded as a valuable but poorly managed business. In 2022, Musk completed the purchase of Twitter amidst huge fanfare and business news chatter. 

Although it is too early to tell how Twitter will perform under Musk’s leadership, we see here an astonishing series of large-scale business development successes. This raises the obvious question:  what sort of person is Elon Musk, the world’s richest person? More specifically, what are the psychological keys to his success? 

What Sort of Person Is Elon Musk?

We think there are three keys, and they fall under the headings of power, structure, and style. Power has to do with cognitive capability; structure has to do with cognitive orientation, and style has to do with interpersonal impact. Concerning power, Musk is very smart and, with a background in physics and economics, he knows more about numbers, technology, and finance than most people. In addition, his business associates say he is remarkably perceptive about forecasting business trends and detecting flaws and biases in other peoples’ reasoning. So, he is very smart and has the capacity to make good decisions—not all otherwise intelligent people do. He is not big on planning; he takes action and evaluates his decisions. Or as he Tweeted on November 9^th:

As for structure, Musk has the same orientation as most entrepreneurs—for whom Hogan has a lot of data. Entrepreneurs, relative to the average person, are analytical, data-based problem solvers, energetic and hardworking (100-hour work weeks are normal), fearless about risk, competitive, and focused on making an impact and a difference. Hard working, fearless, competitive, and achievement oriented—key ingredients for success regardless of cognitive ability.  

Musk describes himself as having Asperger’s syndrome, which has been consolidated under autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and this neurodivergence may affect his interpersonal style. In our experience, ASD is common among engineers, mathematicians, chess players, and entrepreneurs.

People who know Musk describe him as “the life of the party,” and as further testimonial of his vivacity, he hosted the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. Outside of work, he often seems witty, irreverent, and mischievous.

As for Musk’s leadership style and effectiveness, this raises a very interesting question.  Leadership is about building high performing teams, and good leaders are people whom others want to follow. Entrepreneurs as a group are bad leaders—like most managers in finance and engineering, they are interested in results and not peoples’ feelings. Musk describes himself as a demanding “nano-manager,” impatient and quick to find fault. He is action-oriented and doesn’t worry much about staff sensitivities.

Musk isn’t the first leader in the public eye to have a reputation of being difficult. Elsewhere we have talked about “the Apple Paradox”: how can someone as duplicitous and unpleasant as Steve Jobs build a business as successful as Apple? Our answer is twofold. On the one hand, the most critical capacity for CEOs is to make good decisions about products and markets, not worry about peoples’ feelings. On the other hand, good managers below the level of the CEO often protect the staff from the bad behavior of abusive CEOs. We know that Musk is an immensely successful entrepreneur and a mediocre leader—but a mediocre leader compared to whom? Zuckerberg? Bezos? Gates? Welch? Rockefeller?

Finally, then, there is Twitter and how Musk’s recent actions to restructure an underperforming and badly managed company have affected it. Although the previous CEO admitted that Twitter was overstaffed, it seems clear that it was a mistake to fire half the workforce without first evaluating their function and performance. This kind of hasty downsizing creates unnecessary worry and confusion among employees, which is unlikely to contribute to high performance. On the other hand, Musk and his engineers have begun a detailed and granular review of every aspect of the Twitter business and that effort is the essential first step in improving processes and products. Musk himself told his new staff “Revolutions are not done with caution. So we want to try things, ideally things that don’t break the system, but . . . as long as we’re agile, and we react quickly to improve things and correct mistakes, I think it’ll be fine.”

In response to Musk’s takeover and layoffs, many individuals impersonating Musk on Twitter engaged in mocking the new owner. It is worth pointing out that, if the target weren’t the Twitter CEO and richest person in the world, some of this mocking would be declared cyberbullying. Regardless, much of the criticism seems to be inspired by critics of Musk’s political views. But like most entrepreneurs, especially very successful ones, Musk is not backing down. Instead, he’s firing back with his own sarcastic Tweets and changing the rules regarding impersonation accounts. It is difficult to say how the Twitter acquisition will work out for Musk, but if his past business ventures are any indication, it would be hard to bet against him.

Are luxury possessions and speeding tickets indicative of CEOs who will cultivate scandal and commit fraud? They can be. Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, and Blake Loepp, PR manager, spoke with Aiyesha Dey, PhD, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, about how CEO personality influences CEO behavior.

By researching the personal lives of CEOs and their behavior outside of the workplace, Aiyesha has identified data that can be quite predictive of how they may perform on the job.

Let’s dive into how the personality characteristics of materialism and rule breaking can affect CEO behavior.

CEO Personality Matters

Even with systemic fixes and the right incentives, not everyone will behave the same. That’s why corporate scandals still occur despite layers of regulation. Individual managerial styles matter.

“We know managers matter, but what about them is important?” Aiyesha asked. “What should we care about, and how does it matter for corporate outcomes?” Those questions inspired her research into about 1,000 public companies and executives in the US. Her findings? Certain personality characteristics, observable in off-the-job lifestyles of executives, correlate with actions executives take within organizations.¹

Regulators can step in and uncover fraud and scandals after they’ve already taken place—after shareholders have lost resources and employees have lost jobs. The goal of looking at lifestyles of executives is to know some indicators of risk beforehand. Stopping these actions before they take place by using an empirical measure of character is the underlying motivation driving the research.

Understanding CEO Risk Factors

Aiyesha’s research has shown two characteristics that could lead to major corporate blunders: materialism and an inclination toward rule breaking. However, organizations often ignore evidence of these values when hiring CEOs, especially for internal hires. Why?

First, there’s no need to dismiss a CEO candidate because they have multiple luxury assets or a few speeding tickets. They likely bring many other desirable strengths to the table, such as innovation, creativity, and a certain comfort with risk.

“But leaders can be a strong force in establishing the culture of the firm,” Aiyesha pointed out. Someone who breaks rules might inspire a culture that rewards rule breaking, for instance.

Most firms focus on education, experience, and accomplishments in selection. Including behavioral attributes in selection criteria can add to the educational and professional qualifications already in consideration. “Boards can definitely take more cautionary measures in their hiring practices, like expanding background checks for internal candidates,” Aiyesha added.

Repeated legal infractions or a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption are not reasons to dismiss a candidate. Candidates with these behavioral attributes bring very strong upsides to the table, but the attributes can be warning signs about questionable behavior or values. Knowing what strengths and potential shortcomings a person brings to the role is the first step in establishing a system or process to mitigate the individual’s risks.

CEO Behavior: Materialism

Measuring materialism in a CEO can be a challenge. For one, the signs must be observable. For another, the signs must be indicative of values, which is more difficult to discern.

When psychology researchers talk about materialism, they mean a set of values that define how individuals weigh intrinsic motivations, such as spirituality, benevolence, or community, relative to extrinsic motivations, such as image, status, or material possessions. “A very materialistic person will seek material acquisitions at the cost of community values,” Aiyesha said.

Merely possessing a lot of luxury goods is not sufficient to make one materialistic. “When someone has a zeal to pursue material possessions at the cost of the welfare of others and potentially themselves, they are exemplifying a materialistic value system,” Aiyesha said. The observable assets of executives like houses, cars, and yachts compared to their wealth level shows how intent they are on acquiring material possessions. If someone possesses five times the value of luxury assets as another person at the same wealth level, then it’s safe to say they probably have a tendency towards materialism.

Materialism is potentially a problem in a corporate setting if a CEO is willing to waste shareholder resources or damage the welfare of others to get material goods. This value held by a leader affects the values of the organization, as well.

CEO Behavior: Rule Breaking

Like materialism, external rule-breaking behavior speaks to internal values. The underlying construct is a lack of self-control and disregard for rules and laws. If you believe rules don’t apply to you, you’ll be more likely to violate them to achieve your goals.

In looking at executives’ legal records, Aiyesha found that executives with legal infractions had a higher propensity to commit fraud and manipulate earnings numbers than those without. The results were true even for executives with only traffic or speeding violations. “Even minor violations can give an indication of deeper personality differences,” Aiyesha observed.

Here’s a twist: executives with prior legal infractions tend to be involved in committing the fraud themselves, while materialistic executives tend to create a culture where other people are implicated in the fraud.

Given that corporate fraud is an extremely rare event, Aiyesha also looked at the tendency to profit from insider trading. Rule-breaking CEOs profited more; the outsized profitability and lucrative timing suggest that they could have benefited unfairly. There also seems to be a correlation between these profits and the severity of the legal infraction—the more severe, the more profitable.

So, what should organizations do?

How to Hire a CEO

Based on Aiyesha’s research findings, these are the steps that organizations hiring for C-suite positions can take.

In general, boards should not dismiss a candidate simply due to luxury possessions or speeding tickets. They should, however, be aware of the risks that could point to a red flag.

Expanding selection criteria to include background checks and looking at behavioral attributes in addition to professional successes could be useful. Where necessary, organizations can also implement risk management and compliance measures as guardrails. Lastly, organizations can also help executives to develop strategic self-awareness and encourage them to define personal guardrails to manage their behavior.

A Vote for CEO Frugality

“I want to end on a positive note and celebrate another characteristic that is linked to materialism. The opposite of materialism is frugality,” Aiyesha said. “Our research shows very strong consistent results of how frugal executives benefit companies in terms of stewardship of shareholder resources.”

The values of leaders set the culture of organizations. Materialistic or rule-breaking CEOs can tacitly foster an environment of materialism and rule breaking. Frugal CEOs, on the other hand, tend to have tighter controls and risk management systems. They tend to take a long-term focus and shape ethical cultures. These CEOs tend to focus on socially responsible activities.

“Creating a culture of frugality in organizations, either through hiring that mindset or by celebrating such an attitude so that it inspires everyone to have this notion, can take companies a long way in creating shareholder values,” Aiyesha said.

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 58 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

Reference

1. Dey, A. (2022, July). When Hiring CEOs, Focus on Character. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/07/when-hiring-ceos-focus-on-character

A few months ago, we closed out a year-long senior leadership development program with a multibillion-dollar organization. This organization is going through one of the largest transformations in recent US history. As a result, its leaders faced the potential challenge of their job roles changing underneath them. Our leadership development program included a facilitation, the Hogan personality assessments, 360-degree assessments (specifically, the Hogan 360), coaching, a capstone project, and more. For the closing session, the organization’s CEO was on the call with 15 of organization’s top leaders. One by one, the leaders gave feedback that the assessment was the program’s most important element to their development.

I wasn’t surprised.

I believe that a key to our success was combining the Hogan Personality Inventory, the Hogan Development Survey, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory with a 360-degree assessment. Using the Hogan 360 and the Hogan personality assessments, we created custom leader dashboards that integrated the results of both types of assessments. These were designed to show leaders where they should focus their development now and in the future.

After the program concluded, one of the leaders I debriefed hand-wrote a two-page letter to my office that called the experience life-changing. She had been struggling with difficult issues with a few people she was leading, and the 360-degree assessments bore that out. But her Hogan personality assessment results helped her understand the personality characteristics and drivers that were leading to her frustrations, offering a path forward. The leader was also looking toward a promotion into the C-suite, and she said the Hogan 360 gave her a great view of what to work on now. Meanwhile, the Hogan results helped her identify what she would need to focus on in a different role in a different context.

It also did not surprise me that the leader was able to address the challenges with her direct reports and get on track for a C-suite role. A key element of successful leadership development is helping leaders cultivate strategic self-awareness. Building strategic self-awareness through feedback helps leaders get a view of how others perceive them. With this knowledge, they can target behaviors for change, internalize those changes, and seek more feedback. This is why, in picking an assessment tool, sometimes the best answer is to use more than one.

Combining Assessment Tools for Leadership Development

The most common tool used in leadership development to help leaders understand how they are perceived and build self-awareness is the 360-degree assessment. The 360-degree assessment allows leaders to rate themselves and compare their self-assessment to the ratings of their managers, peers, direct reports, and other key stakeholders.

Personality assessments help close the gap between 360-degree assessments, which focus on competencies, and all the dimensions that play a role in building strong leaders. If you imagine an iceberg, experiences and competencies are the observable and measurable behaviors and skills above the water line. But most of the iceberg is below the waterline — that’s where we find personality characteristics and values that are harder to see and develop. Combining the two tools can provide robust “whole-person” feedback to a leader.

Another powerful aspect of combining 360-degree assessments and personality assessments is perspective. Feedback from a 360-degree assessment gives leaders a snapshot view from a particular group of people in their current job context and at a particular point in time. Well-validated personality assessments, on the other hand, are stable and predictive of performance. These provide a motion-picture view by characterizing a person’s reputation in multiple contexts over time.

Six Benefits of Combining 360-Degree Assessments with Personality Assessments

Taking this combined approach ensures organizations and leaders receive a strong return on investment for their time, effort, and money by giving leaders a robust view of the entire “iceberg,” not just what’s visible above the surface. Here are six other specific benefits of the combined approach.

1. Diversity and inclusion–informed feedback – From a diversity and inclusion perspective, 360s present some challenges. Research has shown the potential for bias in rater feedback. For example, some studies have suggested women tend to rate themselves harder than others, raters tend to rate women harder than men, and women tend to receive more vague feedback.ⁱ This is one reason 360s should not be used as selection tools. Scientifically validated personality assessments, such as the Hogan assessments, have no adverse impact based on race, gender, or national origin. These can show how people are likely to be seen without the unconscious bias that shows up in the limited pool of people rating the leader. It is essential, both with 360s and personality assessments, to disclose these facts to clients.
2. Integrated feedback and custom dashboards – As with all assessments, integrating the feedback for participants is critical to identifying what leaders need to focus on in their current job and organizational context, as well as for roles they may seek in the future. This can be done both through the feedback process itself and by writing custom dashboards. Dashboards should provide leaders with an overview of the snapshot to focus on now, the motion picture view for the future, and two to three narrow areas of focus for development.
3. Focused feedback – There are so many scales and so little time — both for the feedback debrief and for leaders who are looking to capitalize on those results. Collecting information about job and organizational context and viewing résumés in advance can help you identify the most important things to focus on for the leader.
4. Evidence-based assessments – Not all assessments are created equally. In both personality assessments and 360s, it’s important to look for tools that have strong normative data backing them. Second, they should have research behind them that demonstrates validity. And third, they should be based on a proven competency framework with data to connect it to leadership success. Many type indicators are marketed as personality assessments, but they often provide leaders only with an “inside view” of themselves. That is, this type of assessment tends to show leaders how they think about themselves, not necessarily how others see them. A strong personality assessment should provide an “outside view” of the leader. This is the leader’s reputation, which is what affects career success.
5. Competency mapping between the assessments – One great way to use the tools together is to map the competencies on the 360-degree assessment to personality characteristics and drivers on the personality assessments. A leader may struggle in one area on the 360 but have some personality characteristics that correlate to strength in that competency. The leader can leverage those characteristics for development.
6. Comparing differences – Personality assessment results describe how others are likely to see a person. Results from a 360 describe how specific people — managers, peers, direct reports, and other stakeholders — see the person. Try comparing personality results to the leader’s self-assessment on the 360-degree assessment and the results from the different rater groups. It can be powerful to talk with a leader about the specific personality characteristics and values that a broader group of people will likely see but that may not be showing up in the 360 feedback. How can these differences in results inform their development?

With the snapshot and the motion picture, leaders gain the power to focus on development strategies for now and the future. While the Hogan assessments and 360-degree assessments can be powerful tools individually, sometimes — like cookies and milk or apples and caramel — two things are better together.

This blog post was authored by Jayson Blair, a member of the Hogan Coaching Network.

Editor’s Note

i. Hogan has done research on rater feedback using the Hogan 360, specifically. Comparing rater feedback for men and rater feedback for women, Hogan’s researchers did not find any significant bias against either gender in Hogan 360 data.