Derailers, in Hogan terms, are everyday personality strengths that can become overused—particularly during times of increased stress, pressure, or complacency. When we stop monitoring our strengths, our behaviors can become detrimental. Someone who tends to be supportive and loyal to authority, for example, could begin to seem excessively deferential and ingratiating. Derailment in the individual sense could hold a person back from performing well or achieving occupational goals. But what happens when the whole team derails?

Team derailment can take various forms, depending on the composition of the team’s derailers. Team members might seem apathetic or disengaged. They might stall or miss deadlines. They might produce low-quality work. They might show indifference or resistance to innovation. They might lack alignment on goals or exhibit internal mistrust. However team derailment manifests, it can damage trust and destroy efficiency.

One common cause of team derailment is change fatigue, which can be described as “emotional fatigue from the recent avalanche of change.”¹ Global, cultural, social, and local change has been so widespread in recent years that teams now struggle to tolerate organizational change—even minor changes that they used to adapt to with ease.

In other words, experiencing too much change within a short timeframe has affected our collective stress tolerance. Read on as we explore change fatigue, two types of team derailment, and how versatile leaders can restore team balance.

What Is Change Fatigue?

Change fatigue can occur when people experience a volatile, unpredictable, complex, and uncertain (VUCA) environment. It can emerge when nothing seems constant or reliable and when individuals are required to flex and adapt too often over a long period of time. The effects of change fatigue can include increased stress, decreased flexibility, and difficulty navigating change.

Teams can become susceptible to change fatigue when their overall versatility is naturally low or has been weakened in a VUCA environment. Leadership consultant Rob Kaiser defines versatility as “the ability to read and respond to change with a wide repertoire of complementary perspectives, skills, and behaviors.”² This characteristic is an essential socioemotional skill in the modern workplace. It’s also a key aspect of successful leadership, which we define as the ability to build and maintain high-performing teams. Versatility is tied to these four leadership competencies: (1) Dealing with Ambiguity, (2) Anticipating Problems, (3) Flexibility, and (4) Driving Change.

On an individual level, people navigate change differently according to their personality characteristics. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) scale Adjustment concerns composure and how we manage stress. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) scale Excitability measures behaviors ranging from emotional calmness to emotional explosiveness.

Other Hogan scales may also indicate how likely we are to resist or embrace change. The HPI scale Prudence measures flexibility and tolerance of ambiguity. The HDS scales Skeptical and Cautious regard trust and risk tolerance respectively. The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) scale Tradition relates to attitudes toward progress and principles, and the MVPI scale Security relates to attitudes toward structure and predictability.

A team’s ability to tolerate change can impact its collective success. How can a team mitigate the risk of change fatigue? And what can leaders do if the team has already derailed?

How Do Teams Derail?

Hogan Director of Professional Services Jennifer Lowe, MA, describes team derailment as derailers “going haywire.” An expert in team development sessions, Lowe emphasizes the role of the HDS and MVPI in understanding what divides teams and what can bring them together again.

Two Types of Team Derailment

The eleven HDS scales measure strengths that can become overused when change fatigue or other factors lessen people’s ability to monitor their behavior. There are two types of team derailment, which often occur at the same time:

• Shared derailment – Many team members may share an elevation on an HDS scale. This shared derailer can impact the team’s reputation. A Reserved team in derailment may be seen as siloed, unavailable, or uninvolved. A Bold team in derailment will likely appear arrogant, ambitious, entitled, and limit-testing.
• Individual derailment – When a team operates in derailer mode, its team members’ unique elevated HDS scales may all be in derailment. The various individual derailers tend to intensify each other. When a high Bold team member arrogantly tests limits, a high Reserved team member responds with withdrawal and isolation. All these simultaneously out-of-control derailers usually result in underperformance, misalignment, and poor communication.

When a team is overwhelmed by change, team members probably won’t manage their derailers as effectively as they might during times of stability. So what can help? The solutions to addressing team derailment and change fatigue can be found in shared values—and versatile leadership.

The Role of Shared Values

While the HDS can identify how the team is derailing, using the MVPI to explore shared values can help identify why. When Lowe addresses change fatigue in a team development session, she usually starts with the HDS and ends with the MVPI. “Teams tend to perform better if there are a couple of things that pull them together,” Lowe explained.

The 10 values measured on the MVPI can reveal what grounds a team. They can also indicate what shared values might improve communication. Shared values help team members recognize how everyone works together so that change doesn’t feel so challenging.

Lowe has a story about a team development session that illustrates how values affect team alignment. Once, she conducted a team session for the chief information officer of a US financial company. Personality data from the team members showed that about 70% of them scored high on the MVPI Security scale and about 30% scored low. Furthermore, the team leader had the overall lowest score on Security. The Security scale is associated with valuing certainty and predictability and minimizing risk and criticism.

During the session, the team created a metaphor to describe their team dynamics. The team compared themselves to a soccer team full of players who couldn’t admit to the coach that they needed some time on the bench. The low-scoring leader tended to take chances, test limits, and make quick changes, while the high-scoring team valued caution and consistency. Using these insights, Lowe challenged the leader and team to have a frank conversation about how each perceived and valued change.

It’s incumbent on leaders to set the example for how the team navigates change. Leaders who understand derailers and values can empower team members to feel secure and confident in themselves, their teammates, and their leader.

What Can Leaders Do About Change Fatigue?

Leadership isn’t a job title—it’s accomplishing goals by means of team performance. The responsibility for team efficiency, communication, and coherence ultimately belongs to the leader.

Leaders of teams who are derailing from change fatigue can implement these four action steps to help restore team unity:

Build Self-Awareness – A leader’s unchecked derailers tend to set off a chain reaction of derailers in team members. Take steps to exercise strategic self-awareness and learn to manage your derailers. Develop a repertoire of behavioral strategies to rely on for building relationships and communication.

Show Transparency – A leader who is transparent about their own vulnerabilities and derailing tendencies contributes to the team’s sense of connection and belonging. When team cohesion is strong, individual employees have nearly twice the capacity to handle change than those in teams with lower team cohesion.³

Be Consistent – Limit unnecessary changes to avoid inundating an overwhelmed team with constantly or suddenly changing priorities. When change is necessary, set expectations by introducing change with the right tone.⁴ It’s important to frame the plan as an adaptable blueprint that is expected to flex.

Pace Yourself – “Know when to set strategy on hold to create space for well-being,” Lowe says. Sometimes you need to slow down now to speed back up later.

References

1. Peregrine, M. (2022, July 22). Change Fatigue and Organizational Culture—A Critical Call for Leadership. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelperegrine/2022/07/22/change-fatigue-and-organizational-culture-a-critical-call-for-leadership/
2. 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
3. Baker, M. (2020, October 14). How to Reduce the Risk of Employee Change Fatigue. Gartner Insights. https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/how-to-reduce-the-risk-of-employee-change-fatigue
4. Duffy, M. W., & Fosslien, L. (2022, May 4). Managers, What Are You Doing About Change Exhaustion? Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/05/managers-what-are-you-doing-about-change-exhaustion

Corporate team building done right can make productivity skyrocket. Maximizing team potential starts with understanding how personality influences our behavior at work.

Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, and Blake Loepp, PR manager, spoke with Jennifer Lowe, MA, director of professional services at Hogan, about how to build a successful team and maximize team potential.

High-performing teams play a critical role in overall organizational performance. Personality sits at the core of team success.

Let’s dive into what makes corporate teams successful, how to build trust in a team, how personality influences teams, and more.

Characteristics of Successful Teams

Successful teams—the high-performing ones full of camaraderie—have these foundational qualities in common:

• a high level of trust
• transparent communication
• clear goals
• a focus on psychological safety

Members of effective teams trust each other and communicate well with each other. “When I get in the room with many leadership teams, I pretty immediately know how the session is going to go,” Jennifer said. The level of team trust is apparent in team members’ interactions. To fulfill team potential, team members need alignment on what matters and clarity about what the objectives are.

In successful teams, team members can offer constructive criticism about an idea without worrying that they’re putting their careers at risk. This characteristic of successful teams is part candid communication and part psychological safety.

It all circles back to trust. “We’re a team together and a team apart,” Jennifer said. “We can support the vision and mission of both the team and the broader organization.”

Challenges to Fulfilling Team Potential

Understanding team challenges is important for fulfilling team potential. According to Jennifer, teams that struggle often have a lack of clarity about the mission. Nothing derails a team faster than mismatched objectives. This could be caused by individuals having different objectives or by team objectives that have increased or changed.

Another common team challenge is when the team acts with too much aspiration and sets unreachable goals. A highly innovative or ambitious team can aim for big results at the risk of overlooking the tactical details of their ideas or failing to communicate their vision to others. Overambitious teams benefit from pragmatic members who will ensure the team’s ideas are actionable.

Teams get derailed when they fail to acknowledge the natural evolution or dissolution of a team. For instance, a team might meet on Tuesdays at 3:00 p.m. because they always have. However, they may not be the right task force to accomplish a new objective—and nobody wants to be the person to say so.

“It’s so interesting how powerful something like auditing the communications of the team and action planning can be,” Jennifer added.

How Personality Influences Team Performance

The Hogan personality tests measure reputation: how we communicate with others, how we make decisions, our sense of urgency, and much more. “When we leverage a personality assessment within teams, it tells us collectively how the team shows up, the way they communicate, and what they’re known for within their organization,” Jennifer said. 

A reputational awareness exercise can help team members understand how they are seen by other business units. It also allows the team to build trust and define their operating norms, overall trends, and themes within the team. Team development reveals individual strengths and potential performance challenges, as well as how those impact team performance.

Personality can also influence division of labor within a team. Teams maximize performance when all members capitalize on their strengths to support the whole. Personality data allows team members to unpack how each other operates and how they will engage day to day.

“Understanding how personality can impact team performance helps people understand each other better,” Jennifer said.

Best Practices for Team Development

Every team development initiative requires a customized approach based on team dynamics. When an organization asks Hogan for help maximizing team potential, the Hogan team begins with discovery. Who’s on the team, and what are the goals of team development? Are there new team members, or is there a new team leader? Is the goal to encourage team connection, or is it to refine team strategy?

Before the team session, individual team members should understand their personal strengths, challenges, and values. Well-validated personality tests are useful to communicate this information objectively. This can help set the stage for team development.

“Maximizing team potential starts with individual self-awareness,” Jennifer said. “We want to know what a successful outcome looks like—what the team is trying to achieve—but we also want the individuals within the team to focus on self-awareness.”

Effective team development sessions end with action planning. Understanding how individual strengths fit within the team culture won’t cause any change unless the team commits to actions that drive them toward higher performance.

Team Building Tips for Leaders

If you’re building a team from scratch, start with selecting the right members for the team. A strong selection process is one that is based on data-driven talent insights and behavioral characteristics that will best support the team’s key goals.

Another point to consider when building a brand-new team is whether it’s needed at all. A team is not a solution to every problem, so be sure you are clear on why the team is necessary and what its objectives are. Ask whether you are building a team for the right reasons.

If you, the leader, are the new element in the team, don’t underestimate the impact of your predecessor and yourself on the team’s culture. Culture is set by the values of leaders, so a new leader changes the dynamic of the team even more than new team members do.

If you fear your team is dysfunctional, identify likely causes for derailment. Jennifer explained, “If a team is operating in derailer mode, it may be that they have change fatigue, have reorganized too many times, or are uncertain about objectives.” To improve performance, go back to the basics: the team’s objective, its communication, its culture, and individual self-awareness.

“Teams that make the biggest improvements towards their full potential make these changes part of their day-to-day interactions within the team,” Jennifer said.

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 55 of The Science of Personality. Never miss an episode by following us anywhere you get podcasts. Cheers, everybody!

We may use the words “groups” and “teams” interchangeably, but they are not synonymous terms.

Groups and teams are functionally and psychologically different from each other, just as group members and team members have different needs and goals. In fact, differentiating between groups and teams is an essential first step in leading and developing each one successfully.

Here’s how to know whether you’ve got a group or a team—and what to do about it.

Group or Team: Know the Difference

Groups and teams differ in how they achieve goals. One is driven by multiple individual goals and the other by a single collective goal.

What Is a Group?

A group is a collection of individuals who have separate goals, do independent work, and succeed or fail based on their individual efforts.

An example of a group is a regional sales function in which each rep’s goal depends entirely on individual effort, not collaboration with other sales reps. The sales function’s success in the region is measured by the sum of the reps’ independent achievements; requiring reps to work more collaboratively would be unlikely to affect financial performance.

Group development calls for leaders to ensure that members have access to the same information and resources, stay engaged, possess the necessary skills, and achieve individual goals.

What Is a Team?

A team is three or more people who have a common goal. A team’s ability to achieve that goal is dependent on its members who share common leadership and success or failure. The members also see themselves as belonging to the team; this mental model identifies them as team members and frames their interpretation of events.

An example of a team is a collective of people with cross-functional expertise working toward a shared goal, such as a team of technical experts asked to solve a problem collaboratively.

In addition to similar requirements for group development, team development requires leaders to ensure that team members identify with the team, hold their goals and the criteria for their success in common, and cooperate.

Team Roles

Building a healthy, high-functioning team is not easy. It requires balance between people’s actual jobs and their strengths within the group. These two qualities are differentiated as functional roles and psychological roles.

Functional roles are dictated by people’s titles and reflect their professional expertise, such as front-end web developer, graphic designer, social media manager, or user experience strategist.

Psychological roles, on the other hand, are influenced by the individual strengths of the team members. One person is good at fostering collaboration, for example, while another excels at overseeing processes. Strengths in anticipating problems or in promoting realistic solutions are linked more closely to personality than to job training.

A team performs best when a team’s members are balanced among five areas of strengths:

• Innovation – anticipates problems, identifies trends and patterns, recognizes the need for adaptation, and generates creative solutions
• Pragmatism – promotes realistic, practical approaches and offers counterarguments to refine ideas
• Process – oversees the rules of implementation, the details of execution, and the use of organized systems to complete tasks
• Relationships – takes responsibility for collaboration within the team and understands how outside stakeholders may perceive the team
• Results – takes responsibility for the team’s outcomes by communicating ideas, processes, progress, and problems to the team

Without harmony among a team’s strengths, the team is unlikely to operate at its highest efficiency and may become imbalanced or even dysfunctional. Leaders of high-functioning teams understand how to manage and develop team members based on how their strengths interact.

The Characteristics of High-Performing Teams

Personality affects the success of teams in terms of team balance, team derailers, and team leadership.

Team Balance

Achieving the right mix of skills, experience, and personality is the key to creating a productive team and satisfied workforce.

A high-performing team is a balanced team. Starting a game of baseball with just eight pitchers and four center fielders would be difficult. Likewise, a team with eight people encouraging team cooperation and four people focused on team outcomes is unlikely to function smoothly.

Team leaders who can assess team balance in terms of strengths can forestall unnecessary struggle and conflict. When team strengths are even and adequate, this is the foundation for a high-performing team.

Team Derailers

Besides the need to keep a balance of personalities on a team, teams face other derailers that stem from personality tendencies and from low employee engagement.

Performance challenges arise when individuals are under stress. Every personality has dark-side tendencies, or derailers, that may express themselves if team members become dysregulated. For instance, people who score high on the Cautious scale on the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), which measures characteristics under stress, can be resistant to change and reluctant to take chances. They can derail a team subtly by avoiding making decisions, rejecting innovation because of the perceived likelihood of failure, or altogether abandoning challenging tasks.

Potential team derailers are also associated with employees who are not engaged. According to Hogan Founder Robert Hogan, PhD, “When employees are engaged, they like their jobs, they work hard at their jobs, they take initiative, and they show loyalty.” Actively disengaged team members can seriously fracture the team dynamic because they may allow their psychological or functional role within the team to lapse.

Team Leadership

Another component of personality that affects team success or failure is team leadership. An effective team leader is one who can manage the team to deliver results, an accomplishment that cannot be achieved without trust.

Trustworthy team leaders are predictable, empathetic, resilient, and humble. They do not behave erratically, they understand people’s emotions, they remain calm under stress, and they forego charisma and arrogance to share credit for collective effort. All these tendencies, which are tied to personality, can be enhanced by deliberate, habitual practice, yet it is also true that well-validated personality data can predict the perceived trustworthiness of leaders and thus their likelihood to lead teams well.

Merely knowing the difference between groups and teams isn’t enough to keep leaders and team members engaged. To grow high-performing teams, organizations need to offer talent development opportunities that are proven to improve engagement and productivity.

The research is clear: Highly effective teams drive organizational performance.¹ When a highly effective team comes together to accomplish a goal, the unique skills and characteristics of each team member work together in concert to produce work that no person could accomplish alone. The astronauts of Apollo 11 worked together to land on the moon, and famous bands such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones collaborated to produce music that will never be forgotten. While these examples of teams made great achievements, many teams fail to be successful.

Patrick Lencioni’s famous model of the five dysfunctions of a team seeks to explain what might cause a team to struggle to succeed. Lencioni proposes that, at the most fundamental level, an absence of trust can lead to serious issues in a team.² Research has confirmed this repeatedly.³ Among other things, a lack of trust can lead to a loss of job satisfaction and poor communication at the individual level, as well as low team commitment and performance at the team level.⁴ Therefore, team trust has ramifications beyond the team.

While research has proven this, the importance of trust within a team is an intuitive concept. A person who does not trust their teammates might be less likely to share new ideas, reach out for support, engage in productive conflict, or to rely on others to make contributions. This behavior will inevitably hinder team performance. Teams whose members are afraid to share new ideas, for example, will have a difficult time coming up with innovative solutions for challenging problems.

Given the importance of team trust, here are three ways that you can improve trust within your team.

Consider Hogan Scales

Scores on the Hogan personality assessments can provide insight into potential barriers for building trust within teams. For example, individuals with high scores on the Skeptical scale of the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) can be less likely to trust others. When they’re under stress or not self-monitoring, they might assume others have ulterior motives. Providing this insight to individuals who score high on the Skeptical scale can be a first step to fight against the tendency to shut others out and develop a plan to help them foster trust.

While Skeptical is a good example of a scale that can be used to build trust, several other scales can be used to help build team trust as well. Notably, these include the HDS Bold scale, which measures the tendency to resist feedback and appear arrogant, and the HDS Excitable scale, which measures the tendency to appear temperamental and critical when under stress.

Set Recurring Meetings

Trust is built over time and cannot happen when team members aren’t interacting. Setting up recurring meetings for the team to communicate can help build trust. Sharing updates on work projects might can allow for team members to collaborate and share expertise, which aids in building trust. In addition, socializing might help foster a culture of vulnerability, which can also help to build trust.

Model Transparency

Mistakes happen, and everyone on the team will inevitably make them. To leverage these mistakes for trust building, demonstrate and encourage transparency. Sharing mistakes as a leader sets the stage for the rest of your team to follow suit. As team members start to share mistakes, others can offer encouragement, support, and help when appropriate. Over time, a culture of transparency will begin to develop, which is critical for developing team trust.

While considering Hogan scales, setting recurring meetings, and modeling transparency are important for building team trust, these are not one-off solutions. Creating a plan for implementing these practices and adhering to them is necessary. Failure to follow through will hardly impact team trust in a positive way, so developing a plan and having the team hold itself accountable is crucial when implementing these practices. For sustainable change, consistency is key.

References

1. Richter, A. W., Dawson, J. F., & West, M. A. (2011). The Effectiveness of Teams in Organizations: A Meta-Analysis. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 22(13), 2749–2769. doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2011.573971
2. Lencioni, P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass.
3. De Jong, B. A., Dirks, K. T., & Gillespie, N. (2016). Trust and Team Performance: A Meta-Analysis of Main Effects, Moderators, and Covariates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1134–1150. doi.org/10.1037/apl0000110
4. Costa, A. C., Fulmer, C. A., & Anderson, N. R. (2017). Trust in Work Teams: An Integrative Review, Multilevel Model, and Future Directions. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(2), 169–184. doi.org/10.1002/job.2213

Imagine the final minute of a national championship match. The fate of the game relies on the final scoring opportunity. The top player receives the ball, and the coach is counting on this player to take the winning shot. Instead, the player passes the ball to a teammate, who shoots and misses. The team loses.

Scenarios like this are common in the world of sports. What causes the star player to pass instead of shoot? It’s likely personality, a little-considered factor impacting the performance of athletes, teams, and coaches. Determining the cause of a decision such as the one made by this star player requires the consideration of individual differences and how they impact team dynamics and overall performance.

The Hogan Assessment Systems suite of personality assessments enables coaches and athletes to strategically identify developmental opportunities beyond physical training. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) offers insights to how everyday personality characteristics impact performance, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) provides a look at extreme personality displays with the potential to hinder performance, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) describes performance drivers.

Personality, Self-awareness, and Development

The use of personality tests to identify and drive talent development initiatives is prevalent across industries. In the sports and recreation industry, personality tests are gaining momentum. In turn, consultants versed in Hogan’s assessments are successfully advancing individual and team performance.

Understanding the personalities of athletes and coaches provides insight for people to overcome tendencies for undesirable behavior that can hinder individual and team performance. Personality tests can help athletes and coaches gain self-awareness to adjust their behavior and improve performance. Hogan’s core assessments provide unique insights that establish a baseline for these developmental opportunities.

Hogan researchers collaborated with Srdjan Vukcevic, CEO and executive coach of Blue Coach, to explore personality in a sports context. Vukcevic and his team apply personality-based initiatives for athlete and coach development. Conducted in collaboration with the Montenegrin Olympic Committee, their research on sports performance and observations of team success (or lack thereof) shows clear evidence of the influential role of personality in individual performance and social team interactions.

Personality of Athletes

Blue Coach works with national and professional teams in European countries with smaller populations. The size of these populations limits the number of players available to build high-functioning teams. According to famed Montenegrin water polo coach Petar Porobic, “When you don’t have a large pool of players, you need to work with them.” In other words, small player pools require strategic methods to develop available athletes. This created an opportunity for Blue Coach to promote growth based on self-awareness of personality characteristics that are important for, or detrimental to, athletic success. Vukcevic emphasizes that the personality of players does not change, but identifying characteristics relevant to success in a specific sport or position can help drive personnel initiatives.

Each player brings a unique personality to the team, and certain personality profiles can be more successful in one position over another. For example, Blue Coach consultants recognized the best handball wings on a premier women’s handball team scored high on the HDS Excitable scale.¹ “These girls are on fire,” Vukcevic explains, referencing a song by singer Alicia Keys. “They are quick and in an instant can steal the ball, take off, and score.” This intensity results from high HDS Excitable scores and improves performance in the position. In contrast, these same tendencies would be detrimental to a more central member of the team. “These high scores would be dangerous for the main player; she needs to have a clear head.”

Blue Coach and its team of consultants also link personality to practice behavior and game performance. They found, in general, the best athletes tend to score higher on the HPI Prudence and HDS Diligent² scales, making them more likely to be self-motivated and focused during practice. Athletes who score lower on these scales tend to require constant reminders to practice and complete drills, especially when the coach is not present to keep them accountable.

Although some characteristics can improve performance, others can cause athletes to become less effective. For example, Blue Coach suspects lower scores on MVPI Power³ represent a lack of competitiveness (e.g., a player avoiding the game-winning shot when they are the most capable). Similarly, higher HPI Sociability⁴ and MVPI Hedonism⁵ can “destroy the potential” of an individual team member. Athletes with higher scores on these scales are less likely to respond to feedback and are more likely to engage in behaviors that negatively impact performance, such as going out for drinks the night before an important match. To highlight this interpretation, Vladan Gojkovic, the national water polo coach for Montenegro, describes a situation he witnessed during his work with a team: “The team was traveling for a very important game, and the players asked if they could go to a soccer match the night before that was more than 200 kilometers away. This is the type of behavior that impacts their performance as a team.”

Often, Vukcevic recommends interpreting HPI scales at the subscale level. He finds that focusing on portions of the HPI Ambition scale,⁶ such as Competitive, provides critical insight to an athlete’s competitive nature. In contrast, the No Social Anxiety subscale is less relevant because it focuses on an individual’s social self-confidence. This subscale may be important for identifying an athlete who excels during postgame interviews, but it is less important when focusing on game performance. He further highlights an atypical relationship between the Accomplishment subscale and performance outcomes: “Lower [HPI] Ambition scores (especially lower Accomplishment [subscale] scores) may translate to a view of low achievement and that you [the athlete or coach] can always achieve more, always more.” He believes that great athletes and successful coaches never accept that they have achieved ultimate success and therefore are always working to get better. As Dragan Adzic, a two-time consecutive World Handball Coach of the Year declares, “Respect what you have already achieved, and do your best to achieve even more.”

Personality of Coaches

A team responds to the personnel decisions made by their coach. Blue Coach consultants work with sports coaches to develop effective inter- and intrapersonal strategies. Similar to the leadership development initiatives used in business environments, Blue Coach helps coaches become more aware of how others perceive them. With this information, coaches see a clear path to develop both personally and professionally. Dragan Adzic describes his experience working one-on-one with Vukcevic: “With him, I have learned the real and scientific value of incorporating personality in my coaching. … Knowing all of my derailers and information I’ve got from [the] results has changed my perception of myself and of how other people see me. Since that time, I have been working on myself with the help of [the] Hogan assessments and I think that people with whom I work and live have noticed progress. I can surely control myself better and know myself better after the assessment.”

Blue Coach continues to work with Dragan to address potential inhibitors in his coaching ability. Although his team was successful, Dragan feels the HDS helped him identify specific development opportunities that were not easily pinpointed. He shares: “I had a strong tendency for burning my stress inside — the inner churn. My calmness was there but always with the cost. That cost was my inner battle and highly reserved [HDS Reserved⁷] behavior under stress. Because of that I usually responded to situations that required communication with silence. I knew that I need[ed] to communicate, but because of my personality, I have been postponing these conversations with players until we all come into an emotionally boiling situation. I saw that as my weakness and worked on it regularly by scheduling conversations with players from week to week.”

Through behavioral observations and one-on-one consulting, Blue Coach provides guidance around the Hogan assessments and gains insight to what makes an effective coach. Consultants find that an effective coach is not a people pleaser. Instead, the best coaches are those who score high on HPI Prudence and HDS Diligent.⁸ These coaches tend to micromanage (which can be frustrating for some), but their level of preparation makes them successful. These coaches are the individuals who “get on the bus after a win and immediately start analyzing the next opponent.” What separates Dragan Adzic, Vladan Gojkovic, and Petar Porobic from the rest is their attention to detail and degree of focus. This is what can distinguish a good coach from a great coach.

In addition, Vukcevic provides player insights that help coaches understand the individual differences that drive their behavior. He says: “Hogan gives the coach information on how to see the underlying aspects of performance for individual players that he [the coach] couldn’t see. Although he was aware of them for a long time, the core assessments allowed him to see these outcomes in Hogan language.” Through a deeper understanding of the personalities of the players, Vukcevic helps coaches take these insights and derive actionable development strategies for players.

Team Dynamics

At the team level, Blue Coach works extensively to curb negative outcomes driven by poor interpersonal relations. Negative feedback is common and accepted in the world of sports. It is exhibited through constructive coaching and general communication between players during practices and games. However, when this spills outside of the sport, it can have consequences that impact team performance. Vukcevic describes a specific example where interpersonal issues affected team performance: “Game performance is perfect. The issue is the interpersonal interactions between the players. Physical performance feedback is already there and accepted. However, there are small clans within the team that are usually against each other. Sometimes this produces a little bit of conflict and competitiveness, and instead of being positive, it hits at a personal level.”

This type of behavior is what impacts the “flow” of the team. Flow is a concept developed by famous psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that describes a process of optimal performance, where players are 100% in the moment and playing at a high level. Vukcevic believes that interpersonal conflicts can disrupt this flow and impact the performance of the team. Specifically, he interprets scores on Hogan scales such as HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity, HDS Reserved, and HDS Leisurely⁹ to help coaches strategically address conflict. He states that “When passive-aggressive behavior turns into ‘I’m not giving you the ball in the game,’ then the team is going to have problems.” This has led to coaching initiatives that promote regular meetings with players and cohesive team development.

Conclusion

Hogan’s suite of assessments promotes self-awareness for the development of managers, leaders, and employees in traditional work spaces. Similar initiatives are gaining traction in alternative areas, including the sports and recreation industry. Collaborations with consulting groups, such as Blue Coach, show how personality relates to competitiveness, achievement orientation, focus, and team relations in a sports context. These findings suggest that consultants interested in sports may find opportunities to work with sports teams, helping members become aware of their personalities and understand how personality impacts overall performance.

Notes

1. Players who score higher on HDS Excitable tend be described as intense and energetic; HDS Excitable with Handball Game Performance (r = .18).
2. Players who score higher on HPI Prudence and HDS Diligent tend to be described as attentive, dependable, and perfectionistic; HPI Prudence (r = .30) and HDS Diligent (r = .43) with Training Performance.
3. Players who score higher on MVPI Power tend to be competitive and achievement oriented; MVPI Power with Overall Performance (r = .26).
4. Players with higher scores on HPI Sociability tend to be socially proactive and distractible but may also be team oriented; HPI Sociability with Off-Field Public Behavior (r = -.13).
5. Players with higher scores on MVPI Hedonism tend to make their own rules and want to have a good time; MVPI Hedonism and Overall Performance (r = -.18).
6. Players who score higher on Ambition tend to be competitive, energetic, and will take initiative; HPI Ambition and Overall Performance (r = .21).
7. Coaches with higher HDS Reserved scores tend to be unapproachable and uncommunicative under pressure.
8. Coaches with higher HPI Prudence and HDS Diligent scores tend to be process focused, organized, and rigid about details and rules.
9. Teams with lower HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity, higher HDS Reserved, and/or higher HDS Leisurely scores will tend to have stressed relationships among members of the team; HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity (r = .18), HDS Reserved (r = -.16), and HDS Leisurely (r = -.18) with Overall Performance.

I hear so many managers and leaders talk about wanting to invest in team development. But in the COVID-19 era, with budgets under pressure, this sort of activity is often under the microscope, and it is easy to see why. Too often, leaders don’t focus on what a good outcome looks like or how it can be measured in terms of progress on both the team and individual levels. Having a clear purpose is necessary to achieve success with team development initiatives. What is the team intended to deliver, and what does the development initiative need to achieve?

The most effective results occur when people can provide a clear answer to the “so what?” question. Getting team members to understand their strengths, how they can be developed, how they contribute to team performance, and where the gaps are (both individually and collectively) is key.  

The Role of Personality in Team Development

Personality assessment should be an integral part of these development sessions to promote understanding of the culture of the team. Using an effective assessment tool, such as the Hogan Team report, will identify the team culture based on the individual team members’ personalities. This report can help leaders understand what it is like to work in a particular team environment, how well the team will bond, and what influences team decision-making.

Alignment among team members is particularly important when there are adjustments to organizational strategies and goals that require the team’s attention. Because values operate subconsciously, individuals’ self-awareness can be limited. The degree to which a person’s values align with those of his or her colleagues affects productivity.  

Creating clarity about the team’s behaviors, particularly those that arise when the group is under pressure, will help team members to work in sync. Who goes quiet when stressed? Who comes up with eccentric ideas? Who remains steady? Who becomes overconfident, overestimating the team’s ability to deliver on plans? These behaviors can serve as strengths, but in pressure, they can become overplayed. If not addressed and managed, they will impede the team’s progress and success. 

As you can see, this is not about typical “team building.” Instead, this is about taking a focused approach to understanding values, behaviors, and performance risks. By starting with defining the team’s purpose, leaders can steer the team’s focus to what needs to be achieved. Once a strong, clear purpose has been identified, teams can identify gaps in their performance, discuss solutions, and move forward collectively. When coordinating a team development session, think about the challenges the team faces — such as challenging objectives, demanding stakeholders, short timelines for completing projects, customer issues, and implementation of new projects, just to name a few.

What can emerge? Too many things to mention, but here are two quick examples.

Example No. 1

A team needed to step up and lead more effectively. We chose the Hogan Team report in this case, and it allowed the group to see that they were relationship focused, which they had already sensed. They had been saying yes to the demands of all the stakeholders because they didn’t want to damage those relations, so they were not challenging each other in the right ways. Due to their collective diligence, they were working hard and becoming overwhelmed. The outcome, among other things, was agreeing that they would all have permission to challenge one another and that they would work on sharpening their feedback skills so they could do so more promptly and effectively. With stakeholders, they identified the need to improve their questioning skills and agreed to support one another in saying no when required. This increased trust among the team members.

Example No. 2

A second example was a senior leadership group who wanted to see how they compared to other senior teams. We typically use the High Performing Team Assessment in cases like this. It allowed the team to benchmark and compare. They quickly identified several strengths and focus areas that formed the backbone of the team development session, driving more challenging conversations and allowing them to align on what was most important and how they were going to tackle the situation.  

With the right investment in time and resources, team development sessions can provide great results and certainly be time and money well spent.

Want to get a better understanding of the kind of insights a Hogan Team report can provide? Check out this case study: The case of the team that went nowhere

*This post was authored by Rob Field, learning and development director,
Advanced People Strategies.

In August, Hogan published the first of a two-part blog series about accelerating team performance. If you recall, we shared the importance of adapting by creating new strategies or running the risk of having an ineffective, unproductive, and misaligned team as a result of our changing environment. In this blog, I will discuss common challenges that teams are facing today. In support of these challenges, Hogan has developed a framework to enable teams to navigate complex dynamics quickly and focus confidently on what will accelerate their performance. The Team Acceleration framework guides teams through a process of self-reflection, discovery, and shared accountability, so they can move through the challenges posed by our changing environment and achieve higher levels of performance.

Some common challenges teams are facing include the following:

1. Dispersal – Teams that were once co-located are now dispersed and working virtually.
2. New team composition – Teams have lost members or added new members due to layoffs and reorganization.
3. New priorities – Teams have been asked to put annual business plans aside and focus efforts on new priorities.

Strategies to Improve Team Function

At Hogan, we believe that Team Acceleration can accelerate your team’s long-term performance. If your team has experienced one (or more) of the common challenges facing team functioning, you may want to consider trying these strategies to improve team function.

Acknowledge the Impact

Reaffirm trust by having open and honest dialogue about the impact of the change.

Dispersed – Discuss the advantages and challenges of working virtually, personally and professionally. What have you enjoyed? What have you found to be difficult? What has been the impact on your team? What does the team need in order to continue operating effectively?  

New team ­- Discuss how work has been reallocated and how the team can ensure a smooth transition of responsibilities across team members. Share ideas on how to effectively onboard new team members. 

New priorities – Re-evaluate the work the team has been doing versus the work the team should be doing. Rethink and redefine the team’s value proposition: “Our team is here to accomplish [fill in the blank]. Our team is here to serve [fill in the blank].”

Revisit Team Values and the Culture Values Create

Identify team values and potential gaps in organizational culture, now and for the future.

Dispersed – Re-evaluate the needs of the team and strategies for how the team’s values will be fulfilled in the new working environment. For example, a high Affiliation team (one that values collaboration), might want to explore different approaches or technologies to support team-based tasks.

New team – Discuss how the culture of the team may have changed with the addition of new team members. What the team values now might not be the same as before. 

New priorities – Discuss alignment between new priorities and team values to ensure that the team is continuing to do work that is valuable for both the members and the organization.

Adjust Team Norms

Connect the impact of the change the team is facing with the team values and culture to inform effective team behavior and norms.

Dispersed – Focus on interpersonal norms, such as belonging, collaboration, and communication, to build and maintain strong relationships among the members of the team. Discuss how the team operates today versus how the team would operate in its ideal state.

New team – Spend time getting to know the new members of the team. Encourage an environment of belonging where team members understand how they fit into the team.

New priorities – Discuss the skills and abilities of the new members and determine how to leverage them according to the new priorities. Ask the team, “How can we work together in the right way to drive a higher level of team performance?”

Practice Adaptability

Respond to the changing needs of the business by rethinking your team’s goals and exploring behaviors that may interfere with the team’s ability to lead through change and proactively prepare for new challenges.

Dispersed – Identify opportunities to expand collaboration across transitional boundaries of expertise.

New team -Build in a regular cadence for the members of the team to discuss what they are working on and how their work fits in with the team’s goals and the organization’s business objectives.

New priorities – Encourage an open dialogue with your team and ask, “What do we need to start doing, continue doing, or stop doing?”

Regardless of the challenge your team is facing, spending time realigning the team’s values and norms, recommitting to desired behaviors, and remaining agile and adaptable can make all the difference in your team’s ability to remain effective and competitive in our constantly changing environment.

Now is the time to accelerate your team’s effectiveness and continue to raise its level of performance, even in the face of change. Using the strategies discussed in this blog and Hogan’s Team Acceleration framework, create new habits for yourself and your team so your team will be well positioned to achieve its goals, operate at its optimal level, and win in the marketplace.

*This post was co-authored by Hogan’s Erin Laxson, Holly Paine Magnuson, and Jessie McClure.

Earlier this year, before the global pandemic, I returned to the office after an extended business trip. When I walked into the building, the environment felt different. The building was the same, the furniture was where it had been before, and my colleagues were still the same lovely people, but the atmosphere felt somewhat unfamiliar. It was because there had been a break in my routine. Humans are creatures of habit — we rely on routines to help us manage our busy schedules, remain productive, and keep us sane. When our routines change, we must adapt, create new strategies, or run the risk of being ineffective, unproductive, or even misaligned.

COVID-19 has significantly impacted team functioning. In our work with organizations during the pandemic, we have observed three common challenges that teams are facing today:

1. Teams that were once co-located are now dispersed and working virtually.
2. Teams have lost or added new team members due to layoffs and reorganization.
3. Teams have been asked to put annual business plans aside and focus efforts on new priorities.

Regardless of the challenge your team is facing, spending time realigning the team’s values and norms, recommitting to desired behaviors, and remaining agile and adaptable can make all the difference in your team’s ability to remain effective and competitive. Spending this time together can help make the unfamiliar feel familiar again.

Accelerating Team Effectiveness

At Hogan, we believe that the following measures can accelerate your team’s long-term effectiveness.

Acknowledge the Impact

• How has the global pandemic affected you personally?
• How has the global pandemic affected your team?

Your team must first create a safe space for each member to accept that things have changed and acknowledge the impact that these changes have had, recognizing that the impact will differ for each team member. Additionally, the sudden departure from face-to-face team interactions to operating virtually has likely created challenges that the team must overcome. Be honest about the challenges and reaffirm trust by regularly setting aside time to have open and honest conversations.

Revisit Team Values and the Culture Values Create

• What did our team culture look like before the pandemic?
• What does it look like today?
• What does it need to look like in the future?

Every team member has individual values that guide his or her actions. When most team members share the same values, the team is likely to experience increased cohesion. Values form the basis for the team’s culture and norms; therefore, culture is the sum of what we value. Using data from Hogan’s Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI), your team can begin to explore values to determine the impact to the current team culture and discuss the culture the team would like to create in the future. While your individual and team values might not have changed as a result of the pandemic, the ways in which those values are being met might have.

Adjust Team Norms

• What are our rules for interacting and communicating with one another?
• What adjustments do we need to make to our team norms?

Over time, teams create norms and behavioral standards that accrue into a team’s culture and reputation. Often these norms operate at the unconscious level, guiding our daily behaviors. Teams operate more effectively when clear and consistent rules guide their interactions and processes. Using data from the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), your team can begin to explore behaviors that inform the team’s standards of operating and team culture.

Practice Adaptability

• How do we need to pivot to meet the needs of the organization?
• What might get in our way?

Organizations are making dramatic efforts to stay relevant during the global pandemic. Many are expanding parts of their business (e.g., manufacturing) and reskilling talent to support new priorities. Effective organizations and teams need to focus on driving and adapting business strategy to derive competitive advantage. As such, your team must respond to the changing needs of the business by rethinking its goals and priorities. But change can induce stress, and stress can cause counterproductive behaviors to emerge. Using data from the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), your team can begin to explore behaviors that could interfere with the team’s ability to manage change, drive results, and remain agile in the changing business environment.

In summary, given our current environment, it is critical for you to identify any challenges your team is facing. Are you a dispersed team, a newly formed team, or a team facing new or changing priorities? Once you are aware of the challenges, consider how you can apply the concepts we discussed in this blog. You’ll likely find that your team has strengths that can be leveraged and gaps that need to be addressed in order to accelerate effectiveness.

*This post was co-authored by Hogan’s Erin Laxson, Holly Paine Magnuson, and Jessie McClure.

At Hogan, we define leadership as the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team. And high-performing teams consistently outperform the competition. You want your team to be one of those, right? We don’t know what impact the current pandemic will have on our businesses, but we do know that high-performing teams are critical to our success.

Hogan’s data scientists recently conducted a literature review to define the characteristics of high-performing teams more clearly. From that review, we know that high-performing teams have strong norms around how they engage interpersonally. Because we are social and group-dwelling beings, it’s no surprise that teams are suffering interpersonally right now as we practice social distancing. Although other factors are at play, the interpersonal norms (the “rules” for how the team operates) have likely deteriorated further than the process-oriented norms. Specifically, this global pandemic has disrupted our social interactions. For example, imagine a high-performing team who used to gather in a coffee shop for morning kickoff meetings. Now what are they doing? Drinking coffee alone at their kitchen tables?

Interpersonal norms are critical to team efficacy, and you cannot let them go unattended yet expect teams to keep functioning at a high level. It does take some extra effort, but the team results are worth it. Based on Hogan’s literature review, we decided to focus our message on how to handle conflict, belonging, communication, and collaboration virtually. These norms keep teams connected, motivated, and engaged; they ground teams in productive interpersonal interactions. They are the invisible glue to a high-performing team. Without them, a team will come apart, not only at the edges, but at the core.

Whether you’re coaching leaders or you’re a member of a team, consider the following questions:

• How does your team address conflict when you aren’t all in the same physical location?
• What do you do to create a sense of belonging and connection for your team? How do you inspire and acknowledge contributions when so many factors compete for your team members’ attention?
• What about communication? How have you adjusted your practices around keeping people informed and aligned?
• How does your team collaborate and work together toward important business results?

Click here to listen to Brandy and Wendy’s webinar, “Practical Advice for Transitioning Team Norms in this ‘New Normal.’”

The world of work, and our individual and collective place in it, has been continually shifting over the past hundred years. But with the current unprecedented global disruption, these shifts have become dramatic and jarring, seemingly redefining weekly what it means to work. Employee motivation has been thrust into the spotlight, and for good reason. People’s motives affect, at conscious and unconscious levels, the way they make sense of and respond to the world around them.

Values act as a lens – they color what we find important and motivating and determine which messages we find inspiring or distasteful. Leaders’ values are especially important in organizations, as they often set the standard for internal communication, impact company culture, and guide reward systems. Their values are conspicuous right now in the ways they communicate with their employees. Left unexamined, leaders’ communications may highlight values-based blind spots and fail to compel their intended audience.

For example, many leaders seem to be trying to inspire their organization by emphasizing the importance of the work itself, couching disruption as something that can and should be overcome, and speaking confidently about their ability to win and emerge triumphant, as seen here in this message from Jeff Bezos to Amazon employees. While these messages may align with that leader’s values regarding competition, winning, and comfort with risk, many individual contributors will not share those values to the same degree. At best such messages may fall flat with a large percentage of the workforce, and at worst they could be disengaging or seem out-of-touch.

In our research on values, as measured by the Motives, Values, and Preferences Inventory (MVPI), there are clear, noticeable differences between leader and individual-contributor populations in the types of communications they are likely to find compelling or aligned with their values. For example, across industries and job families and in comparison with individual contributors across all job families, leaders tend to score higher on Power (valuing authority, top-down influence, impact), lower on Security (valuing risk-taking, limit-testing, experimentation), lower on Altruism (valuing personal responsibility, self-reliance), and lower on Hedonism (valuing professional, formal work environments) than the average individual contributor. This suggests that if leaders could often provide more effective communications by managing their value-based blind spots; they may need to:

• Curtail the desire to invoke the language of war, winning, and beating the virus
• Broaden their perspective beyond work and consider issues related to work-life balance; emphasize collegiality and a whole-person focus
• Provide greater clarity on plans, tasks, and deadlines than they may do naturally
• Consider how their requests and directions impact the greater good; find more ways to illustrate the higher purpose and link their employees’ actions to beneficial outcomes for others

For example, the message to employees delivered by Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott, has received extensive positive media attention and provides values-based messages likely to resonate with a broad array of employees.

Understanding values is key to enabling leaders to connect with individual contributors in ways that are likely to inspire commitment, compel them to put forth discretionary effort, and provide them with a deeper sense of meaning. To learn more about the importance of values, and especially how to leverage values-based communications, join us at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28 for the webinar Leveraging Values to Keep individuals and Teams Engaged. During the webinar, we will dive deeper into values differences between managers and individual contributors and highlight common values differences across functions that may help managers target their communications for the greatest motivational impact.

*This post was authored by now-former Hogan CEO, Scott Gregory, and Hogan Consultant, Amy Sarraf Renshaw.