It Is All About Personality

“The underlying personality tendencies will remain the same, but the behavior can change by being regulated with self-control.”- Robert Hogan Ph.D.

He is the president of Hogan Assessment Systems, is an international authority on personality assessment, leadership, and organizational effectiveness.  The author of Hogan Personality Inventory, Bob Hogan is often described as outspoken, controversial and insightful by his students and professional associates.  I am a big fan of his writings (Check out his blog here)He was McFarlin Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at theUniversity of Tulsa for 14 years.  Prior to that, he was Professor of Psychology and Social Relations at The Johns Hopkins University.  He has received a number of research and teaching awards, and is the editor of the Handbook of Personality Psychology. Dr. Hogan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in personality assessment.Hogan Personality Inventory looks at the following dimensions to define personality. These are useful to refer to where Bob talks about employability or what makes for a successful senior leader. According to Hogan, these dimensions are:

• Adjustment: confidence, self-esteem, and composure under pressure
• Ambition: initiative, competitiveness, and desire for leadership roles
• Sociability: extraversion, gregarious, and need for social interaction
• Interpersonal Sensitivity: tact, perceptiveness, and ability to maintain relationships
• Prudence: self-discipline, responsibility and conscientiousness
• Inquisitive: imagination, curiosity, and creative potential
• Learning Approach: achievement-oriented, stays up-to-date on business and technical matters

Abhijit Bhaduri: There are so many ways to measure personality. What made you create the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and what makes it unique?Bob Hogan: I developed the HPI in order to combine the measurement goals of the CPI (at the time the only measure of normal personality concerned with validity) with the structure of the Five Factor Model, which I was sure was pretty much correct.  So the HPI is the ONLY measure of normal personality that is/was developed exclusively on working adults, based on the structure of the Five Factor Model, and designed to predict occupational performance.  The NEO is not designed to predict performance, and was developed on college students.  The OPQ has a bizarre and idiosyncratic structure, etc.Abhijit Bhaduri:  What elements of personality makes a person more employable?Bob Hogan: Employability = high Adjustment, high Prudence, high Interpersonal Sensitivity.Employability and Career Success depend on behaving in socially desirable ways. To do this requires specific competencies:

1. Seeming smart
2. Seeming compliant and conforming
3. Seeming sensitive (interpersonal skill)

Abhijit Bhaduri: Do the same factors that drive employability also impact who is likely to get promoted? And does that change over career transition points?Bob Hogan: Yes.  Employability and promotions are mostly about politics and only a little bit about performance.  People get hired and promoted because senior people like them.  The factors that make people likable don’t change over  time.  If a person is well liked, all sorts of performance deficits will be overlooked.  I  hasten to add, however, that that is NOT how we run our business, but it is how big business is run.Abhijit Bhaduri: If you had to choose someone for senior leadership roles in a global organization, what would you look for?Bob Hogan: HPI:  Average Adjustment, high Ambition, average Sociability, average Interpersonal Sensitivity, above average Prudence, high Inquisitive, high Learning Style.Abhijit Bhaduri:  You have famously coined the term “dark side” to refer to personality derailers. Can these derailers (See the description of derailers below) eliminated through training?Bob Hogan: By training, people can learn to control them, but they never go completely away.Abhijit Bhaduri: Is it nature or nurture that gives rise to derailers.Bob Hogan: BothAbhijit Bhaduri:  What are personality factors that can help predict an employee’s engagement?Bob Hogan: High Adjustment, high Interpersonal Sensitivity, high Prudence.Abhijit Bhaduri: How can organizations get the best return on investment on Leadership Development dollars? What are the trainable elements of personality? How can we train/ coach leaders to be more Inquisitive, Ambitious? Bob Hogan: They can get their best return on investment by hiring their managers using well validated assessment methods, then follow up on their performance using well developed subordinate ratings.  What is trainable about personality is self-control:  our developmental feedback is all about “stop doing that”, “start doing this”, and “keep doing  this”.  The assessments provide self-awareness, the self-control provides the improvement.  The underlying personality tendencies will remain the same, but the behavior can change by being regulated with self-control.Abhijit Bhaduri: You have studied personality over many years. What are the changes in motivation, preferences that you have noticed over the years? Is there a difference between the generations – are millennials different from the previous generations in terms of their derailers?Bob Hogan: Young people in America are more entitled, more spoiled, lazier, less sophisticated, less well educated, less concerned about society, politics, and the economy, and more naïve than the earlier generations.Abhijit Bhaduri:  Is that true of Millennials in other countries too or is that a failure of the parenting style? What are some things parents should do differently?Bob Hogan: It is NOT true of immigrants from anywhere in the world—Ethiopia, Brazil, China, India, etc.  The post-WWII US generation lived in the lap of luxury.  The war had destroyed all our foreign competition for manufacturing.  It took 25 years for the Germans and Japanese to get back on track.  During that time, Americans got fat and lazy, only to wake up some time in the 90s to discover that the US had the dwindles while others were gaining.  It is all in the child rearing, in parental values.  My business partner’s kids go to a private school.  He thinks his kids work hard.  Last Friday evening his daughter asked if she could call her best friend from school, an Indian girl.  So she called.  At the end of the call, the Indian girl’s mother got on the phone with my partner and told him never to let his daughter call again without her permission, because her daughter had homework to do on Friday evening and over the weekend.————The Hogan Development Survey lists the following derailers

MUST READ: History of Personality by Robert HoganDr. Hogan is the author of more than 300 journal articles, chapters and books.  He is widely credited with demonstrating how careful attention to personality factors can influence organizational effectiveness in a variety of areas — ranging from organizational climate and leadership to selection and effective team performance.  Dr. Hogan is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology.