The science of personality matters to high-potential employees and to the organisations seeking to fill succession benches. The predictive power of personality data can help accelerate effectiveness in high-potential development. But how, exactly?
On episode 117 of The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Allan Church, PhD, cofounder and managing partner at Maestro Consulting and former SVP of global talent management at PepsiCo. He explained why the impact of personality on high-potential employees and leadership development is critical.
“While each Hogan personality assessment provides unique and important information, the power in understanding the relationships across the tools drives the messages home,” Allan said.
Read on for a snapshot of how PepsiCo uses Hogan, how career stage can affect developmental feedback, limitations that can hold high potentials back from advancement, and four cases for adopting personality assessment in your organisation.
How PepsiCo Uses Hogan
Allan worked at PepsiCo for 21 years, where he helped rebuild the HR function and its leadership development processes. Based on his previous consulting practice, he knew that integrating personality into development was essential.
Initially, Allan learned that people generally believed managers were better at assessing talent than personality tools were. Allan also heard that people disliked answering personality assessments because of their resemblance to intrusive clinical personality tools. So, he conducted about 300 Hogan assessments and individual hour-long debrief sessions for senior managers. Then, he surveyed the participants about their experience. “People told us that when we coupled 360-degree feedback with the Hogan assessments, their development experience from just that conversation was 85 percent better than most of the other ones they’d had,” Allan said.
PepsiCo went all in on using Hogan’s assessments. The organisation expanded over time from leadership development alone to every layer of assessment across their entire talent management strategy.
How Different Roles Affect Personality Assessment Feedback
From first-time managers to senior executives, career stage affects the type of developmental feedback that is likely to benefit leaders most.
“Earlier in your career, self-awareness is important,” Allan said, mentioning worldview behavioural tendencies, derailers, and drivers. Feedback for early-career employees focused on building strategic self-awareness. From the organisational side, it focused on identifying high-potential talent. Can managers leverage their strengths in the right way? Can they overcome their derailers?
Feedback at midcareer levels focuses on guiding and coaching advancement. At the senior levels, feedback helps leaders shape and refine behaviours. “Maybe you’re high [on the Hogan Personality Inventory scales] Learning Approach and Imaginative. If so, you’ve got to ratchet back your ideas or present them in the right way,” he said.
Allan helped PepsiCo position coaching and development as preparation for future success—not just means to fix problems. The messaging about “shaping and refining” let people feel comfortable about participating in development and receiving feedback. “If they want to keep progressing, their motivation to pay attention and do some development work is going to be high,” he explained.
High-Potential Development Strategy
Certain personality characteristics can help someone initially show up as high potential and can carry them through other roles. On the other hand, what makes someone successful in one role could become detrimental the higher up they go. “There are some super strengths and some clear limitations and derailers that can ultimately limit you if you’re not careful,” Allan said.
Those super strengths tend to support execution and performance. In Hogan terms, Allan said that moderate to high scores on the Hogan Personality Inventory scales Adjustment, Ambition, Prudence, and Inquisitive scales are fundamental to getting identified as a high potential. “As you go up, the relationship pieces matter so much on top of those—motivating people, inspiring people, and being good with people,” he explained. Limitations include lower Sociability and Interpersonal Sensitivity. “Those two can really get in the way sometimes.”
Allan said that being strategic is also a predictor of high potential, but strategy looks very different in early-career roles than in senior leadership. Someone’s scores on Inquisitive and Learning Approach can affect their attitude toward and preferred method for generating ideas and acquiring knowledge. Most organisations expect senior leaders to set vision, think creatively, and innovate. Assessment-based coaching helps high potentials understand the importance of social and strategic skills, as well as how to mitigate any related derailers.
Stretch Assignments for High Potentials
Experiences that put a high-potential employee out of their comfort zone can help reveal whether they are ready for senior leadership. For example, these may include crossing a business sector or operating model, leading in different global regions or regulatory environments, moving from an established market to an emerging one, working in the field or in corporate, or adjusting to a cross-functional role.
Personality assessment data can help high potentials navigate their new, highly stressful dynamic environment. “By definition, a stretch assignment should give you stress. Why in the world wouldn’t we sit down and remind you of your derailers?” Allan said.
From an organisational standpoint, stretch assignments for high-potential development can help reveal opportunities for tactical team building. Demanding that someone with a low Inquisitive score instantly excel in a job that requires strategic thinking could be detrimental. Instead, organisations can support that potential gap with skilled lieutenants, a coach, and mentors to help the person learn.
A High-Potential Development Success Story
Allan shared a story about a junior marketer at PepsiCo who was smart and driven. This high-potential employee had higher scores on Adjustment and Ambition and very low scores on Sociability. “If you want to be a CEO one day, you’re going to have to overcome your natural tendency to resist visibility and being social,” Allan told them. They also had very high scores on the Hogan Development Survey’s Bold scale. The Bold scale concerns seeming entitled, arrogant, and overconfident. Based on the Hogan debrief and assessment-based coaching that Allan gave this person, they gained strategic self-awareness. They advanced to CMO and ultimately president of one of the company’s biggest divisions.
Advice for Adopting Personality Assessment
Be clear about why you’re considering integrating personality assessment. Allan described four cases you can use to persuade your organisation that assessment is valuable.
- The business case – The science of personality has an impact on how our people lead and manage, which in turn has an impact on success.
- The talent decision-making case – We can use this data to make better people decisions, to select people, to develop people, to form teams, to plan for succession . . .
- The organisational development case – If we embed personality into how we do things, we can build a better, more development-focused culture.
- The leadership case – Personality assessment data will help predict success and augment all the leadership work that we do.
The bottom line? “An overall language of leadership, personality, and impact is critical for all leadership development,” Allan said.
Listen to this conversation in full on episode 117 of The Science of Personality.
*This blog was originally published on Hogan Assessments
