When organisations hire, most will fall back on their tried and tested method: post a job ad, select candidates, conduct an interview and contact referees. However, this process skips over potentially the most important indicator of a person’s ability to do a job – the core aspects of their personality.

Why assess personality when hiring?

Your airline pilot candidate might have the required number of flight hours, but are they conscientious and resilient under pressure? Your banking candidate may have the right qualifications, but are they commercially minded and good with people? These things are difficult to gauge from a formal interview, or by checking references selected by the candidate. However, they can be evaluated very effectively with a tool that’s being increasingly used in recruitment worldwide – the personality assessment.

Considered the ‘gold standard’ in assessment tools globally, Hogan Personality Assessments and the Hogan 360 are among the most popular methods of evaluating key personality traits. Peter Berry, managing director of Peter Berry Consultancy, has been using Hogan Assessment tools for over 20 years, and he says the science and rigour behind them have made them an invaluable tool for talent acquisition and development.

“There is tremendous validity and reliability in Hogan Personality Assessments, and they’re used very substantially for recruitment to determine if you’re hiring or promoting the right person,” Berry tells HRD.

Hogan Personality Assessments: Global stats

“The assessment is comprised of three parts. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI] looks at emotional intelligence. which is a person’s ability to be positive and socially skilled; leadership, which is a person’s ability to step up and take a supervisor or general manager role; and conscientiousness – their ability to do a job in a professional, rule-compliant manner.

“The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) is colloquially called ‘the dark side·:· Berry adds. “High scores reflect day-to-day strengths, but if you’re stressed, tired or not coping, it will show dysfunctional dispositions or derailing tendencies. For example, an excitable person might have passion and energy but get temperamental and volatile. A diligent person might be perfectionistic and organised but also controlling and micromanaging.”

The third key profile used by Hogan Assessments is the MVPI (Motives. Values, Preferences, Inventory). This focuses on what you want out of life and is often used to see if there’s congruence around values – for example, by a non-profit that might be looking for someone with high levels of altruism.

Berry says that when it comes to hiring, the best thing to do is to look at intelligence, experience and qualifications, and then add in the personality dimension.

“Dr Hogan has a great quote: ‘The MVPI is what you want out of life, the HPI is how you go about it. and the HDS is how you blow it.” The Hogan Personality Assessment is unique in terms of being able to triangulate those three and put the whole jigsaw together,” Berry says.

“When you’re doing the selection, we actually think the interview and reference checking is the weakest aspect of hiring. Most of us can present ourselves well in an interview, or nominate referees that will say good things about us. The personality assessment is the most science-based and insightful, and if you’re going to get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off the bus, then you need to have a robust recruitment process.”

Using personality assessments to develop talent

While Hogan Assessments can tell you a candidate’s key strengths, they will also identify potential areas of weakness. This makes them a great starting point for coaching and talent development – particularly for people in leadership roles.

In Peter Berry’s recent white paper, Competencies of Great Leaders he uses the Hogan 360 to evaluate the key strengths of Australia’s best leaders. The research found that their top strengths were being achievement focused, strategic and inspiring, and having high emotional intelligence.

With leadership having a direct influence on engagement, turnover and productivity, Berry says investing in leadership development should be a no-brainer for any business looking to boost its bottom line. “The international engagement surveys show that only two-thirds of people are engaged, and that reflects on retention, performance and discretionary effort.” Berry explains.

“One-third of people are disengaged and would take a job elsewhere. It’s a huge challenge for businesses. because the cost of someone quitting is about $60k. If you have 10-20% turnover. it’s killing your business. That’s where we know that leadership and team culture are critical, so it’s important to hire the right person to get that engagement up

We know from our research that the leader of a team has the biggest impact on engagement, motivation, performance and retention, and the best companies are paying a lot of attention to developing their leadership.” Berry adds.

“You can’t just throw a good employee into a dysfunctional team, or give them a leader that has no EQ. You have to create the right culture, and that’s the bigger picture of how you make individuals highly successful.”

When it comes to leadership coaching, Berry notes that there’s been a lot of focus on teaching executive presence, influencing skills. emotional intelligence. and being visionary and strategic – all of which are vital to driving business results.

Leadership also impacts heavily on company culture, and using Hogan 360 assessments is a great way to determine how a leader’s strengths and weaknesses are impacting their team. If a leader doesn’t have the right levels of resilience, emotional intelligence or influencing skills, the good news is that these can all be taught – and your company’s engagement, culture and bottom line will be all the better for it.

“People only sink or swim in the culture we’re given, and we’re lucky to work with some great companies that do this really well, but also companies that are struggling with poor leadership and toxic cultures.” Berry says.

Hogan 360: Global stats

“We use the personality and 360 assessments in our coaching and development programs, where you’re assessed by your colleagues at work. When you assess below and above the waterline – that is, the private person and their public reputation – there’s nowhere to hide.

“We have very strong competency models, and the three meta-competencies of good managers are resilience, social skills and professionalism,” he explains. “If they don’t come naturally, they can be taught. Leaders are all going to have different personalities and capabilities, but we can always agree on what we’re trying to do – and that’s to achieve better outcomes through employee experiences.”

To those who haven’t tried personality assessments yet. Berry says: “You don’t know what you’re missing out on!”

“It’s got enormous global validity, best practice companies have had great success with it. and it gives you a strong ROI. It also brings science to what is otherwise a completely intuitive and flawed model. If you’re serious about bottom-line results, you’ve got to invest into leadership, people, culture and assessments.”

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Subaru of America President and CEO Thomas J. Doll led the company through the 2008–2009 financial crisis to 12 years of growth at a time when the auto industry faced significant challenges. He did this by modeling the characteristics in Hogan’s recent research showing the link between humility and strong leadership: remain open-minded, do not self-promote or seek the spotlight, and focus on getting along with others over personal gain. See: Humility: The Antidote for Bad Leadership.

Doll and his leadership team have placed a heavy focus on customer service, staff welfare, and giving back, as evidenced in the Subaru Love Promise, which is deeply embedded in the company’s culture: “More than a car company: The Subaru Love Promise is our vision to show love and respect to all people at every interaction with Subaru. Together with our retailers, we are dedicated to making the world a better place.” Subaru has donated more than $176 million since 2008, including notable charitable contributions to the environment, health, hunger, education, and animal welfare. Doll also quickly championed the donation of 50 million meals through Feeding America in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Making Culture a Statement

This leadership style does not come without its challenges. Doll was originally overlooked for the top job at Subaru. After serving as the automaker’s CFO, he eventually did land the CEO role, given the company’s need for someone with strong financial acumen and deep knowledge of the company and industry. But that was not all it took for him to secure early wins. Doll’s first bold move as CEO was to create a new statement about the culture with a focus on unmatched customer service and a positive experience for employees, retailers, external partners, and the community, which over time became deeply embedded within the company.

In 2017, Doll was proud of Subaru’s success, culture of being a nice place to work, and low attrition. However, he felt the company could accomplish more with the right level of structure and a focus on accountability and feedback. He needed a new CHRO and went outside of the company to hire Peggy Verdi. According to Verdi, their efforts focused on “beginning a multiyear journey to increase employees’ skills and comfort with having difficult conversations, as well as driving accountability.” Verdi said, “It is a major shift, and we needed to change but also protect the core Subaru culture of humility because that’s what has made — and will continue to make — us successful.”

Shifting Gears

Their work focused on employees having individual goals tied to company priorities. In the past, other than sales targets, goals were not consistently set at the beginning of the year. As a result, the focus turned toward training managers and employees on how to give constructive feedback in reviews and now have distributed performance ratings. When performance reviews were given previously, nearly everyone was rated as exceeding expectations or exceptional, and a large portion of people were high potential. Doll and Verdi went a step further with the executive management team, providing Hogan assessments and coaching for each individual leader and at the team level.

Finally, the company revamped its leadership competencies to focus on the behaviors needed for future success, such as Fueling the Business, Driving Results and Accelerating Change, Engaging People, Diagnosing Self and Shifting Gears, and Igniting Development and Coaching. A recent survey of all employees showed people recognise that change is underway, and a vast majority are very supportive.

Subaru is currently wrestling with how to recognise exceptional individual contributions within a culture that prefers to recognize team success. “People sometimes assume requests for recognition would come from the sales force, millennials, or the new employees we’ve hired, given our growth,” said Verdi. “But it comes from mid- and late-career professionals as well — people at every stage in their career. Employees report staying because of the altruistic mindset, despite not feeling individually recognized. The programs are there; we just need to remind managers to use them.” Verdi added, “We are starting to use individual recognition to spotlight rising stars, showcase underrepresented voices, and help attract talent, but we can’t let it get so big it no longer feels genuine at Subaru. When people aren’t modest here, they often struggle.”

Doll makes clear that being humble is not the same as not being fiercely competitive, working hard, or having a focus on the bottom line when your legacy is to make the world a better place.

The post Humble Leadership in Action: Subaru case study appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.

If you google executive presence you will find descriptions that include gravitas, body language, appearance, emotional intelligence (EQ) and integrity. With communications you find pitch, eye contact, speed, vocal range and listening skills. It is often described as how you act, speak and look. All of these are important but are a subset of broader leadership competencies needed to influence and inspire others to achieve great organizational outcomes. The purpose is sustainably impacting people’s lives for the better.

The biggest danger is simply focusing narrowly on improved communication skills. The goal has to be broader motivational skills to lead teams and employee engagement to achieve outstanding business results. It’s being passionate about purpose, performance, and culture to achieve industry leadership results.

Forbes magazine (July30, 2018), said:

“In its simplest terms, executive presence is about your ability to inspire confidence-inspiring confidence in your subordinates that you’re the leader they want to follow, inspiring confidence among peers that you’re capable and reliable and, most importantly, inspiring confidence among senior leaders that you have the potential for great achievements.’’

The good news is that Executive Presence (EP) can be measured, coached, and improved. It starts with using highly reliable, valid personality and 360 assessments and having a return-on-investment approach that understands the causal link between leadership, employee engagement and business results.

This paper shares our research and insights into EP and our approach to building EP competencies.

We can explain the science behind the importance of EP.

Read the full paper here

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A multinational company based in Europe, one of the largest companies in the world, was looking for a new approach to developing and identifying high potential leaders. As part of this new approach, they reviewed their current leadership assessments and recognised a need to enhance their assessment suite which included their multi-rater survey. They then engaged PBC to customise the Hogan 360 (a globally benchmarked multi-rater leadership survey) to align with their Leadership attributes. The intention was to use this multi-rater survey to identify the strengths and development priorities of their leaders across the globe in relation to these attributes using a valid assessment tool. The organisation had also done previous research that showed increasing engagement in their people improved safety outcomes to a notable degree. Safety was a critical performance indicator, and the results of the multi-rater would assist in identifying those who were more likely to engage their staff, and ultimately, encourage safer work behaviour.

Approach

PBC collaborated closely with the organisation for approximately 12 months. During this time, PBC:

• Customised the Hogan 360 to the organisation’s leadership attributes, of which several versions of the survey were created to cater for different leadership streams.
• Created a self-administration platform for those employees selected to participate in the multi-rater survey. Self-administration included downloading and interpretation of their final report.
• Developed top quartile benchmarks against which leaders could compare themselves to top performing external global leaders.
• Assisted in the analysis and interpretation of data gleaned from the administration of the survey to over 4,500 participants annually.

Use

• The primary use is to support the leadership and commercial solutions across the company and develop strong business, functional and people leaders, with the capabilities to deliver results for today and in the future.
• The Hogan 360 assessments are used for both development and identification of potential.
• Historically the company used its own in house 360 assessment. In 2017, an internal analysis of this assessment showed poor validity.
• The Hogan 360 was mapped to the company model and is readily interpretable in a competency language with which the company employees are familiar.
• The 360 data is used to identify future commercial leaders and technical leaders and enrol them in high-potential development programmes. At a strategic level, the 360 data is used as a part of senior succession planning, to compare their aggregate profile to external top quartile performance, and to identify the strengths and gaps in relation to their strategic aims (e.g., those at the core of the business versus those who are leading transition).

Outcomes

• The assessment enables the company to compare themselves to external benchmarks and leverage the 360-assessment data to; provide insights to the business at team, organisational and strategic levels and supports analytic projects shifting the organisation towards evidence-based HR.
• At the company engagement is central to their performance management philosophy. Analytical work demonstrated higher engagement scores predict higher performance ratings and higher engagement scores predict fewer safety incidents. They further learned that leadership at the team or organisational level accounts for a large proportion of engagement.
• An internal study demonstrated a strong relationship between leadership and team performance. Using 360 assessments, the organisation was able to understand the causal effect between engagement and sales in various parts of the commercial organisation.
• In the process, they re-validated the factor structure of the Hogan 360 and in so doing, highlighted its superior technical qualities.
• The organisation found a strong association between team engagement and 360-based leadership competencies.
• The findings generated interest from the organisations internal stakeholders and led to the implementation of several interventions in the organisation including: a) a leadership development program b) annual feedback to line managers on how well they engage their workforce; c) targeted communications about business strategy and how a specific unit can contribute; and d) interventions to improve personal safety where needed.

Summary

PBC was able to assist one of the world’s largest organisations in terms of customising a multi-rater survey to meet their unique requirements, while providing them with the internal capability to manage the administration process. Collaboration between PBC and the organisation from a data analytics perspective also allowed the organisation to improve and streamline its leadership assessment methodology using a robust scientific approach.
The 360 data will be used to help validate other assessments including leadership potential. The 360 tool assists in the education of stakeholders on the importance of valid and reliable assessments and ultimately to make evidence-based HR decisions.

Read the case study here

The post Case Study: Multinational Petrochemical Company Hogan 360 appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.

Four super competencies emerged.  They have a strong achievement focus and are strategic.  In short, they are pushing for results.  They are also inspiring and emotionally intelligent.  They know how to create employee engagement.  The four competencies and 360 behaviors are as follows:

Engagement pays

Global research shows that a leader has at least 50% impact on the performance and culture of a team.  Leadership is consequential, measurable and improvable.  We use Hogan 360 and personality assessments.  Engagement drives performance, motivation and retention.  It impacts financial and operational outcomes as well as the customer experience.

The best leaders demonstrate sound competencies with both their soft and hard skills.  The reputation of a leader should be the engagement and performance of their team.

The good news is that leadership is learnable.  Using Hogan Assessments brings science to the journey of continuous improvement.  Coaching and leadership development programs should aim for self-awareness and self-mastery of new competencies to build performance, reputation and career success.

Measuring and improving key business drivers

There are five types of assessments available to businesses. There are 3 measures of leadership. They are personality assessments, a 360 review and a team assessment. The next two assessments relate to stakeholder satisfaction that measure employee engagement and customer satisfaction. They pick up on both the employee and customer experience.

The challenge is to understand, measure and improve the causal link between leadership, engagement and performance.

The post What are the competencies of great leaders? appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.

Peter Berry Consultancy were asked to provide a customised Hogan 360 and Group Report with mapping to their leadership capability framework.

Canon needed an individual and group 360 that could

• Increase strategic self-awareness
• Analyse team strengths, weaknesses, and values
• Benchmark leadership capability

PBC provided the following solutions to enhance Canon’s talent management initiatives;

• Ability to measure against a consistent framework across the employee lifecycle.
• Provision of the opportunity to measure ROI from development investment as the Hogan 360 is a repeatable tool. Data analytics reporting options are also available.
• With sufficient volume, different leadership level benchmarks can be applied to reflect the Canon Australia leadership levels. An internal Canon Australia benchmark may be calculated following sufficient data collection. This is in addition to the global benchmark

Results #1
Canon can now apply different leadership level benchmarks.

Results #2
Canon can drive real behaviour change as the Hogan 360 uses evidence-based diagnostics and highly effective feedback for individuals.

Results #3
The Hogan 360 Group Report allows Canon to implement targeted team building programs to address team development opportunities and drive organisational performance.

For more information, please contact us at info@peterberry.com.au

“We were already using the standard Hogan 360 in our business so it was familiar for our leaders, but we loved the fact it could be customised to reflect our Leadership Framework. The immediate impacts to the business were leaders were able to make some small changes to their behaviour immediately to be seen as more effective by their stakeholders. Yes, absolutely, we would recommend the Hogan 360, self-awareness is a great starting point for any leadership program and the practicality of having that awareness linked directly to the behaviours you want to see in your business is useful for leaders.” Jennifer Voss, Learning & Development Manager, Canon Oceania

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