By Barb Ward
Managing the complexities of the business world in today’s environment requires leaders to be self-aware. And organizations want to make sure they are hiring a candidate that has the right tools for the job. A Hogan Personality Assessment can help in either of these scenarios. Hogan offers a perspective of your personality that allows you to delve deeper into who you are and how you show up as a leader and a person. It can deepen leadership effectiveness by illuminating your strengths and areas for improvement and offers you and your employer (or potential employer) an objective view of how you work, how you lead and how you interact with others. Self-awareness of your potential derailers when under stressful situations can help propel you forward for success both personally and professionally.
So why Hogan?
Hogan is different from other personality tests because it takes into account not only personality traits, but it correlates them with workplace data, enabling the assessment to predict work performance. In fact, Hogan assessments were the first to scientifically measure personality for business. Three decades later, Hogan has assessed millions of individuals in hundreds of organizations throughout all types of jobs, job levels and industries throughout the world.
- This is important for organizations because it helps them determine the best candidate for specific positions prior to hiring, which helps ensure they will stay for the long-term. Additionally, it provides leaders, individuals, and teams within the organization to improve self-awareness and build more effective leaders and high-performance teams.
- It is important for you personally because the assessment can help predict the type of career path that will be most successful for you, and help you develop skills that will take you there.
Innovative Connections uses the Hogan Personality Assessment to help organizations and leaders identify strengths and areas for improvement among leaders, individuals, and teams. In addition to the paper report, a 90-minute one-on-one coaching session delves further into the meaning of the report to give you a deeper understanding of your results.
A Personal Touch
To gain better clarity for how this process looks from the inside out, I took this assessment, received my results and went through the debrief process with Kaine Cure, one of our Innovative Connections team who is certified in Hogan Assessment interpretation. Now, full disclosure, I am most comfortable with a paper report I can review on my own. I was a little apprehensive about having to discuss my results, both good and bad, with someone else.
Now, for clarity, over the course of my career I have taken a few different personality assessments. Learning information about how I relate to others, how I work best, etc., has been informative, and comfortable for me because it was just a paper report. When we were discussing this blog post and Kaine suggested I go through the debrief process to understand my results more fully, I was hesitant. However, I saw the value for both myself, and for this article, so I agreed.
While there are explanations of the report through Hogan, going through the debrief process was an invaluable experience. Kaine has an in-depth knowledge of not only the definitions of the categories, but also how they are interpreted. What’s more, it wasn’t a situation where he just told me how to read the report. It was a time of reflection. So, it went like this, Kaine would explain the category and give examples of how that trait could look, and then offer space for me to decide if my score resonated with me and how it might show up for me. He then offered thoughts about high scores that could become derailers for me given a stressful situation. Then I took time to think about situations where this trait had surfaced in my life, how I handled the situation, and how I might change my response given this new information.
The End Result
The best way I can think to describe the value of this debrief is to say that the process made this paper report a living, breathing document. Kaine offered so much insight with no judgement. He offered personal experiences, related his experience with traits that he has that are similar and made the process so much more valuable. There is always strength in knowing we are not alone!
Since my conversation with Kaine, I have found myself using the techniques we discussed to evaluate my approach to situations or projects to affect better outcomes. I can only imagine that this knowledge will work its magic through additional experiences, situations and projects as time moves on. And what could be better than that?
Facts about Hogan:
- Personality provides the deepest insight into an employee because it tells the whole story without bias
- Personality stays consistent over time, unlike skill sets and experience
- Personality can be assessed with accuracy and reliability
- Personality traits can be correlated with real-world performance measures in different roles and industries
- Personality assessments compare people objectively, on equal playing fields
- Hogan’s job performance studies are painstakingly conducted over a significant period of time for each company evaluated for its data
- Everyone is measured, not just top performers, so the data clearly differentiates high performers from their peers
