The Right Perspective

In an exclusive interview with People Matters, DR. ROBERT HOGAN, Founder & President, Hogan Assessments talks about the evolving nature of leadership, bridging the gap between psychological science of talent and common real-world talent practices, the criticalness of evaluating personality, identifying talent with empirically-validated psychometric devices, and high potentials

- Yasmin Taj & Suparna Chawla Bhasin

Robert Hogan is the founder and president of Hogan Assessment, which leads the world in personality assessment and leadership development. Dr. Hogan was the first psychologist to demonstrate the link between personality and organizational effectiveness and currently is the leading international authority on personality assessment and leadership. Hogan earned a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley and was McFarlin Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at The University of Tulsa from 1982 to 2001. Prior to that, he was Professor of Psychology and Social Relations at Johns Hopkins University.

You have researched extensively on leadership and the domain of ‘personality’. How do you really define leadership and how does the personality of a leader make a difference to corporate results or the successful operation of an organization?

Leadership is the ability to get a group of people to work together towards a common purpose and to do it efficiently. Leadership is about building and maintaining a high performing team and beating the competition — it is not about getting promoted and getting a salary raise but about building a team that can beat others, almost like how you prepare the army. We know exactly how the dimensions of the personality are related to capability and most of the people get it wrong. What happens is that due to the wrong personality, the staff gets alienated, disengaged, they quit or stop working hard. This phenomenon can be easily observed in athletics when we say that the coach has lost the team and they won’t play for him anymore. The exact same thing happens in business – the manager loses his team as the team won’t perform for him.