Dive Brief:
- Nearly everyone in a workplace has more than one personality tendency — or “derailer” — that can interfere with performance, relationships or reputation when a person is operating under pressure, according to an analysis by Hogan Assessment of more than 86,000 working adults.
- The data revealed four derailers frequently found at a high-risk level: “Colorful” (14.3%), or expressive and socially confident individuals who may become attention-seeking or have difficulty sharing the spotlight; “cautious” (14.2%), such as careful decision-makers who shift into excessive hesitation or fear of failure; “bold” (13.7%), where confidence and ambition turn into overconfidence, entitlement or difficulty acknowledging mistakes; and “reserved” (13%), when independent or emotionally composed individuals become emotionally distant or limited in their communications.
- The findings challenge the idea that career-limiting behaviors belong to a small group of “difficult” employees, Hogan stated in a media release.
Dive Insight:
For employers, the goal isn’t to eliminate these tendencies or change someone’s personality, but rather to help employees develop a “strategic self-awareness” of what triggers a tendency and how it affects other people, Hogan said.
“The same characteristic that helps a person succeed in one situation can create problems in another, particularly when pressure increases,” Alise Dabdoub, Hogan’s director of product innovation and data science, explained in the release. The idea “is to recognize the pattern early enough to adjust your behavior,” Dabdoub added.
Take the “mischievous” leader, a risk-taker who can seem engaging and fearless, skilled at building rapport and getting things done, Ryan Rush, a psychologist and Hogan consultant, pointed out in a recent blog.
In derailment, a person with “mischievous” tendencies can become impulsive or easily bored and “fracture team trust by failing to follow through” as well as lose credibility by taking irrational risks, Rush wrote. By identifying what triggers their derailing behavior, leaders with such a trait can learn to balance their risk-taking tendencies and discern which risks are worth taking from those that aren’t, he said.
In a recent survey by Express Employment Professionals and The Harris Poll, 86% of more than 1,000 hiring managers said the right personality could outweigh a candidate’s skills gap. Hiring managers and job seekers agreed that the traits with the highest value are reliability, honesty, adaptability, flexibility and self-motivation — skills that play a large role in technology transitions taking place at work.
People managers can also transform workplace relationships by considering employees’ different cognitive skills — such as analytical, experimental, relational and structural thinking, an executive coach explained at a Society for Human Resource Management conference in 2023. For example, during a conversational performance check-in, an analytical thinker may respond better to charts and data instead of bulleted talking points, she said.