The Leadership Divide: Global Leadership Effectiveness Study Findings

0:00people are the most consequential and dangerous forces on earth well personality psychology is about the nature of human nature it's about people and wouldn't that be useful to know it seems to me i can't i can't think of a more important problem you're listening to the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments the global leader in personality and leadership guided by your hosts hogan chief science officer and world-renowned personality psychologist dr ryan sherman alongside hogan's pr manager and

0:35resident storyteller blake lepp this podcast explores the impact of personality on life leadership and the nature of human nature hello everybody and welcome to the science of personality podcast i'm your host ryan sherman along with my co-host as always blake lepp say hello blake hello everybody and welcome back to the science of personality podcast episode 150 today ryan and i are joined by hogan's managing

1:05director of asia pacific krista pettersson and hogan's senior consultant in the apac region nicole dickey to discuss the findings of hogan's global leadership effectiveness study anyone who uses hogan's personality assessments or listens to this podcast knows that identifying effective leaders is at the core of what we do at hogan this study which compares personality assessment data from over 21 000 executives in hogan's global database with survey responses from nearly 10 000 full-time employees across more than 120 markets reveals some really incredible insights including a striking

1:42disconnect between the characteristics executives display and the qualities employees say define effective leadership krista and nicole were two of the key people to get this study off the ground and they're here with us today discuss the new findings now that the results are in but before we get to our conversation with krista and nicole if you wish to give us any ideas for upcoming episodes or you want to ask ryan or me a question shoot us an email at hello at the science of personality.com or follow the science of personality on linkedin now let's get to it krista nicole welcome to the podcast is there

2:17anything you'd like to share with our audience before we get started hey hey so excited to be here this is krista i've been at hogan for this is actually my 13th year at hogan i'm doing my phd in organizational development and change and i live in mainland china and actually i have lived outside of the u.s my entire adult life longer than i have lived in the u.s wow that's a good fact krista um and i'm nicole dickey thanks so much for having us um a couple i guess additional facts i'm based in

2:52taipei taiwan this is my third year with hogan i have a master's in io psych from the university of tulsa and have worked in corporate communications and organizational development so excited to be here thanks for having us well for our audience members i just want to uh let them know that krista and nicole are two amazing rock stars of our asia pacific team uh i know uh they mentioned where they're currently based and and where they work out of but they work throughout all the markets

3:24through the asia region uh region for us including india uh and down through southeast asia china japan korea and many many other places uh in asia and um those markets are huge markets for hogan and we wouldn't be as successful as we were in those markets without the incredible work that krista nicole do and of course today we're super excited to have krista nicole on because of their amazing work on this study which quite frankly goes beyond their uh typical call uh of duty and so uh this is a

4:01huge study and they were really two major drivers behind it so super excited to have you on here with us today so so thanks nicole and krista for joining us well thanks ryan well okay let's get into this this uh very special episode episode 150 but also just talking about this massive uh undertaking that so many people first off i want to say um so many people at hogan were involved with this study um you know krista nicole you all were kind of there you know at the very beginning getting this thing off the

4:31ground and then it goes through all these different facets of the organization you know um especially like getting up to the the marketing launch of this thing once everything was done but really so many people at hogan were involved with this so we just wanted to say a huge thank you to everybody who put a lot of really hard work and effort into this because it was it was a massive project uh but it it also uh yielded some really incredible results which we're going to talk about today you know some of our listeners probably listened when krista joined us for an episode on this topic when the study was

5:06underway or or the mini um psyop episode we did with nicole to discuss some of those early findings that we saw about a year ago but for those who aren't familiar with this can you explain what you were trying to accomplish with this research you know what what was the what was the the rationale for getting this off the ground and really wanting to explore this yeah absolutely blake um as anyone who's listened to the podcast really knows hogan is the thought leader on leadership around the world and if you've ever

5:40listened to any of ryan's talks you have probably heard this distinction we like to make about effective leadership versus emergent leadership and for those of you who are just joining us um what we say the difference is is that effective leaders are really focused on their teams and supporting their teams to perform and compete against the competition and win against the competition so it's more about the leadership as a resource for the team whereas emergent leadership is about the leader themselves

6:11um emerging as a leader or uh being able to get into positions of leadership so it's more about that individual leader's career and being able to climb the through the politics and get to the top and so we we differentiate these two which is very important um because i think um this is actually something quite unique to hogan a lot of people when they think about leadership they think about the position of leadership but we kind of challenge people to think about um what action leader needs

6:42to do to become effective and so with this uh difference between leader emergence versus effectiveness we have actually done quite a lot of research on this very topic and around the world we've collected so much data from hundreds of markets on emergent leaders so we've actually written quite extensively on emergent leadership across the world in different countries uh and um we we notice that there's

7:12differences in emergent leaders or who we promote as leaders around the world so a leader in china looks very different from a leader in denmark and they look very different from a leader in the u.s um different cultures and countries reward and punish different behaviors and different types of leaders get to be in positions of leadership well when it comes to effective leadership this is where hogan is really obsessed with learning more about how we can help support and develop effective leaders

7:44and so uh anyone who's heard either ryan or dr hogan talk about effective leadership knows that we oftentimes talk about really four maybe five characteristics that make for a good leader so an effective leader tends to cast a vision and get everyone rallied around that vision they tend to have good judgment um show integrity and are confident sometimes we add in humble humility right and so when we talk about effective leadership around the world we oftentimes get the question from different markets yeah that's

8:19great but does effective leadership from a personality perspective differ in my market so um for example in japan a couple of years ago ryan came to speak and and a few people asked him well ryan does effective leadership um differ in japan we know emergent leadership is different in japan we know leaders in japan are way different than leaders uh in almost any market in the world but is effective leadership the same around the world and before we did this study really we didn't have a good answer for

8:53that we knew that we knew that it was important to have vision judgment integrity uh competence and and humility but what we really couldn't answer is if um leaders around the world exhibit this in different ways and so really the goal of this study when we first um started thinking about this was to understand if effective leadership is different around the world and it was actually uh me uh a really great great talent from our um data science team way one yeah and also chase winterberg um brilliant guy

9:29from our hogan research institute um we were at a conference together and we were talking about this um conundrum of how we can actually measure effective leadership around the world because we have so much data on emergent leaders but we wanted to know more about effective leadership and chase was talking about a research project he did um for police officers in the u.s and anyone who knows about the u.s knows that there's been some controversy there and so uh what chase did is he actually asked people what they wanted to see in effective police officers and way one said well hey why couldn't we do the same thing

10:06with effective leadership around the globe and we just thought this was such a cool concept and i'd also like to brag on nicole just a little bit nicole when she joined this project um it it was she was barely three months at hogan and she just like took off running with this project and it's so amazing so this is like she mentioned it's her third year at hogan but she has done so much work on this project and it's been such an integral part about studying uh what makes effective leadership around the globe so we are super excited to

10:39start talking about the results and maybe one other point that i'd like to make is previously we called this the global leadership effectiveness study but we have rebranded to calling it the leadership divide yeah so nicole i didn't know if you had anything to add there as well but i think one of the um you know one of the exciting things about this study is that to the point you were making earlier krista we've been talking at hogan about this distinction between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness for a long time there seemed to be some pretty clear evidence for it

11:14but a lot of the empirical evidence for it was limited to some older studies that had been done quite some time ago or is limited to just focused on managers not really necessarily the highest level leaders and often took you know a very different perspective from this study which really focused on the perspective from followers as opposed to the perspective of say hr leaders or some other leaders in different parts of an organization so you know for for me this is really an opportunity to

11:45demonstrate what we've been talking about at hogan from an empirical standpoint to say really we think there is a distinction a critical distinction between emergence and effectiveness we think this has been overlooked for a long time we've been telling people this there's some past empirical literature supporting that but this is really uh a standout global study right to your point in incorporating many many cultures some of those original studies were just done in the united states um where we can look and see if this divide to use the word is is consistent uh across the world and uh if it really

12:21is consistent with it with our point of view um so i guess for me that that was one of the exciting things about it um but i was really interested sort of uh krista nicole your uh you know your perspective on the sort of the uh if if that was part of the rationale for it was not just um that this this global nature to it but also the rationale was about um you know trying to really put uh a flag in the ground

12:54so to speak to say hey this is really definitive now and then for me that was what was exciting but i don't know if to what extent that was part of the um the creation process yeah that's a great question ryan i think when we started off it really started off quite organically and we didn't know how big this would actually get in fact when we first pitched it um we were thinking about maybe starting in five different countries maybe looking at some of the biggest economies so india china mexico brazil and we were

13:26talking about maybe germany and the u.s something like that um but it was really um my boss jolt who said why don't we just do this around the world and see how much data we can get and how far we can take it and it kind of spun from there so uh like like blake blake mentioned earlier it was really wonderful to have this grassroots like group collaboration just sparked on from the curiosity of does leadership look different around the globe and i think with all of the contributions from across

13:59different departments at hogan it really became this kind of flagship project i don't think i could have ever imagined that it would get this big and that we would have um this much data to be able to just play around with and do so much with and gain some really solid insights on so i'm super excited to see it actually come out into the world and go from this like grassroots small project to something really meaningful and significant for global studies well i'd like to chime in here before we get to the

14:32next question and just to give our listeners kind of an idea of what the magnitude of these results have generated as far as what my where my job's concerned in the in the pr and you know media outreach for this and you know i think uh as of recording this we are 13 days into the launch uh of course it's going to come out you know later uh but um we already have coverage in forbes forbes uk the times out of the uk i mean we're already seeing these top tier one outlets really kind of

15:06take a look at this and really they're they're seeing what we see so this isn't just something that we're we think is cool but you know in our in our media outreach people are really grasping onto this this this this means something to them and we just continue to see i think we've already hit about almost a half a billion uh umv as far as our audience reach in just the first 13 days from a pr standpoint so this has been a huge win um on that front as well so that just tells you the

15:37magnitude of this so moving on to my next question can you now give us a look behind the curtain and talk about the study design and methodology so i think that before we can get to the other parts i think we really need to dig into that as well sure um this is nicole i'll jump in blake so we had two really key data sources that we were pulling from so you know it's the leadership divide so we're comparing the leaders that we have with the leaders that we want so that first data

16:09source is dealing with the leaders that we have and so for for that data we actually used hogan's global normative data set so that's a stratified representative sample of the global workforce and of that we grabbed and used the job level of executive to really represent and operationalize our emergent leader kind of you know the leaders that are in power and i think ryan could speak more to this but our norm is tailored to represent the demographics of a global workforce so when we say

16:43that executives tend to behave this way or that way we can really speak with a lot of authority and you might see different numbers of respondents um on the hpi or the hds the mvpi and that's just because a different number of folks have taken those different particular inventories so then we get to the leaders that we want and if i can kind of take a sidestep a little meander here to talk about a theoretical

17:13background so our background really comes from implicit leader theory and that's helping us to understand who followers are going to follow the idea here is that every person has this sort of unconscious personal idea of what makes a leader this comes from interacting with teachers and coaches and bosses in the workplace from the media all kinds of socialization experiences maybe ryan you have like a specific person you think of when you think of a leader maybe krista thinks of like a prototype

17:47but we just really wanted to figure out a way to get at these perceptions of an ideal or effective leader and kind of an easy way to think of this is if you look at a person and you unconsciously decide that this is a leader or not a leader so you're making an unconscious evaluation and when you evaluate someone as a leader you're willing to follow them and this comes to like really good positive performance outcomes like employee engagement and team performance and organizational effectiveness

18:19so our goal was to use this information about respondents perceptions of an ideal leader in order to help develop current and future leaders to help them behave in ways that align with employees needs employees expectations so that we can see those positive performance outcomes like engagement like org effectiveness so from like a nuts and bolts of the study perspective we used hogan's

18:50personality-based job analytic tool and that was the foundation of the survey so usually if hogan's data science team is going to be conducting a job analysis it's going to have a specific referent job like a flight attendant or an accountant and our data science team would be asking subject matter experts and incumbents those who are in the job you know what does it take to be successful in this role and this would be sort of a first step in collecting data to then do more with the data like to develop a

19:23success profile for selecting employees or training recommendations development recommendations there's a ton that you can do with job analysis data but we took a different approach so instead of asking about a specific role we just asked about ideal leader and anyone and everyone who's ever worked for a boss they were our subject matter experts and we were asking people in a structured way which is going to help us you know reduce that bias and really get to behaviors so we presented individuals with a behavioral

19:58behavioral statement and then we asked them to rate that as very good or very bad very good to very bad for ideal leadership so blake and ryan i want to get your perspectives really quick here's an example item can see things from the perspectives of others okay so would you rate that as very good good neutral like i'll let you go first can you can you list the uh the options again yeah yeah yeah so five point

20:35scale very good good neutral bad or very bad for ideal leader performance i would say very good yeah i was gonna say very good as well yeah not saying that i'm very good just saying that's what i would expect out of a leader yeah i was more wanting to be no no but that's a good point blake because that is how the study is supposed to work you're supposed to be thinking about not yourself but what you think the ideal leader should do yep exactly that's what i think is very good and blake and ryan your

21:07perspective aligns with what we see across the world so this item was actually our top endorsed item so you're aligned with our global respondents so at a really high level we had this opportunity to partner with distributors around the world clients around the world for this data collection effort and we have now over 10 000 respondents across almost 2 000 companies in over 120 different countries and territories so a really robust sample across the world well i mean thanks nicole for

21:43for going over that methodology for us i should point out here uh you know point of order you know usually blake and i get to ask the questions on this podcast so we get to look like the smart people because we get to ask all the questions you know what now fortunately we got the right answer there so we could maintain our uh position at the top of the intellectual hierarchy because we got it we've matched everybody else but but that was a real risk for us so uh we're gonna have to be careful about that in the future blake uh having uh our guests turn the tables on us and ask us questions

22:18yeah well i was buying time there so i could i could pull up chat gpt and get the right i'm kidding yeah but uh go ahead blake no you go ahead ryan well no no nicole i i was gonna say that one of the questions that comes up here thinking about this methodology i'm sort of interested in your take on this is um to what extent can we actually trust people's opinions you know your example there you're asking me and blake and we ask other people these kinds of things you know why is it that we think we can trust other people's opinions should you know there's an argument to be made that people

22:53don't even know what they need as a leader so how can you ask them what they want um what are your thoughts on that i'm so happy you've teed us up for that ryan um we'll get more into this as we share the share the findings but i really think that across all the inventories and across the behavioral statements what this shows to me is that people respondents employees really know what they need to be successful and they genuinely want to work and want to be successful so i'll share some examples

23:29moving forward but i think more than anything um this has surprised delighted me to see that people genuinely want to work and they seem to know you know what they need in order to accomplish their goals what they need from their leader in order to accomplish their goals yeah i think it's really funny um ryan because when we talk about effective leadership around the world we we always tell people you know effective leadership is about building and maintaining a high-performing team it's not about the position of leadership it's about the followers and everyone

24:04says yes that's right it should be about the followers it shouldn't be about the leaders but then this question that you've asked whenever we presented the results around the world that's the first question we get is do the followers really know what what a leader needs to do to lead shouldn't the leaders know better shouldn't the leaders know better what the organization needs to perform which is kind of funny right because we're so willing to say that you know leadership is for the followers and yet we're so mistrustful of actually the followers knowing what they need in order to be

24:40successful but like nicole said kind of our research shows um you know we're not just asking people who do you want as a leader and letting them free form you know and tell us they want the most funny charismatic leader we're actually in this survey asking about specific behaviors that they want to see in the in their leaders and so we can be very precise and like nicole said the findings really show that people are really wanting a leader that can help them perform

25:12well okay you all mentioned we're going to take it you know we're going to do a deep dive into the findings a little later in this episode but i'm going to point out you know spoiler alert there was one common theme we saw in the results which is that the leaders we have are not the leaders people want and i think that gets to that leadership divide you know rebranding the the the study and you know i alluded to that in the intro but would you you know either be mind elaborating on it a bit and tell us more about what this means yeah absolutely i think we see this the most starkly

25:46when we look at the competencies of the leaders that we have around the globe versus what people say they want in leader competencies and so we actually took the top five highest ranking competencies of leaders around the globe and they include inspiring others competing with others presenting to others taking initiative and driving innovation so that's the top five competencies that global executives exhibit and what's really surprising or maybe it shouldn't be surprising what's really stark to me

26:20is that these are all very performative behaviors they're emergent leader behaviors and so we see the leaders getting to the tops of these organizations inspire others they take initiative they drive innovation they're presenting to others it's all about the leader and their capability to present and share their vision and perform and so it really is more about the position of leadership and less focus on the teams whereas if you actually look at the competencies that people want to see in their leaders

26:53we see that global respondents say they want effective communication effective decision making accountability integrity and leadership ability which is uh integrity and leadership ability which is uh really the competency that we're looking at or how we define that is uh leaders supporting teams to perform so if you think about what respondents actually wanted their leaders it's those effective uh leadership characteristics it's about communicating to the team it's about making good decisions and being willing to admit

27:28when they're wrong it's about taking accountability for their decisions having integrity and supporting others to perform again it's about you see it very very clearly uh the leaders that we have are emergent leaders and the leaders that people want are effective leaders

27:49you know krista as you describe those results and i remember the first time you shared those results i don't know if it was just with me or the data science team i don't remember exactly where it was but i remember the first time you you shared this initial set of results and you know we were looking at these results going huh that's really interesting um bob hogan for years and years has talked about you know what do people want in leaders and he's given this list of some of the things you listed off earlier right integrity good judgment competence right how much overlap is there how much overlap do you see

28:24between what we found in this study and the things that dr hogan's been talking about for years uh i mean the competencies are right there you can see it's pretty much nearly all overlapping you know if you're talking about effective communication uh decision making that decision making is kind of equivalent to judgment right we have accountability which is uh and integrity which is saying what you're going to do and doing what you say um leadership ability is about supporting the team to perform i think the

28:57only things that aren't on this list are confidence which is um could be argued is about um more about experience and maybe even cognitive ability um and then but you could you could say that there's some overlap with you know accountability making sure that you know you're you're uh being accountable for what you say it overlaps with confidence so i think it's very much overlapping it didn't surprise me at all that these are the characteristic that people around the globe really wanted their leaders the only one i

29:29will say and this is the one that you always say ryan people over index on is vision vision is clearly on the what global leaders are really good at global leaders tend to be really good at casting that vision so i'd say you know presenting to others um inspiring others things like that that's that lands on that one uh aspect that dr hogan says is also important um but that's more on the emergent leader side yeah yeah i see what you're saying yeah that shows up on that the leaders that we currently have tend to be really good

30:03at vision but lacking in some of those other categories whereas the leaders that we want have those other categories but do you think that they might also be lacking in vision do you think maybe that's uh or or or that we don't but maybe we don't want vision or do you think it's just that we get so much of that already that that it's less in demand well that's that's a good question i don't know these are like the top ranking competencies so maybe a little bit lower on the list you know vision one of the things

30:34that are important but i think what people are most craving out of the leaders are these other aspects and i think you know from a team perspective from a wanting to perform of course people want a leader that communicates that makes good decisions that takes accountability and holds other people accountable for their results um and supports them to perform and again going back to that question of do followers really know what they want how can we trust them i mean it's pretty clear from these data right here

31:05that followers genuinely want to succeed they genuinely want a leader that supports them to perform which i think is a really good thing and so we really should be starting to take the perspective of followers in order to engage them a little bit more okay now let's dig in a little bit deeper and we're going to start uh at the top at the global level which includes responses from you know employees across 120 different countries or more than 120 different countries you know first i'm curious what

31:36people around the world are saying they want an effective leaders uh so if you all could address that and second were there any findings that surprised you that stood out yeah um i'll go ahead and take this one i think a couple of clear themes were there across um what we found and first of all when we're we're looking at what people value around the world what people want in their want their leaders to value um really teamwork and relationships was the big theme um executives uh around the world only score

32:13moderately on the scale the hogan scale of affiliation but really people around the world wanted affiliation in their leaders so they want a leader that can drive that sense of belonging that can help people work together as a team um that can put an importance on relationships in organizations so that was one big thing we saw and um there was a little bit of a gap there between the leaders that we have and the leaders that we want and so it's really an area for

32:43um leaders to consider it's not just about your individual performance or you getting ahead as a leader it's about making sure that you're building a team um one of the second themes that we saw that was pretty clear um and and really nicole gave us a hint with that item the top ranking item is that people want people first leadership um and so we saw that people actually wanted leaders who were had energy and drives or high on ambition who were empathetic and cared about people um so

33:18were high in interpersonal sensitivity and who were curious and strategic so high on inquisitive um and so it's really interesting because uh actually leaders around the world tend to have these characteristics so they tend to be higher in ambition interpersonal sensitivity and inquisitive but that doesn't mean that there's no opportunities for development here because we know that leaders who are high on these characteristics will have good behaviors associated with them and also have

33:51negative behaviors so for example someone who is high on interpersonal sensitivity is going to be tactful empathetic caring but at times they may be afraid to confront others and so another characteristic that i'll talk about in a minute is people didn't want uh their leaders to be high on leisurely so they didn't want people who are passive aggressive or people who kind of avoided conflict and and were outwardly agreeable but inwardly kind of resentful and so this actually tells us that there really

34:22still are opportunities to develop our leaders in their behaviors so even though we may want someone who's high in interpersonal sensitivity who's empathetic who cares about others who can seize things from others perspective we still need leaders who are willing to confront problems so that's an area where we might want to develop them finally when we're looking at the characteristics of leaders that we don't want there was very clear consensus around the globe people really didn't want leaders

34:52who are high on excitable leisurely bold and cautious and for those who are not so familiar with hogan excitable excitable is about being emotionally volatile so people wanted a leader who was pretty emotionally stable and followed through with things they want a leader who is not passive aggressive or outwardly agreeable but inwardly resentful so they want someone who's willing to confront problems and share their agenda openly and and really provide kind feedback and not just be nice

35:24um they want leaders who are humble they don't want leaders who are entitled and arrogant and finally they want leaders who are willing to make mistakes take some risks um and and so uh they don't want leaders who are just overly careful and afraid of public embarrassment and never making a decision because of that and so i think what really stands out to me um oh and i'd like to say that most leaders around the globe um they tend to be a little bit lower on excitable leisurely and cautious but really where the gap in in

36:01biggest opportunity i think to no one's surprise is that bold because leaders around the globe tend to be higher on on bold they tend to be arrogant again if we're thinking about emergent leaders they tend to be willing to put themselves out there to make america great again you know to to really um be overconfident here and say that they they can be the superhero that will save the organization but what really what people are wanting are those leaders who can be humble and admit when they're wrong and listen to feedback

36:32and so i think one thing that really stands out for me as i'm looking at all of these characteristics together is just a leader who is people first um who's willing to rise to the occasion for example with that high inquisitive to think about how we could be doing things better um with all the new technologies ai going on in the world um they they have to be able to be meeting those challenges but even more importantly um i think it's significant that people are wanting that sense of belonging affiliation

37:06and the people focus in their leader so with all of the fear that ai is going to take our jobs and and no one's going to have jobs anymore i think leaders can rest assured that people are really wanting someone and uh they're wanting leaders who can actually guide them through this new technology to help build the team to help them have that sense of belonging which is something that you know ai really can't do i mean they can pretend to do it on a superficial level but it really takes a human

37:36to be able to be people first people centric and really care about the team and create that sense of belonging so i think the message here is that we'll still need leaders and leadership even with ai even with the rise of ai you know krista in that description uh about you know what we see in terms of what followers say the most effective leaders do behaviorally uh around the world there was a lot in that description that struck me as sort of about emotional control and then i started thinking about

38:09you know you know the item that nicole read off a moment ago about sort of perspective taking and that made me think is a lot of this a lot of it sounds like eq a lot that's what you know and of course eq has been a huge topic and lots of people have talked about eq and leadership so i just wondered just to you know i have sort of two questions here the first question concerns and to what extent do you think that the pattern here a lot of it is captured by eq i don't think all of it but quite a bit of it is and then i also wonder about you know this interesting

38:43uh pattern what where leaders said they or where the followers said they don't want leaders who are high cautious they also don't want leaders who are high bold and that's somewhat interesting because those are actually the opposite of each other to some extent i mean they're not they're not totally opposite right but there is a small negative correlation between cautious and bold so it's almost like they want leaders who are comfortable and willing to take um you know a certain amount of risk they're comfortable in the public light they're comfortable making a decision without perfect

39:15information they're comfortable making a mistake but they're also comfortable owning up to those mistakes when they make them right so one of the things that's great about really high bold leaders is they're very comfortable making mistakes they just won't admit that they're there those are their mistakes whereas the high cautious leaders are uncomfortable making those mistakes in the first place so i thought that was a really interesting combination of those two and i wonder sort of how do you how do you square those two results so the first part is about eq to what extent is a lot of

39:46this about emotional control and eq and what about that interesting pattern between cautious and bold and things that we don't want in our leaders yeah those are great questions ryan i think on the eq part one thing you know blake asked what i found surprising i think the result that surprised me the most is we didn't actually see adjustment on here which is also about you know being emotionally controlled you know being calm and cool and collected versus being uh emotion more emotional

40:21and pessimistic and i but it was very interesting because people didn't have a strong feeling about whether or not it was important that their leaders have high adjustment so i don't know about that eq piece i think it's about the people focus about having someone that's empathetic and people are okay with you know displays of emotion on a day-to-day basis but what they don't want is that volatility that comes with the fightable so it's about the uh the negative you know getting really excited about

40:54something dropping it uh maybe getting you know emotionally volatile yelling things like that but on a day-to-day basis i think showing emotion seems to be okay in what people accept in leaders as long as they're empathetic and as long as they're you know supporting uh really strong goals so i did find that surprising because in a lot of um research uh adjustment or neuroticism is is really important for for leadership so that was one finding that surprised me i don't know if you have to jump into yeah yeah i think the

41:26other element of i agree with everything everything you shared i think there's also on the excitable piece there's this you know desire for consistency and follow through i think that's kind of through the excitable leisurely um so this like dependability reliability uh emotion and task um i think there's i think the overall ideal leader trends seem to be bigger than eq like there is still this focus on work

41:58focus on tasks focus on um ideas and curiosity that kind of spans something larger than eq but ryan i think your observation on cautious and bold is really really interesting it reminds me of the importance of decision making when we look back at the competencies um but the the items that were really really really disliked is entitlement so the the facet of of bold where um leaders are entitled

42:29that was really really disliked by respondents i think maybe one other thing to point out with the bold versus cautious is also openness to feedback openness to hearing others opinions like with cautious too um people get embarrassed you know publicly embarrassed when making a mistake and it it leads to not being willing to you know listen to others or make that mistake whereas with bold as well you know if you're if you're always right and never admitting what you're wrong there's no room for others input

42:59and that's something we see with like that high is and that low leisurely is people want and even with the competencies people want communication from their leaders they want openness they want honesty and they want you know feedback and so that's also another theme that we're seeing throughout well i wonder if that has anything to do with the observation you shared around adjustment is that high adjusted people aren't necessarily that great at with feedback or maybe they just let it go in one area and out the other i mean speaking as someone with a pretty high adjustment score uh i i can

43:34acknowledge that i have difficulties with that as well so maybe maybe that ties into what you saw or didn't see as far as the adjustment side of things i don't know absolutely um okay well that was the global they'll look at from a global level now let's dig into the regional and country specific results and and okay forgive me this is going to be a bit of a loaded one here but you know so bear with me i've got a kind of a multi-faceted question here first off did you see any consistent patterns

44:05uh secondly were there did people in different countries around the world generally agree about what makes leaders effective uh or were there any results in countries that stood out to you like you know just kind of give us a breakdown what were you seeing at the regional and country specific level sure i'm gonna hop in like this is such a fun this has been such a fun bunch of questions to explore so i hope i can answer this uh really in depth but also not too in depth so i would say one of

44:40the biggest takeaways for me is dealing with mvpi science okay so we didn't focus on that in that global report but i'd say across the world we see that database decisions database decision making is sort of now a baseline expectation for employees now in the current executives personality data the leaders that we have we see that many leaders still rely on intuition and experience there's sort of a moderate low on science but employees really expect evidence-based decisions clear logic behind choices staying up to

45:19date with technology and just like a general curiosity about how things work and we saw this demand for data-driven leadership really strong across latin america so mexico bolivia brazil chile colombia across europe spain lithuania romania czech greece and in asia in mainland china and india in particular and so kind of what this meant the way that we're thinking about this is that there was a consensus amongst respondents so 50 or more of respondents and all those countries are saying yes these high

45:54science behaviors are good to very good for ideal leadership and a particular market um for example an example of this divide is in australia so australian leaders are low on science but we saw that 39 of respondents wanted a leader who was high science so i know that 39 isn't reaching that consensus threshold but this was one of australian respondents highest endorsed values it's kind of interesting

46:24to sort of stay there we saw across europe particularly france germany the uk hungary and denmark all had relatively weak endorsement of all values so in all those countries there were no mvpi scales that had consensus about 50 or more of respondents endorsing any value and then on the flip side we had three countries who had a really strong consensus amongst values 65 of respondents endorsing as good to very

46:58good or greater and that was vietnam egypt and the uae so values was like a pretty interesting uh similarities and differences there we also saw that there were markets around the world who were fans of prudence hpi prudence fans and they wanted leaders to organize work plan works you know strive for really high quality work initiate structure be organized and those countries were in the middle east was the

47:29uae in asia it was vietnam and greater china in europe it was france and spain and in latin america it was colombia chile bolivia and mexico so again these countries respondents are wanting their leaders to adhere to rule initiate structure provide that organization and support and then i guess kind of finally we see that the most universally rejected behavior is that emotional volatility it's excitable

48:03we see that 60 to 90 percent of respondents in most markets are saying that this is bad to very bad for leadership apart from that excitable piece we really do see that it's like kind of a combination of bold leisurely and cautious sometimes we see skeptical and reserved in there but in general those kind of are the top four like most disliked uh scales most disliked behaviors from leaders and we see um

48:37some some gaps on these so for example in india indian leaders tend to be high excitable high leisurely high bold and moderate cautious and again we see this this alignment that 82 of respondents they don't want excitable followed by leisurely bold and cautious so a misalignment on the dark side for india but really all over the world um we've seen some some interesting interesting findings yeah uh nicole i want to just follow up on a couple of things here first you know these these regional

49:15differences really i think highlight first of all the global nature of the data set which again highlight something that we pointed out at the top or or krista or one of you i think was krista pointed out at the top of this uh which is this was really a massive team effort which includes so many of our distributors around the world who encouraged people to participate in the study in their local markets because without them uh we wouldn't have that this kind of region this kind of impact so i think that's um

49:46you know a huge uh part of the study i think kind of goes overlooked just how many people were involved in i mean we know so many people from the from directly inside hogan were involved but without the participation and enthusiasm so many people uh in these markets we wouldn't have been able to collect this data as well but i think the main question i have for some of these regional differences and i think it's going to be the really hard one is why why do you think it is for example we see high science uh being a bigger uh seen as more important in certain regions certain markets around

50:22the world why is it that we see high prudence being seen as as uh more important in certain markets around the world and i realize that you know we don't have necessarily the data to answer some of this but i don't know if if you've all um brainstormed or speculated as to what what some of those reasons might be yeah that's a great question ryan i mean obviously culture probably has a lot to do with it and this is something i i say culture very lightly because we know that culture is very difficult to

50:59measure um but i i would like to point out that like each individual country is quite different um even within a region we're seeing very individualized results within each country and i would suspect that the reasons why could be different for each country and let me give you an example um there were two markets around the globe that did not prioritize ambition um any guesses for i bet you can guess what one of the markets are right well i would guess that one is japan that's correct you're right

51:36could you guess what the other one is uh geez another one that did not prioritize ambition uh no i don't want to guess i might reveal my own bias you might not get it right it's actually denmark is that right nicole that's right that's right yep so and it's very interesting because actually we see that danish executives are score very highly on ambition whereas japanese executives score very lowly on ambition and so it's possible that even though they're the people in those

52:13markets are coming to the same conclusions it's for different reasons so for example in japan the priority is less on accomplishing things on individual drive and on leadership and more on group consensus or harmony or getting things done together you know getting along in japan is much more important than getting ahead so for japan that's it but with in denmark where you're seeing that executives have this super high ambition it could be that because the executives there already

52:46exhibit that people are saying hey we don't really like that we don't need that we want something else in our leaders we want leaders who actually prioritize you know getting along because we have leaders that are so focused on getting ahead so very interesting we're finding different results in each country but i i think the local specialties um of each market are quite different and probably add to it

53:11well that's such a good breakdown it's also really fascinating because i mean whenever for my job and what i have to do from a pr standpoint i get this at the end of the of the cycle of this entire thing i didn't have time to dig into all of these different like little nuances and these you know these interesting results that you see in these you know that stand out so this is really cool for me because i i i'm getting more up to speed on on what these results are instead of just me having to look

53:41at it from a 10 000 foot view and get it out there but um i guess my next question is kind of we're going to transition a little bit here so for organizations that take developing leaders seriously how should these results change their approach to leadership development like what are your recommendations what do you what do you think these these organizations should do well i think one thing to consider is that most organizations develop leaders to what they assume the leader should be

54:13competent at and it's either their own competency model that they made up or it's something that the the the hr finds important and oftentimes they tend to completely neglect the perspectives of the followers and what the followers need to perform better from their leaders what they need from their leaders to perform better and so we really hope that this research gives a voice to the followers and helps organizations really consider the needs of the followers as a very important part of engaging the

54:44followers to perform better and really if you've recently or even in the past like 20 years read an engagement survey almost all of the global engagement surveys say that about 70 percent of the workforce is disengaged and it really costs organizations billions in losses every year and so we really hope that the results of this report can inspire organizations to really think about how leadership development programs can help better support the needs of the followers that are following the leaders

55:20which again around the world everyone seems to agree that leadership should be about supporting followers to to perform and win but no one really thinks about how we can actually do that they're thinking if we do a better competency model or if we align better to the goals of the organization then people will perform better but i think you know it's really important that we're thinking about what type of leadership behaviors does my team need in order to support them to perform better and really this this report the leadership divide offers you a very clear road map to see that and again like we

55:57mentioned earlier one of the biggest comments we've gotten on the project is that followers don't really know what they need leaders know better but actually um even though we acknowledge that there may be different needs that the organization has at different stages and you can select whatever leaders you feel is best but try to still develop them on what leader what followers are saying they need from their leaders and and we think that this will organically increase increase engagement yeah krista i think the point there about leadership development

56:33is a really interesting one i mean you know there's a certain logic to saying hey look we know people with these emergent qualities are going to stand out they're more likely to show up and you're on your high potential list um but once they're there how are we going to take them to the next level how are we going to make these leaders be more effective for these people who show that high potential how can we take them from high potential to highly effective and maybe the results of this study are something that points

57:03that maybe this suggests that leadership development ought to be about developing some of those behaviors for those skills that you and nicole have talked about thus far on this podcast um but i also wonder about from the selection side to what extent do you think the results of this study should inform how organizations go about identifying their high potentials or go about hiring or selecting new leaders um should they take these results into account or should they say eh let's keep doing what

57:34we're going to keep doing or to what extent should it change the way organizations uh operate today yeah great question ryan one thing maybe to make clear is that we never intended this to be a selection profile and so you shouldn't take the results and just start selecting leaders based on this profile however i think it's worth considering um these characteristics when we are creating programs in

58:05uh that support selection or when we're creating programs that um have internal selection capabilities you know we should we should think beyond just like hey we want a leader that can drive profitability and think about we need leaders that can actually support the team members so while i'm saying that absolutely take these results in consideration um and maybe even replicate uh a selection uh research at your organization if you want to select leaders but this can also be useful for long-term talent

58:39strategy and thinking about your talent who you need as future leaders you need future i mean one of the stark um results for me um results for me is that they will people want a leader that can create that sense of belonging be very people focused and the characteristics that people are rejecting the most are the moving away from scales so this all shows that people want someone that can engage and communicate and really support the team and i think that's worthwhile considering as part of you know your

59:10thinking about selecting the future leaders um but especially as we are developing our current leaders as well if i can just jump in krista yes i think in general just broadening our horizons to allow employees to have a voice in the leadership development process as well as other kind of hr processes like whether that's employee value propositions employee engagement organizational culture i think this is an interesting um opportunity to hear from employees and to tailor hr processes to align to employee needs

59:52well um i have something else i want to point out here because um first off this is around executive coaching because we have a lot of executive coaches who listen to this podcast my next question was actually submitted by a coach who attended the webinar hosted on the study findings a few weeks back and for our listeners who are interested in that i will put a link in uh the the show description to where you can go access that it did shatter uh any previous webinar record that we've ever had and ryan i believe you were you were the the key figure in that webinar but the question that was submitted

1:00:27and i forget the individual's name but uh what are the key implications of this report for executive coaching and leadership development yeah this is a great question and i'd say from an executive coach from a leadership development perspective really focusing on the global gaps are probably going to give you the most bang for your buck if you will and maybe um if you're coaching a ceo or a senior leader you might have their token profile their flash report and so you can

1:00:58sort of do this gap analysis yourself but i'll just call attention to the three biggest gaps that that i i viewed um the first is on affiliation so we know that leaders are going to be operating independently preferring that maybe prioritizing tasks over relationship building and so my encouragement would be that these things like networking informal check-ins being deliberate in connecting with the team while these can be deprioritized you know in favor of of really specific work tasks employees are going to

1:01:34see this as emotional distance a lack of care and to reiterate krista you know that those moving away scales are really disliked so my encouragement would be having these executive coaches encourage leaders to remember that connection is a performance driver so building affiliation building the team intentionally not accidentally so like some specific things could be one-on-ones that are not agenda driven

1:02:06having visible cross-team collaborations really inclusive decision-making processes that help people get involved early rather than after decisions are made and just creating shared team rituals like celebrations or kind of informal connections and again i know krista said this but this really shows that relationships are core leadership work so like in the world of ai this should be encouraging and positive for for leaders to take away um the second development area i know this wasn't explicitly

1:02:39called out in the leadership divide main report but i'd like to call attention to science to mvpi science so we've seen that leaders can rely on intuition and past experience and sort of this the way we've done it or what's worked in the past and we know that senior leaders experience is valuable but employees are wanting this clear decision making this openness to technology this genuine curiosity so it's sort of moving these leaders from from certainty to curiosity slowing down thinking testing assumptions and helping make their reasoning

1:03:16really visible to teams so i think executive coaches could work with senior leaders on you know asking better questions using data as an input rather than an afterthought express explicitly explaining the why to their teams um just in general that this this openness and curiosity and then finally the last development area would be on hds bold so okay we've already said this leaders are rising to positions of power because they're confident

1:03:52and decisive and have these opinions um but this can be overused and we see in the data from respondents that they really don't want to be steamrolled they want their leaders to be open to feedback they they want their leaders to be more humble um so i'd say that leadership development in this area should help leaders remember and understand that confidence isn't going to build trust right we see those those key competencies as what's going to be building trust with teams

1:04:24um so honestly helping to create self-awareness strategic self-awareness is a really good place to start particularly on the hds and on bold so that could be using that 360 degree feedback it could be encouraging coaching conversations between obviously the executive coach and senior leader but senior leader and their teams um so creating more feedback loops and an openness for coaching conversations um and just building that

1:04:57credibility through humility like a willingness to listen like pause listen adjust and and be willing to say you know i could be wrong i could be wrong on this so i think leaning in finally leaning into that curiosity which we're already trying to develop on that science side um can balance that confidence with openness so i think like those are my three that i'd recommend

1:05:25well i'm really glad you asked this question blake because in my inbox right before we got on this recording i have a very similar question uh from an executive coach as well so i'm like oh okay great i'm taking notes here on what Nicole's saying okay great this is what i will say to this executive coach but i think between this question and you know the previous question you know we've learned quite a bit about how these results can actually lead to action can actually lead to particularly on the development side of things and i'm glad krista made a good point there that the study wasn't designed

1:06:00it's not what we would call in the io world a criterion study where we looked at some performance outcome we said this is the profile that predicts that specific performance outcome partly because getting a performance outcome for leaders is incredibly difficult uh you know you know we talk about it as as a high performing team but but defining and quantifying what exactly is a high performing team is tricky and so that's that's one of the beauties of the studies it simplifies the question of leadership to say hey let's just ask people what what they want in a leader and i think it does create really clear developmental

1:06:36guidelines to your point here Nicole for executive coaches these are the things that uh our executive coaches can work with people to work on or or i can imagine looking at someone's profile and comparing it to the profile of um that we see from this leadership divide study and saying hey here might be an area where you might want to work a little more right here's an area where you might be falling short um in terms of expectations for you as a leader what do you think about that Nicole do

1:07:08you think that's a reasonable strategy for executive coaches to do to say hey like again it's not a selection profile but using it to sort of guide those coaching development sessions definitely yeah and i think if you know the market or the country territory that your senior leaders based in you can really tailor that with the country specific findings there's 25 different countries but if if that country's not there then the global findings are going to give as i shared kind of like the best overarching guidance

1:07:39and i do i ryan i think that's a great way to use it is that comparison between that leader's flash report or their general you know personality trends against what global respondents are saying they want in a leader and again we can highlight the alignments because that's great those are those strengths to lean on but then highlighting those gaps where hey your employees might not be identifying you as a leader so we might not be seeing these positive performance outcomes but hey let's let's tweak these behaviors

1:08:11let's adjust um to be more whether it's team-oriented whether it's data-based whether it's humble and open to feedback i think maybe one thing to point out here too is is that hogan really doesn't recommend one-size-fits-all leadership programs because individualized leadership development tends to be more effective and so this actually gives you not only the personality data but it also gives you data on what leaders around the world wants and matching the two makes individualized leadership development even more

1:08:49effective because if you know that just like what you said ryan um if you know that someone tends to be uh for example lower in science but we know that people around the world are wanting leaders that use data to to back up their decisions um and if we know that teams want greater communication as a competency for leaders then a coach clearly knows how to develop um an individual that lacks those characteristics

1:09:19or even like nicole said even when there's overlap so for example you have a leader that's high on ambition and we know that people around the world generally want high ambition leaders however uh they still want leaders who are people focused so the coaching would be like yeah use that energy and drive to really um cast a vision for your team but don't forget to bring your team along with you would be the development piece there so there's really a lot you can do it's pretty cool well chris and nicole

1:09:50this has been an awesome conversation uh i do have one last question before we let you all go and that is if you can highlight one key takeaway from this study to emphasize for our listeners what would it be uh i think we've we've said it but i'll say it once more i think when we look at the findings and aggregate we do see that employees know what they need to be successful so global endorsement people want leaders who are emotionally intelligent and people oriented who are driven for excellence and

1:10:25quality who are thoughtful and structured considering the consequences and who are confident and goal directed so to me i think we can we can take a breath rest easy um that respondents the employees around the world you know really know what they want from leaders and as we've talked about as ryan's talked about so many times kind of at a high level it's structuring consideration um so i think let's let's listen to employees and and see if we can align to meet their expectations to better engage them

1:10:59um i think that is excellently put nicole i think the only other thing that i'll add here is to let you know that if you're interested in replicating this very study at your own organization we are offering that availability so if you have an organization you could do it at the organizational level you could do it at either the department or business unit level or even the team level we just require 10 or more respondents um but you can definitely um do this study to learn what your

1:11:34people at your organization what the followers at your organization are needing from their leadership so that's also a cool thing we don't just do this at the global level we can do this for your own organization so just contact us and we'll set you up well i want to say thanks to both krista and nicole for joining us today this is uh you know a great breakdown or at least overview of a tremendous number of insights that we have inside the leadership

1:12:06divide report and of course we wouldn't be at this stage you know more than a year almost two years in the making without uh this brainchild that came from krista nicole and and some of our other colleagues at hogan and putting this into action and so many people who worked around the world to make it all happen um and producing that all for us here and so so thanks krista nicole not only uh for joining us on the podcast today but for your amazing work on this global leadership effectiveness study

1:12:36the leadership divide the reports out there for everyone to check out and we would encourage people to check that out so again thank you so much for joining us today thank you ryan and thank you for all of your support yep thank you both and uh look forward to seeing what you all come up with next

1:12:57and that does it for the science of personality podcast episode 150 be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun and informative episode cheers everybody this has been the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments you can access all episodes on our website thescienceofpersonality.com or on the streaming service of your choice see you next time

1:13:33um you you you you you you