“It may get uncomfortable,” Jackie Sahm, vice president of interactive solutions at Hogan Assessment Systems, tells me. We’re roughly 40 minutes into our nearly two-and-a-half-hour virtual meeting analyzing the results of three personality and development assessments I completed the previous week.
At the end of the session, Sahm will recount “the story of Trey,” as she puts it, just as she used to when her day-to-day consisted of conducting one-on-one meetings with senior executives being considered for the corner office.
While no one’s asking me to be CEO of a global multi-billion dollar business operation, that hasn’t stopped me from thinking once or twice: “They should just let me run the company.” So, I decided to test whether I have what it takes to lead a sprawling organization.
In many circles, Hogan Assessments is considered the industry standard in helping companies and executive search firms assess whether a CEO candidate has the right personality and character to take the helm. The test, developed in the ’80s by the Oklahoma-based HR consulting firm Hogan Assessment Systems, uses data science paired with psychoanalysis to predict job performance based on in-depth personality assessments. Executive recruiting firms, such as Heidrick & Struggles and Russell Reynolds, and boards at Fortune 500 companies use the results in succession decisions as part of a web of assessments, as I’ve previously reported.
“Personality predicts performance just as well as cognitive ability or other abilities tests,” Sahm says.
Hogan’s assessment process—the one Sahm put me through—includes three tests that, when analyzed together, paint a fairly thorough picture of an executive. Some executives take the assessments multiple times while working with executive coaches to learn where they need to improve to best meet the company's leadership needs. That process may take place over months or years, depending on the timing for succession.
“It gets into the crevices, the nooks and crannies of your character and personality. We think if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re probably not growing, and if we tell you a bunch of things you already knew about yourself that make you feel really good, we’ve not really done our job,” Sahm says.
I completed the three assessments, which took me just over one hour. The average is 12 to 15 minutes per assessment, but I admittedly took longer because I was jotting down notes and overthinking some of the prompts.
Hogan’s assessments are not too dissimilar to other behavioral assessments, like DiSC and Myers Briggs. But rather than yes or no questions, Hogan’s tests use statements such as, “I often wonder how I got to be the way I am,” to which candidates select a range spanning “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree."
Other inquiries featured on the assessment include: “I sometimes get annoyed at things in general.” “I do most things better than almost everyone I know.” “I tend to focus on my mistakes more than my successes.” “I can talk my way out of almost anything.” “Most of the people I’ve worked for are incompetent.”
For example, Myers Briggs casts me as an INTJ-T, whereas Hogan breaks down results into different scales like sociability, recognition, or aesthetics. There are 28 scales broken down into more detailed subscales trained psychologists use to make inferences about executives’ personalities, leadership capabilities, and relational skills. My report, for instance, shows a high recognition score, suggesting that I tend to be motivated by a desire to be praised and celebrated for my accomplishments, be in the spotlight, and become famous.
The first of the three assessments, the personality inventory, is what Hogan calls the bright side assessment. It measures who you are when you’re at your best—after a full night’s sleep, stress-free, and firing on all cylinders. The second is a development survey, or, ominously put, the dark side profile. It measures who you are at your worst. Last is the motives, values, and preferences inventory, which seeks to capture what impels you and your purpose.
Sahm says the questions are designed to be difficult to game. "If the question says, ‘I am ambitious: true or false,’ it’s pretty easy to tell what we’re trying to get at,” she explains. “But we may ask you a question like, ‘It’s hard for me to enjoy a game unless I win.’ That gives us some insight into your ambition.”
I took the assessment incredibly seriously. I don’t typically subscribe to personality tests—though my partner loves an enneagram—but this was for work, and I would be assessed by someone whose job it is to analyze CEO personality profiles. Not to mention, Sahm says the assessment typically runs companies around $1,000.
First, I turned off the Real Housewives of New York episode playing in the background. From my couch, I opened the email a Hogan representative sent me with a link to my three assessments and my temporary Hogan ID and password. Most executives also complete these tests virtually, though I can’t say which Real Housewives series they prefer. Some tests are done in a supervised setting, but it’s become rarer, Sahm says. However, she advises people to block time on their calendars to avoid distractions and get the most accurate results. I was nervous about taking the test, but the questions weren’t tough. And I wanted my answers to be as honest as possible for journalistic integrity.
Typically, my M.O. is to read deep into questions, not to game the system, but to truly understand what it's asking. I’m an overthinker, which led to second-guessing more than a few questions. Was asking me whether, “In my view, a person who doesn’t drink can’t be trusted,” trying to get me to admit to being a lush? Was it simply about how skeptical I am of people? Or was it possibly digging into my social interactions? And what would that say about whether I’d be an effective leader?
The latter question is tough to answer.
The CEO job is complex, with many factors beyond personality contributing to success. Plus, there simply aren’t great measures of a CEO’s performance outside of driving profitability and shareholder value, Sahm says. But at lower levels, she notes, the organization has more robust data. For example, she says the firm can point to data showing that bus drivers hired using Hogan are 60% less likely to have an accident.”
Teraesa Vinson, a partner at Heidrick & Struggles’ CEO and board of directors practice, says she uses Hogan assessments as “a star in a data galaxy,” meaning it’s one factor among many considerations.
The ‘story of Trey’
I hate to admit it, but my Hogan assessment was spot on. My partner even gasped reading the 30,000-foot view Sahm wrote, having never met me and with just the graphs and data points my answers provided.
“Your desire to enjoy and find pleasure in life may be thwarted, undermined, or threatened at times by a desire to be known, visible, and/or recognized for your achievements,” Sahm tells me. “When you are stressed, bored, overwhelmed, or otherwise depleted, you are prone to withdraw and move away from others or find ways to push them away from you.”
She continues: “This can be a self-defeating pattern, as you may retreat from others when you need them most—or when they need you.”
Unsurprisingly, “nobody should hire you to be their CEO,” says Vinson, who also looked at my assessment results, in jest. My assessment suggests I’m not a good fit for a mature company with a well-defined corporate structure. I don’t do well with authority, set constructs, rules, and procedures, according to Vinson and Sahm’s assessment analysis.
Although I won’t be succeeding Bob Iger at Disney or Roz Brewer at Walgreens anytime soon, there is a silver lining.
“Your profile looks not unlike many startup founder-CEOs' where they challenged the establishment, broke from tradition, did something risky, and created something that didn’t exist before,” Sahm says. While that sounds nice enough, as a leader, I’d likely get bored with processes and procedures, she warns.
Vinson says, were she advising me, she’d look for a company that needs a turnaround or a distressed, paralyzed organization that could use a decisive and creative thinker. But even then, my personality profile suggests I might find it challenging because I don't care to get bogged down with details, per my assessment. Vinson says that’s fine. “You’re someone who thinks more zoomed out and is cognitively facile,” she surmises.
Despite the assessment’s purported accuracy, companies use it as just one element of the succession equation. Sahm says Hogan doesn’t even give boards the raw reports without context because their takeaways might not provide the full picture.
The results are an indication of how someone might lead, engage with, inspire, and communicate with their employees and other corporate stakeholders. But Vinson notes that “if you’re doing [succession planning] right, it should be a multimodal approach.” She uses 360 interviews, simulations, reference calls, and hours worth of one-on-ones with executives to understand how they tick.
I jumped through one hoop in the C-suite selection process, and the results indicate I’m not Fortune 500 CEO material. But these days, discerning who is fit to be CEO has only gotten harder.
“We expect impossible things from CEOs. If you look at leadership competency models at all these Fortune 500 companies, they want you to be tall and short at the same time,” Sahm says. “They want you to be hard and soft; they want you to be everything to everyone, and that’s not how people are made. Leaders are held to these impossible standards, and most are set up to fail.”
