Hogan Assessment –a global leader in workplace personality assessment –will host its first Pan-African virtual conference tomorrow Tuesday, October 24th, 2023, on business success in Africa to explore how personality impacts business outcomes throughout the continent and beyond. These are series of widely used and challenging pre-employment tests that assess personality, cognitive abilities, and leadership skills. The New Times’ Alice Kagina, conducted an interview with Jopie de Beer, CEO of JVR Africa Group, an organization affiliated with Hogan Assessment, to dive into human resources needs in Africa and how Hogan assessment tools can boost the productivity of businesses and institutions. Below are excerpts. Please tell us about Hogan Assessment business activity. Known for its work in exploring the science related to personality, psychologists Robert and Joyce Hogan established Hogan Assessment organization in the 1970s with an interest in moral development and leadership. Hogan Assessment has grown exponentially across the globe because of its academic purity and science while making sure that the assessment techniques and research bear local context and relevance by working with local and regional partners. We have been working with the organization in research and providing local linkages, as we are based in South Africa. What has been the most rewarding impact of the business so far? One of the most indices of a business's sustainability is the quality of product. The thoroughness of research and high standards in conducting business with Hogan Assessment academic inquisitiveness creates a rewarding working environment for people. Another important factor about Hogan Assessment is the leadership perspective. It is typical for a leader to be considered arrogant or dominant; however, Hogan’s view of leadership is that a leader has to be strong, resilient, and competent with the ability to build a team and guide it in a specific direction. The ability to build a team implies that people believe in the vision and trust the leader. The Hogan view of leadership is that whether you read literature or research, it has to be sustainable rather than a typical bureaucratic, autocratic way. You are hosting the first-ever Pan African Conference on Business Success in Africa. Why now? Available data shows that by 2030, 20 percent of the world’s population will be African, 50 percent of the world’s youngest people will be in Africa, in addition to the factthat there is an aging workforce in many European countries. Africa is not only about its mineral resources but about its talent resources as well. On the other hand, international studies (Gallup) indicate that 70 percent of people in Africa tend to leave their jobs, and that Africa is the third highest on strength and anger. While leadership priorities in Africa and Europe are similar in terms of creating an enabling environment, encouraging continued learning, diversity, and problem-solving, among others, they also share the same challenges such as the lack of skills to build a team, delayed business objectives, strained relationships at work, and inadaptability to the current change dynamics. In this 4th industrial revolution era for human resources, along with the vast human capital potential available in Africa versus the future global needs, various investments are necessity. Hogan has a particular interest and niche in leadership and management. This can be buoyed by the fast-rising technology momentum that facilitates a vast reach of specific services and products in a wider context. What do you hope to achieve from this conference ? The conference will feature useful and insightful presentations. JVR Africa Groupcovers the southern part of Africa while other groups cover Kenya and Egypt, so we hope to raise awareness on the key role of personality in leadership through the sharing of information. You talked about talent assessment, what is it and how can this boost the continent’s business performance? Over the past years, choosing a talent to fit a position was done based on interview techniques and gut feeling where trust is established depending on how long you have known someone. Now, people realize the enormous dilemma of that being the only criteria to use because it is set with biases. That's why we need to have assessments that are solidly developed and scientifically based. With talent assessments, various tools, techniques, and procedures are used to choose the best candidate for a specific position. It must be objective and compared with scientific normalcy. Knowing a person for a certain period is not an excluded factor but comes in addition to the fact that a talent,or the potential of a person, can be measured as objectively as humanlypossible. What talent assessment tools can be used to source the best talents for businesses ? Hogan assessment looks at personality. In leadership positions, personality is incredibly important. Much as at different times in a person’s career, they need to demonstrate various characteristics. There are three ways of evaluating someone’s personality. That includes the bright side of strength and areas of improvement, the dark side which looks at who a leader is when they are under stress,and the inside which assesses the values that a leader possesses, whether they value commercial criteria over people or vice versa. When combining those three elements, you get a picture of how a person will lead. It doesn’t take away the competency judgment, but it factors in their personality in terms of what they have to offer and possible risks. From your observation, how does this really impact business outcomes? When it comes to best practices, these assessments should be provided to the leader even if they are used for selection or feedback. They provide an opportunity for the leader to listen, ask questions, and use the insights for strategic self-assessment. In regard to how personality impacts business outcomes, can you shed light on leadership performance and resilience during times of volatility? Today, change is the new game. Everyone experiences that, and leaders need to adapt to it. At one point, we conducted research among leaders regarded as good in adapting to change, to know how we can unpack change from a personality perspective into smaller elements. We have found three things that support leaders in turbulence and change, and people in human resources, trainers, coaches, or other similar roles, need to give very specific attention to those three things to be able to adapt to change. These include: inquisitiveness in a way of listening and learning things, ambition to get the best standards that they or the company can be, and resilience that comes from inside and self-management. How do you use your assessments to promote leadership for disruption? Going forward, leaders need to know the balancing act. They can no longer afford the binary thinking of “it is this or that”, rather, it should be “it is this and that”. An ideal leader must be able to stabilize and change. It’s not about changing for the sake of change. It has to be a systematic process that considers change with stability. This means being confidentially humble, responsibly daring, politically virtuous, ambitiously appreciative, and ruthlessly listening. The leader of tomorrow will have to be able to balance that. How do you integrate values/talent assessment to develop an Ubuntu culture? Ubuntu means “us: I live through you, you live through me and we live for the greater good.” The Hogan assessment considers that people differ, but with the shared values, they support each other. More to this will be shared during the conference.
