Assessments to Successes: The Benefits of the Hogan Assessment with Coach Melanie

As we search for new jobs, career goals, and opportunities, we often want to analyze how well this new role will fit with our personality and lifestyle. Coach Melanie is a certified leadership coach who shares her experience with the Hogan assessment–an assessment that measures job fit and personality traits. Listen to our episode to learn more about the Hogan assessment and discover what jobs are the perfect match for you. Take your leadership to the next level now!

Transcript:

Narrator [00:00:03] Welcome to ideamix performance and wellness were world leading coaches and scientists explain how their research can help you achieve your personal and professional goals faster. Hi, it’s Sam Jayanti, co-founder and CEO of ideamix Coaching. Coaching has played an important role in my life. It’s helped me through my journey to become a powerful leader, mother and wife ideamix coaches help you increase your self-awareness, improve your problem solving skills and evolve your habits to achieve your goals, all things I’m grateful to have learned and done through my own coaching journey. Our easy one minute assessment matches you with an ideamix coach that best fits your needs and values. Each ideamix coach is vetted and experienced and helps clients map and achieve their wellness, professional and business goals. If you or someone you know could benefit from coaching, visit our website at www.theideamix.com. We also know that not everyone can invest in coaching right now and that’s why we provide free coaching and our coach shorts episodes. If you think someone you know would benefit from it, please share our podcast with them. Thanks for listening and see you next time. 

Jamie [00:01:11] Welcome to Coaches to Know, a podcast short by ideamix radio. This brief podcast is designed to demystify coaching and help you, our audience, understand what coaching is and how it can help you. I’m your host, Jamie, and today I’m here with coach Melanie to discuss a coaching assessment tool called the Hogan Assessment. Coach Melanie is a certified leadership coach and Hogan facilitator. She has worked on talent selection, career transition and leadership development for more than 20 years. Her clients are emerging and high potential leaders at all levels. Welcome, coach Melanie and thank you for joining us here today. So to get started, why don’t we just design or define what we are talking about? What do we mean? What is the Hogan assessment? 

Coach Melanie [00:02:02] Yeah. Yeah. There’s so many assessments on the market. And if you’re listening, more than likely, and you’re listening and you’re a leader in an organization, you have taken some type of assessment. Hogan is a–I’m so clear about this–Hogan is an assessment that measures job fit. So when I go to debrief someone on their Hogan results, I sometimes hear the joke Is this going to tell me if I am–if I have a weird personality or if like–meaning this is not and I always say this is not a clinical assessment. I’m not a psychologist and this is not going to tell us if you have some sort of personality disorder. [00:02:49]This is an assessment that is used in the business context to determine if you are a good fit for the job that you either are applying for or are in and want to take your your role to the next level, your leadership to the next level. [19.3s]

Jamie [00:03:09] Amazing. And I personally have never taken the Hogan assessment. Just a little bit of a nuts and bolts question on how long is it? How many sections are–how many questions are there? 

Coach Melanie [00:03:19] That’s a really good question because I will prep people before they actually take the assessment. And I will say you are going to have a love hate relationship with this assessment. Your work is going to be exciting at first and then you’re not going to–you’re going to think, why are these questions repeating themselves? So it takes about 30 to 45 minutes to actually take. So you were taking it, you know, and it’s the typical, you know, fill in the circle, you know, a lot of asking a question about your preferences or your natural tendencies. And then, you know, you choosing always or never or sometimes the questions are designed to repeat themselves just with a slight variation of wording, because the psychologists who designed the assessment three decades ago know that people struggled to to stay consistent in their answers. And so [00:04:16]one of the things that makes Hogan stand out is that it’s one of the most validated assessments on the market because of the way it was designed to to make sure that people are answering consistently and correctly, if that makes sense.  [15.6s]

Jamie [00:04:32] Interesting. So very well thought through and well designed. 

Coach Melanie [00:04:34] Very well thought through. So I often tell people just trust the process. Trusts that the brilliant organizational developments like college’s who designed this knew what they were doing and understand personality. So it takes about 35 minutes to take and then the debrief which is where a certified facilitator would come in, I do 90 minute debriefs of the assessment because it’s quite rich and in detail. 

Jamie [00:05:03] And what does the debrief look like? 

Coach Melanie [00:05:06] Yeah yeah. So the Hogan itself it’s again, it’s assessing job fit and it’s a personality assessment we all each of us have one personality but there are three aspects of personality that are dimensions. Maybe that’s a better word. There are three dimensions of our personality that the assessment is measuring. The first is bright side, which means this is how other people see you when you are at your best. So when you’re on your A-game and stress isn’t in the picture and you’re just doing you naturally, this is what other people see that’s bright side. The dark side, which we all have as part of our personality, is when stress hits the picture and we are not self-monitoring or we’re tired. This is when we have we are most at risk to overuse or underuse, depending on what comes up in bright side, we look at that. That’s what the dark side is. And then the third dimension is our motives and our values, the things that give us the most energy and are our highest drivers. 

Jamie [00:06:29] Very, very interesting. And I like the multiple perspective and the division between the bright side and the dark side. So tell me a little more, how does Hogan differ from the other assessments that are out there on the market? Because there are many. 

Coach Melanie [00:06:48] There are many hundreds, thousands, maybe even. So, identity versus reputation. Most assessments on the market are measuring your identity, which means I go and I take this test and then the results really just affirm for me how I see myself–that’s my identity. Bob Hogan, the one who created this Hogan assessment, is quoted on many YouTube videos to say, We might as well throw out any assessment that measures our identity because it is completely subjective and it’s not–it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how I see myself. What matters more is how other people see me. So what Hogan did is they were the first–one of the first–to design an assessment. But even though I take the test, they are able to show me my results from the perspective of how universally others see me. And that’s what reputation [00:07:54]is. And so when we do the debrief, we look at the results and we tell the person, some of this might be confusing or it might you might not understand it initially because you are walking around with your point of view of how you see your skill set. But really, this is going to show us how other people see you. [22.0s]

Jamie [00:08:18] I think there’s a really critical component in their self-awareness, right? Because you start to see those blind spots, then. For us, of which you can base goals and say, I actually I want to be showing up like this. 

Coach Melanie [00:08:54] How do we do that? Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. How do you want people to experience you and what what choice, what different choice do you need to make when you know stress is in the picture? Knowing that the data suggests that you come across too strong. 

Jamie [00:09:08] Amazing. Now, tell me a little bit about, as a Hogan facilitator, I mean, who comes to do Hogan assessment? Who is the Hogan assessment actually for? 

Coach Melanie [00:09:19] Yeah, I’d say there’s two two scenarios, and this is coming from Hogan, in which Hogan is widely used. One is recruiters, executive recruiters, use the Hogan often in the selection process. So if a recruiter or hiring manager is deciding between the top three candidates or an executive position, a Hogan might be used to see, to measure that candidate’s personality and job fit against what the ideal personality would be for that particular role. I haven’t used it that much in that scenario, but Hogan does that a lot. The scenario that I use it in is leadership development coaching, and so companies will use the Hogan when either emerging leaders or or executives and senior leadership is going through executive coaching and it’s just used as part of the coaching engagement typically at the very beginning to really help a leader understand its data, its analytical data, to help them understand how they’re currently showing up. Sometimes it’s paired with an actual 360, which can be really rich when it’s combined together, got analytical data, and then you have narrative data of what real people are really actually saying. And then, you know, [00:10:52]the themes of those two assessments can be used to help set goals and measure success. [6.2s]

Jamie [00:11:00] Yeah, that’s interesting. Obviously, having those sort of the data that the person says about themselves, but also then that that narrative feedback can be quite, quite powerful. And I’m just curious, you know, we have one final question today. This has been very insightful. Why did you choose to get certified in Hogan? Because as we said earlier, there are so many assessments out there. Why did Hogan make sense to you? 

Coach Melanie [00:11:25] Yeah, Yeah. And it’s a good question. And as a as a coach, I have a lot of choices. And it’s an investment of time and resources. And it was one of the best I can honestly say three years into being certified, it was one of the best decisions I made, even when I don’t have when I’m coaching someone and we’re not using the Hogan specifically as a tool, I still use my training and what I know about personality and reputation and all the different scales and bright side and dark side to guide the coaching conversation. I chose Hogan because it’s very widely, widely used in some organizations that I coach for. It’s–because its so validated–that was one reason, but also because of that reputation component that I have a psychology background and so I understand personality. I have done some strengths finder training. I know enough about Myers-Briggs. I think those are great assessments, but I did a lot of debriefing of those assessments when I was in career transition coaching, and I never felt like people walked away with those insights into their blind spot. So again, it was more confirming, but the Hogan, the fact that they’re measuring this reputation piece felt like that was going to give the people the clarity that they needed to get outside their comfort zone and take their leadership to the next level. 

Jamie [00:13:02] Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Coach Melanie, for being with us here today to talk about the Hogan assessment. We appreciate your time and your insight. And to our audience, if you would like to work with Coach Melanie or one of our other qualified coaches, please visit us at the ideamix.com. Thank you for listening. 

Narrator [00:13:24] Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www.theideamix.com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Milewski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.