# Introduction and why leaders should care about psychometrics

- **Episode:** [14](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/14.md) (2022-11-29)
- **Type:** intro
- **Tags:** psychometrics, leadership, introduction
- **Time:** 0:33–9:02 (start 33s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/14?t=33](https://truthliesandwork.com/14?t=33)

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[0:33] Sandy McKenzie: Nice
[0:33] Al Elliott: Check out hopspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses
[0:42] Sandy McKenzie: We need the Elon Musk high HDS people, you know, in our world
[0:55] Leanne Elliott: Hello, and welcome back to the Truth, Lies and Workplace Culture podcast, where we delve into the complex world of people and culture and try and make sense of it all. My name is Leanne. I'm a business psychologist
[1:06] Al Elliott: My name is Al, and I am a business owner
[1:09] Leanne Elliott: And welcome back
[1:10] Al Elliott: Hello
[1:11] Leanne Elliott: Hi
[1:12] Al Elliott: So if you're a regular listener, or you've listened to the last 2 episodes, you realize we've been talking a lot about Twitter and the Twitter layoffs. Now, what's, what's What was interesting is we spoke in over those last 2 episodes to 3 experts, and they made some really interesting observations on Elon's psychology and behaviors
[1:29] Leanne Elliott: And how would you rate Elon Musk's empathy in his approach? If there was a zero. So a lack of empathy. Does— do you associate that with anything, Al?
[1:42] Al Elliott: Well, obviously, being married to a psychologist, which is sitting to my right, Then I would say something like a sociopath or a psychopath. Like, I'm made to think of Wolf of Wall Street guy or Jeff Bezos or someone who's just very single-minded and probably, yeah, doesn't have much empathy
[2:00] Leanne Elliott: To put it simply, I guess sociopaths are known more for being hotheads. So they lack remorse. Guilt and empathy can be present in some cases. Whereas in contrast, psychopaths are known for being more cold-hearted and tend to have a complete lack of guilt remorse. Or empathy. They don't tend to feel emotion. So with that, they tend to be a bit more manipulative, narcissistic, and typically very charming, which is often why they're usually quite successful people and will maintain what looks like a normal life. And of course, popular culture would lead us to believe that psychopaths and sociopaths are violent. Not all psychopaths and sociopaths are violent, and not all violent people are psychopaths. Psychopaths or sociopaths, um, the prevalence is actually only about 1% of the population
[2:47] Al Elliott: It's interesting you say 1% because that, that's a small amount but still quite a large amount. If the average person's got, say, 500 Facebook friends or they're followed on Twitter by 1,000 people, that means like 5 or 10 of the people who follow them are sociopaths or psychopaths
[3:02] Leanne Elliott: Quite possibly. And I think it is, you know, something that we, we definitely do, do see in, in, in the business world as well. This this conversation are, are some very successful business leaders bordering on psychopaths. And this is where Elon Musk comes in. We're not going to dedicate another whole episode to him, but we will be talking about or using Elon as an example because he has given us just some very recent behaviors to, to reflect on. But absolutely similar to the experts, you know, my psychology spidey sense started working, you know, looking at Elon's management of the Twitter layoffs and his subsequent behaviors, um, and just, you know, the relationship between creativity, intelligence, intelligence and mental illness, which is well documented, and particularly the connection between exceptional ability and psychopathology. And I think most people will actually, when they start to think about it, will recognize this connection. I think this term genius is particularly associated with mental illness. As far back as Aristotle, there's no great genius without a mixture of madness, was something that he said. And of course, one of the most famous examples, John Nash and his diagnosis as a schizophrenic
[4:12] Al Elliott: John Nash is the guy from A Beautiful Mind
[4:16] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, he is
[4:17] Al Elliott: Yeah. That's the film. If you've not seen it, it is an incredible film. Uh, Russell Crowe, I think, plays, plays the character. But he, as you said, he struggled with paranoid schizophrenia. Um, and then he won the Nobel Peace Prize. But according to the film, and I don't know how true to life this is, you know, he still sees people, he still hears people, he's still got lots of characters in his life who are still talking, uh, talking to him. I seem to remember then in your master's you did— your thesis was on something like this
[4:42] Leanne Elliott: It was. It was on the relationship between dark side personality personality traits and work performance. So to give you a bit of background, late '90s, early noughties, researchers really started to, I guess, reignite the view that normal and abnormal personality are basically extensions of each other. Abnormal personality meaning a personality disorder, and that personality disorders are simply extreme forms of normal behavior. So on the continuum, I think we've talked about this before on the podcast about personality on being trait-based on a continuum. So because of that research linking personality and job started to venture into what we call subclinical measures of psychopathology, or a catchier term, the dark side of personality. So yeah, it was the Hogan Development Survey that I used in my thesis. Hogan and Hogan, amazing psychologists and researchers, they were real pioneers in both the research and practice of dark side personality. It started because in the late '90s, they saw a correlation or a relationship between certain scores on the profile and problem managers
[5:49] Al Elliott: When you say profile, was this— what do you mean by profile?
[5:53] Leanne Elliott: So profile was an inventory. Um, it was actually used by clinical psychologists at the time to measure personality disorders
[5:59] Al Elliott: So profile is like PR, it's like an acronym? No acronym or something, is it?
[6:03] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, so P-R-O-F-I-L-E
[6:05] Al Elliott: Gotcha
[6:06] Leanne Elliott: Tools, a profile. Yeah. Um, so yeah, so they, they were, they were using this to, in their research, and found this relationship between scores on, on this profile tool and problem managers. And that's where the idea for the Hogan Development Survey came from. So it's a— whereas the Profile is a clinical inventory, the Hogan Development Survey is a non-clinical inventory that's basically used to assess behaviours that adversely affect performance or reputation of people at work, and also as a tool that then could be used for professional development and coaching. So because of that, they wanted to create a non- clinical tool based on clinical conditions, the Hogan Development Survey, or the HDS just for ease, was developed using the DSM descriptions of personality disorders. If you're a regular listener, you'll remember the DSM from our imposter syndrome episode. It's the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Catchy. But basically what clinicians use to diagnose psychological disorders. So the 11 scales on the HDS inventory. Each one is linked to a personality disorder on the DSM
[7:16] Al Elliott: We have got an expert guest on today, a lad called Sandy Mckenzie, who knows plenty about Hogan and how to interpret the results
[7:23] Sandy McKenzie: So I'm a managing partner for a global talent organization called Amroth. We're an organization founded back in 1977, over 1,000 employees, 55 locations around the world
[7:36] Al Elliott: So as you've heard, Sandy is basically a seasoned practitioner. in the Hogan Development Survey. And he helps executive leadership teams to better understand their behaviors when they want to have high-performing teams and sustainable success. And this is both obviously from an individual level to the organizational level. He also is an executive leadership coach, an expert in the Hogan psychometrics, and you're going to hear, a really interesting guy. So the first thing we asked him, in fact, what was the first thing we asked him, Leah?
[8:03] Leanne Elliott: I think the first question is, quite rightly, why should leaders and organizations really care about psychometrics? And what are the benefits of using them to assess and understand leadership behavior. So this is what Sandy had to say on that
[8:17] Sandy McKenzie: But it's trying to recognize and understand and extract and develop the behaviors that make individuals and organizations successful. We have a slightly corny slogan that says, if we can make an individual happy, we can make a team happy, which means we can make an organization happy. And if we can combine all of that, it equals high performance. And a lot of that captures behaviors and wellbeing and sort of really interesting aspects like that. And it's an area that people don't like to talk about often. You know, very strong-willed senior executives don't want to necessarily be vulnerable or talk about behaviors or things that they've done right or wrong. Sometimes it's easier just to fire and hire