From Insight to Action: Why Your Assessment Data Sits on the Shelf

I think the most important thing is think about the purpose of leadership, which is about helping the team, the group, the organization, at whatever altitude. It's about helping the whole be better. It's not about you, it's about them. And.

And if you keep that in front of you, I think as a leader, you make different decisions than if you think about leadership is about you and your career. Hi there, and welcome to the Step up podcast. I'm your host, Kent Knievel. Every week, I talk to experts who focus on helping leaders step up their leadership game, and leaders telling their stories of growing up through the ranks.

If you're new to the show, do me a favor and subscribe so you never miss an episode. One last thing. As a leadership development consultant and executive coach, focus area of mine is supporting newly promoted leaders. One in three promotions fail because we never teach newly minted VPs how to stop being a director, or a newly promoted director how to stop being a manager.

That's you. Or if you support a leader who has been recently promoted, I encourage you to visit my website at Kent Coach Toolkit and download a free copy of the Promoted Leader Toolkit filled with practical advice and tools to help new leaders stick the landing and. And truly step up to their new leadership level. All right, I've dillied and dallied long enough.

On with the show. Welcome, everybody. Today we're gonna be talking about assessments, but in particular, how do you go from insight to action? And with me today is my longtime mentor, friend, former professor, former colleague, former CEO of Hogan Scott, Gregory Scott.

Thanks for coming today. Oh, my pleasure. I'm glad to be here, Cam. Yeah, I'm thrilled to have you.

So for those that don't know you, I would love for you to just give a brief intro. Tell us, you know, whatever of your career arc you know, you'd like to share. Yeah, well, happy to. There were a lot of formers in your.

In your introduction, and I should say,. Still mentor, still friend, former professor. That's fair. Okay.

All right. Former friend. Well, former friend. Yeah, we had a real falling out.

And yet I'm having you on the podcast today. It's big of you. Big of you to do that. Yes.

Well, thank you for having me, first of all, and I'll talk a little bit about my journey, and you can guide me if I'm getting too wordy. Let me say this. I had my last role before I retired was as CEO of Hogan Assessments. And the journey getting there was a really interesting one and probably bizarre in a Lot of people's eyes.

I. The first, I like to say my first life, the first career I had was as a professional musician. And I did that. I think you know that.

But I, I did that for about 20 years, almost 20 years. And. And you might say, well, okay, how does a musician get to leading an assessment firm and doing personality research? But then assuming, like my brother, part of it is paying the bills.

There is that practical aspect to it, for sure, but there's also an intellectual aspect. And that's all. Briefly talk about that. And that is when I, as a musician, I was always thinking, I was always intrigued by the notion of why are people motivated to do what they do?

Like, where do these passions come from that we have or these interests that we have come from? And so when I decided to change careers, I did actually, for me, an incredibly systematic career, detailed kind of process to kind of figure out, okay, what else would I do? And I. Going back to school was intriguing and appealing to me because I always loved school.

And so as I started to reflect on that, I thought, well, you know, one thread in my interest is, has always been, why do people do what they do? And, you know, how do you get to be passionate? So if they. And, and so I settled on psychology and I, I started just sort of researching what angles are there in psychology.

The notion of industrial organizational psychology, which is who I eventually got my PhD in, was really interesting to me because it was this connection between psychology and the world of work. And, and so, so there you go. And I was really fortunate early on in that career, actually, just I was fortunate to enter graduate school by meeting a guy named Robert Hogan, who many listeners may not know who that is, but he is an iconic personality psychologist, one could argue one of the most important in the 20th, 20th century for his, his research on personality.

And he and I clicked right right away, just on a friendly basis, but also he was just a fantastic mentor to me. And my first leadership lesson really came from him, which is people need an opportunity and they need the support that they need to seize that opportunity. And it's not always obvious what that is. But at any rate, I was really fortunate to work with him and complete my graduate studies under him and Joyce Hogan, who was his wife, but also just a brilliant researcher and psychologist.

And after I graduated, I went to. Into a consulting firm called Personnel Decisions International. It's now been acquired by Korn Ferry a number of years ago, so it doesn't exist in its former state, but the focus really in that role there in that consulting business was on training, on coaching leaders, on assessing leaders, and in especially assessing fitness of leaders with certain kinds of roles. And so it was a natural fit, given my background, having done a lot of research on personality measurement and personality research in the context of the workplace, and that's kind of the thread that has gone through my entire career.

An interesting aside about the connection from being a musician to being an industrial and organizational technologist, which is still kind of a bizarre connection, is I found out. Well, when I worked for Dr. Hogan, we did a lot of research on occupational interests, and one of the icons in that field is a guy named John Holland. And he really set the tone for that entire field of study and focusing on occupational interests and.

And organizing them in a way that you could actually predict what careers people would choose based on their interests or what kinds of career moves they would make based on their interests. Well, as it turns out, at a high level, the interests, the core interests that organizational psychologists have and the core interests that musicians have overlap to a great deal. So, you know, in hindsight, it was a more natural transition than I even thought it was at the beginning. But it really is true.

There's demonstrable overlap between. There's a creative aspect to consulting. Right. There's a creative aspect, there's a sort of technical aspect to both, and there is a people aspect to both.

And those are kind of the three components that overlap and obviously play on well. And so I know, you know, we both kind of started at the same, you know, from a professional perspective, started at the same company, years apart, but you, like me, went into HR for a little while. So you had made that move, and then back to consulting as well. So from pdi, I think you had gone to Pentair, or was there another place in between?

No, I did. I went to Pentair, which was a client of mine at that pdi. Yeah. So you spent some time in hr, and then I think you got pulled.

I can't remember if it was the next thing you did, if you got pulled into Hogan from Pentair, or was there another stopping point for you? Well, yeah, there were a couple, actually. I. I made a really bad career choice.

True. After Pentair left, went to another firm. I won't mention it because it was a horrible experience. And.

And it became clear to me pretty quickly that culturally it was just a horrible fit. And. And then I ran the assessment business for a consulting firm called MDA Leadership, and. And did that for a bit.

Did some consulting with Tenncare. Because fortunately I still had really good relationships there and eventually went back. And then I was there for about, I don't know, a dozen years or so. And I was, as I was beginning to contemplate retirement, think about what I wanted to do for the sort of last chunk of my career.

I, I called Bob Hogan one night and, and, and told him I was thinking about creating my own one man consulting firm and just doing that for another five years or so. And he said, well, don't do that. Come home. So, so I went back to Hogan, which was, it was a great experience at time one.

It was a great way to end my career too, in a professional career. Nice. Well, and so I, I let's get into our topic today. Cause I think, you know, if you've done assessments long enough and coaching, right.

And, and I would say even for myself, being in hr, kind of seeing it on the ground, you know, here's how I kind of want to kick it off is ev, you know, everybody loves an assessment report, right? A leader, you know, leaders, we build, you know, we put assessments into leadership development programs, right. And maybe that's, you know, part of day one, you know, big, big focus on self awareness. And I always said, you know, I, I joking, I'm kind of tongue in cheek.

Even though it is also my profession. I'm like, yeah, everybody gets really excited about the wavy lines or the bar graphs and you know, and, and what's the, so what, you know, are they actually doing anything with it? And I would say even my experience in the assessment world, when we would do these big long day long assessments for development, right? And then we would, we would sit down and part of it would be to, you know, craft a development plan.

Right. And I, and that countless times I sat down with someone and I was like, all right, we just, I just showed you all this data about you. Now I'm trying tooth and nail to say, can you just put that aside for a moment? And what matters to you and what should we actually develop?

And people would get really stuck, you know, in certain ways on like, well, maybe these things where we got really low scores on the assessment, like, but do those matter to your side? I would say I've spent a ton of time in my, my career battling this like, affinity that people have for assessments. Yeah, right. And then, you know, you, you build it into a leadership development program and you get your feedback about the leadership development program at the end.

And nine times out of 10, the top scores are the assessment and the coaching. You know, regardless of the workshop facilitation. Yes. And yet, you know, on the inside in hr, and I think you probably saw this too, it's not uncommon for people to kind of get their binder of the assessment work and then they kind of, you know, they think about it long and hard for a couple of days and it kind of goes on a shelf behind them and then, you know, we kind of stop at self awareness.

So, yeah, I would say, and I think similar to you. Right. I think a lot of what I have tried to do over time in this space is like, how do we get people from insight into actually acting upon it and doing something with it? So I was really thrilled that that was what you wanted to talk about today.

I just thought I would kind of commiserate for a moment on. Yeah, it is a real issue going from that self awareness to doing something about it. Exactly. And yes, we have very similar experiences in that regard.

And I think it's one of the. Not here to be critical of HR talent management folks who have incredibly difficult jobs. But I think it's one of the flaws in, in general, in our, our collective approach to leadership development is we spend a lot on getting this pile of data. And you know, for me, I love data that's really intriguing and interesting to me.

But you know, for the run of the mill leader, they've got a million things on their plate and a million things on their mind and they want to know, you said, so what? Like, let's get down to it here. And, and that's often just a really difficult road to travel. You know, one of the conclusions I've come to, and maybe a couple about that one is I think we overload people with data.

We give them a lot more data than they need to think about what's important for them to focus on developmentally and it can be really overwhelming to them. It's really interesting. I still do a lot of work with executive, mostly executives these days and a lot of assessment work with them. And it's extremely rare really, when in a feedback session with an executive that I'll point out something where they probably need to work on it and they probably need to stretch their comfort or their skill with it.

It's really rare when I hear them say they're surprised. Right, right. They know. They know we may not actually put it in the same words, you know, use the same kind of language to describe it, particularly coming from a personality assessment background.

And I sort of have really specific ways of describing those things. But, but they know it when they hear it, they recognize it. So that says to me that they need enough data to help them get really clear about what it is they need to develop and how to actually do something about it that is turn insight into action about. But they don't need this huge pile of data.

They need really thoughtful data. The other thing I'll mention, just a little tangential, but the. You're right. Often assessments are part of a broader skills training, I'll call it skills training kind of curriculum.

And one of the difficulties I think leaders face is they're often just disconnected. There's this feedback component and then there's this classroom component. But this is just no connect. So for example, the assessment may say, may give a leader the insight that they're not very naturally.

I'm just going to use this. Yeah. They're not very naturally insightful about how to adapt their communication to different people. Okay.

And a component of the training curriculum may be on negotiation, but those two are never connected for that leader unless they can do it themselves, which frankly seems somewhat rare. So I think that's also one opportunity is to make sure that the sort of measurement data component isn't separated. It should be integrated with that. If you're teaching negotiation and this meter isn't good at that kind of listening skill or whatever, those two ought to be connected and they ought to be practicing that within the context of negotiation skills.

They're leading. Yeah. Which is maybe why assessments are a much stronger tool within coaching, which is much more one on one. Right.

Yeah. Custom learning really, if you want to talk, call it that, you know, compared to classroom learning. Right. Yeah.

You could, you could build it into classroom learning if you took the idea of learning over time into consideration versus, you know, a four day on site one and done. Right. You probably could build assessments in intelligently on the front end and, and use that as part of the design. Yeah.

You know, from there on out. But you still are probably going to run into cases where, you know, you've got 30 individuals. You, you certainly could build the program around the most common five or six or whatever, you know, skill or competency areas. But you're still going to end up with these individual differences that don't get addressed in the program.

Right. But then there's always the question of but did they need to. And coming back to like their actual job performance and career goals, do all the, you know, do all the wavy lines matter in, you know, in every. Yeah.

Situation too? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, and the other thing, I think there's a, you know, there's a time and a place for both too. If you, if you're trying to teach somebody's skill, you know, business skills, then, then doing that sort of training curriculum and, and I'm going to call it one size fits all kind of content delivery can make sense and be very efficient and can be very effective.

If it's more about the nuanced aspects of leading effectively, that is an individual sport from a development perspective. I mean, where I think coaching has its big value, by the way. I just want to raise something. We can come back to this, but we've been talking about leadership and we haven't defined it.

Yeah. And I think that is a fundamental problem too. Yeah. You're not saying we haven't necessarily just not defined it on this podcast, but perhaps it's ill defined more broadly mostly.

I once was speaking to a group of Fortune 500 HR leaders. It was about, I don't know, five years ago or so. And I asked them upfront, raise your hand if your company has a definition of leadership. Not a competency model, but a definition of what leadership is.

No one raised their hand. There's about 50 Fortune 500 leaders. That's a fundamental problem. It's a fundamental problem that affects what sort of the core of what we want to get through, I think, which is insight to action.

Well, what kinds of insights do you need and what kind of actions will make a difference? And so the definition matter. But we can come back to that. Well, do you want, do you want to propose a definition?

I do, actually. This is the definition that I don't claim ownership to this, but it's the definition of leadership we use at Hogan to drive our research and to drive our development efforts and coaching efforts. And that is that leadership is the ability to develop and sustain a high performing and highly engaged team. So leadership is about the team.

The point is leadership is about the team. Interesting. Not to take it onto a tangent myself, but as I was saying before we started recording. Right.

I focus a lot of my time, my writing and soapboxing, I guess, on how little support we give to leaders the day after they've been promoted. And an observation that I've seen time and time again and I'd be curious what your ops if, you know, if you have the same observation and at what level it stops, if ever. Right. Because there's certain lessons that have to be relearned basically every, you know, every promotion up the leadership pipeline, you know, and I would say one.

Right. And I'm Coming back to your definition of team, being at the center of this is one lesson I continuously see. Leaders needing to relearn is their own definition of success for themselves. Right.

At each level. And it's really pronounced. You know, it's really easy to pick on supervisors first time leaders of individual contributors. Right.

It's really, it's one of the hardest transitions and it's also really easy to point at it and pick on it and say, you know, we, we count. I'm sure I've even, we've even talked about this on this podcast numerous times. Right. You take the best widget maker, most companies and you make them the, the widget maker leader when the widget maker leader moves on, right.

And you know, the inclination is to, you know, oftentimes roll up your sleeves very quickly, get involved, just try to do more and somewhat through force of will and osmosis, get your people to kind of try to step up their game to match you versus, you know. Right. And then I've even seen it at the manager level when people move on from being a team leader to managing team leaders is this idea of having to sort of redo the math or the equation like what's what plus what plus what equals your, your own success when like now I'm in meetings all day long and that doesn't feel like, you know, I don't feel productive anymore.

And so, and still I'm going to roll up my sleeves and get involved in my people's work and, and think about what my personal output is versus my success is. The numbers the team is putting on the board. Right. You know, and I don't know that I've seen that go away until maybe the VP level, but there's still maybe even a little bit of it before you make it into the C suite of the like, what am I, what are my hands on?

Yeah. Well, I agree. Yeah. And you do see it, you see it all the time.

It's a really difficult transition to make because most of us spend a good chunk of our careers as individual contributors and we get rewarded by our personal, you know, for our personal output. And it can be kind of scary to make the shift to thinking my personal output is the output of all these other people here on my team. Like I have to rely on them for my success. But, but I really think that that is what leadership success is about.

And it's, it's true at the, at the supervisor level, entry level, supervisor level, and it's true at the CEO level. Yeah, yeah. So it's commonality across levels, not to discount the big differences there are that you mentioned. Yeah, well, and so thanks for going on the tangent with me because I think your, your definition of leadership was like, you know, I feel like I am, it's a regular conversation at least in my, both coaching calls and leadership development work around, you know, how are you measuring your own success?

Yeah, right. Because it's, you know, which kind of. Let me, let me, let me bring this back to insight to action because it's one thing to talk about it and for people to logically shake their head, yes, that makes sense. It's another thing for them to get it at the core and actually do something differently about it.

So kind of bringing that back to the assessment conversation here of insight to action. Right. Because I think to your point earlier, my experience is very similar to rarely are people completely shocked by their assessment data. Yeah.

Funny anecdote. And then I'll turn it back to you. There was, I can't remember what the, what the element was, but I think I had gotten like this, the same element of feedback, you know, throughout the years from different leaders and a leader that I really enjoyed working with. So much so that, you know, she hired me twice and I mean, I accepted a role twice from this person across a couple different companies.

And I turned to her one day after she kind of gave me this feedback and I was like, you know, it's like the fourth or fifth time I've gotten this feedback in my career. What is it when like you, you know, you have all the insight in the world but you're clearly not taking any action on it. And her, she was like, I think that's called contentment. I was like, that's, that might be so.

Well, yeah. And I think that's where, you know, my experience, that's where personality assessment really shines and is helpful in putting a spotlight on the insights that are important. Because personality, if you measure it right for adults, personality is stable. There's a lot of research on that.

It's stable over time for most of us beyond about age 25. And so those characteristics that make things challenging for us today are going to continue to be challenging for us 10 years later. And you know, and that's, I think that's part of the insight that is helpful in a development context is this isn't an event, this isn't a sprint, this is a marathon. This is a long term commitment.

And so it's really important to points you made earlier to make sure you're focusing on the insights that will move the needle. It will help you and help you do what? That's where the leadership definition comes in. Help you build and sustain high performing, engaged team that can outperform other teams, you know, the competitors, teams.

What do you find that is that either you, in the kind of a coaching context or, or otherwise helps get people to go from insight to action? You know, I'm, I'm smirking because I'm, I'm thinking of some folks we know in common and one in particular. It's not his joke. I won't give him the credit for it, but, you know, he certainly is the first person I heard it from, which is like, you know, how many.

I'll put it in the assessment context instead of coaching or consultant. But like how many assessments does it take to change a leader? Right? Or the joke is, you know, how many consultants or how many coaches.

Yeah, and I know you know the joke and you're already smiling, which is like, well, only, only one. But the leader really needs to want to change. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I don't know if it always comes down to motivation, right?

And really talking to somebody about, you know, what their motivation to change is, but you know, what's been your experience of getting people kind of off the fence of sitting on the insight and saying, okay, cool, now I know. Well, yeah, I think there, there is always a can do and a will do component to it and you know, the will do being the motivation. I just, anecdotally, I'd say my experience is the majority, the vast majority of the time people who are in some kind of leadership development process really want to improve.

They really want to help their team more. They really want to help productivity for their organization. They really do. Most of the time there are exceptions, but there are exceptions.

But I think a lot of things get in the way. You know, leaders really at all levels have a enormous amount on their plates and, and the basis on which mostly they get rewarded is sort of hard output, you know, financial impact, which, not to downplay that, but the question is, how do you get there? And I think if when they put their efforts into developing themselves as a leader to enable their teams, that's where real productivity can happen. So.

All right, but back to your question about that sort of insight to action. I think one thing that we collectively in the leadership development space don't do incredibly well is take that data, those wavy lines and help the leader understand or explore even whether that inside data point is important to them. And I think the Test for that is, will it help me help my team? Will it help me improve my team?

And if the answer is no, then it's probably not very important. So, you know, it's helping them whittle down the other thing. We know there's a lot of research on this. We know that people can't really change very many things at once, like one or two.

So again, we give them these, you know, 75 pages of data, and we got to get to one thing. Right. It's. It's overcoat.

So I think. Go ahead. Well, I mean, to that. To that point, like, how.

And. And how far can you change something, too? Right. Yeah.

Right. I think, you know, some of the research I've seen, maybe you can correct me on this. It's like, you know, just improving in one skill or one competency area can take, I don't know, a few months or six months. Right.

You know, for real behavior change. So if you're focusing on three things, can you change three things in six months? And that's before we even talk about. Are you talking about taking something that you're okay at or good at and building towards being great compared to something you're poor at?

Right. Because there's a journey there. Right. Of like, you pro.

If you're poor at something, your first. The journey to great is much farther and longer than the journey. Than the journey to. Okay.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely true. Absolutely clear in the research. This points to another issue that we.

This is a rabbit hole we will not go down. But it points to another issue, and that's how organizations select people for leadership roles in the first place. And for our next. For our next podcast, we will talk about selecting leaders.

Yeah, but. But that puts them in a difficult position when you talk about leadership development, because you're right, you can only go so far, and you have to be really focused and very motivated to move the needle that much. Even one thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And I think, you know, also, we. We don't. In this space, we tend not to give leaders enough. My opinion, enough assistance getting from the insight to what would I do to improve on this particular skill?

And often they're kind of left to their own devices to do that. Yeah. So what are some of your recommendations for folks? You know, you've just gotten some assessment, feedback.

Maybe it was in a classroom, maybe it was from a coach. You know, what are some of the things that you recommend for people to kind of do in order to, you know, even propel themselves a bit more from the insight into taking some action on it. Yeah, I think one really important thing is to make sure that they are putting that feedback sort of holistically putting that feedback into the context of their team. You know, what does my team need from me?

And you know, teams can vary greatly. You may have a team of seasoned professionals who don't need a lot of coaching from you or a lot of detailed skill building help from you, that kind of thing. Or you may have people who are less experienced or in a changing industry. So you have to think about context.

I used to, one of my colleagues used to make fun of me because I said all the time context is key. And I, it's really important. That's where the, that's sort of the translator from the insights to what are the important actions. I think.

Right. Is what's the context. Context of your team? It's your industry.

It's the dude. I want to, I want to drill,. Drill in on that example because I think you're highlighting a really important thing. I want to drill in on the example of like, all right, you're a leader of a highly skilled team that doesn't need a lot of coaching.

Right. And you, you've sat down, you've gotten this ream of data. One of the low points is your coaching skills, right? Yeah.

And let's say like another low point is your ability to share a vision. Right. Well, all, all things being equal in that context, if you have a team that's highly skilled, doesn't need a lot of coaching, then the more important thing for you to work on might be the sharing vision, you know, strategy. Yeah.

Right. And, and because I, you know, I try to, I love the conversation on context. I try to talk to people sometimes about like what's the low hanging fruit? Because you know, your effort and impact wise.

Yeah, I, I see that you're really excited about becoming a better coach, but you're not really going to need those skills right now or put them into practice. Is that really the most important thing now? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's, I think a lot of times a shift of perspective for leaders to think about.

This shouldn't be about what you want or what you want to give the team. It should be about what the team needs from you. And that's a really different, Even culturally, we tend not to think about leadership that way. I think in general, in this country at least.

So it can be a real mind shift to think about that. How do you recommend people get under the hood on that? I think it's really important to get feedback from the team and to pay attention to it. It's easy to ignore it or they're just disgruntled, whatever.

But no, if leadership is about building and sustaining a high performing team, leaders need to be listening to what team members need from them and trying to respond to it. And it doesn't mean, you know, they say they, you know, you want them, they want you to triple their pay and so you just do it because that's what they need. No, it's about what do they need to be high performing? What do they need to be growing and learning and engaged in the work they're doing?

You know, those kinds of things. But I, I think that feedback part is just incredibly important at the stage of getting from insight to action. But then also later on when you want to evaluate did my actions make any difference? Yeah, I think I say this far too often, but I, I might have to take you up on the conversation of coming back on and talking about selection for sure.

But for the sake of time, just sort of get into, you know, what I call the advice column here, you know, and this might relate to some of what we're talking about and, and you know, but as I like to say, it's not forced fun. It doesn't have to. So one, you know, I'm curious, what's one piece of advice you have for leaders out there who are still trying to grow in their career, looking at their next promotion? You know, what's one piece of advice you have for them that would help them in getting there?

I think maybe the most important is sort of redundant, but I think the most important thing is think about the purpose of leadership, which is about helping the team, the group, the organization at whatever altitude. It's about helping the whole be better. It's not about you, it's about them. And if you keep that in front of you, I think as a leader you make different decisions than if you think about leadership is about you in your career.

It's so, it's so easy to say, right? Yes, yes. Because I feel like I, I've, I've said similar things and it's like, you know, it's, it's really easy to talk about, it's really easy to say, it's another thing to kind of get there, you know. Yeah.

But I think to your point that the leaders and you hear it and you see it when you talk to, you know, when you've been in rooms full of leaders, you can kind of tell who is Focused beyond themselves. And usually the performance follows, oddly enough. Yeah. So my other focus area is folks who were just promoted.

Right. Because I think, you know, like I was saying earlier, there's a lot you need to unlearn, a lot you need to learn every time you are promoted. So what's your best advice for folks who, you know, they're finding themselves, they just so happen to magically be listening to this podcast on day one. Right.

Of their new role? They've just been promoted. I think it's a really tough transition. First, for two reasons.

One, I think there's a lot of learning that I'm going to call sort of technical learning. That is stuff about managing people in an organization. And that includes just, you know, all the. You have to do performance reviews, you have to do performance improvement plans and blah, blah, blah, you know, So a lot of things that HR tends to govern that you need to know how to do, and it's a real skill building that has to happen there.

But I think the other half of it is you. In, in a lot of cases, you're now trying to lead people who yesterday were your peers and who may think you're a doofus, you know, or. Or think they should have been the one promoted, not you, that kind of thing. So there are also lots of those interpersonal team challenges.

And the first thing you need to do is stop doing the job you were doing yesterday. Right. You know, stop being an individual contributor. Because now you've got these two herculean tasks ahead of you.

One, learning just the mechanics of management, and the other learning how to motivate, inspire, manage performance. You know, all this team stuff, team leader stuff that you didn't have to do yesterday. Yeah, it's really hard. Yeah.

Yeah. And like, like I said, I mean, at each step, right, you have to kind of redo those. Those same lessons, you know? You know, now you're managing team leaders.

You have to sort of. How do you leave behind being a team leader so that you can effectively manage team leaders? Right, exactly. Yeah.

Another one of those easy to say, hard to do. Right. Examples. Yeah, exactly.

Well, God is. We're kind of winding down here. Anything else you want the audience to know about you or anything you want to leave the audience with? Wow.

Well, if. If anybody's intrigued by the definition of leadership and. Or how personality intersects with that, I. I really would just say, and I'm retired, but I would suggest they take.

Take a look@hoganiseyphons.com there's just tons of articles, research Blah, blah out there that can provide a little more context for that. So how would you assess your own skill at retiring right now? Well, maybe a solid C plus.

Yeah, I see you're, you're busy. I, I am busy. I, I mean, I still do. I, I love working with, with executives.

I love doing development work. I love doing the assessment work, helping companies select the right people. So I do some of that, not a ton. I mean, it's maybe a half a day or a day a week that I focus on that.

I joined, speaking of transitions, I, I joined a for profit board of a consulting firm that's headquartered in Paris, and I am on a nonprofit board and, and I had to unlearn some things that I learned as a CEO to try to be more effective as a board member. So it never ends. Yeah, it never ends. Yeah.

Well, before I let you go, since you brought up Hogan, you know, let's just talk about Hogan for just a minute or two. I'm kind of watching the time here because I would say it's, you know, my favorite assessment at this point, and I've kind of, through my career, even just over the last 20 years, have seen it grow in popularity, grow in usage. I think one of my favorite things about the assessment is part of it is just how we even give people feedback about it that, you know, and correct me, you know, in a second here, if I say anything that's not quite, quite right.

Right. But I always say it's like the closest thing to a360 you can get from an assessment in terms of how it was built and, and what it says about someone. Right. And I think my, you know, and you actually taught my, my certification course years ago, so I've been able to be in number, a number of classrooms with you throughout the years.

But, you know, I think part of my, the positioning of it that I like so much is like, what people who answer the questions in the way that you answered the questions, they tend to be described by others as. Right, right. You know, this, that. So I just figured while we have like another minute, you know, which I'm sure is not nearly enough time to do the Hogan justice.

Just any, any kind of words out there for people who are Hogan curious. Yeah, I, I, everything you said, I endorse, first of all. And the assessment, this is the brilliance of it from my perspective. The assessments were built from day one for two purposes.

One, predict how other people would describe you, because that's one way to think about personality. One is, who am I? That's all the authentic leadership nonsense is about that. And the other way is to think about who does everyone else say I am?

Well, that's a really important kind of insight to get if you're trying to help a team improve. Right. So that's the brilliance of it. And the second point from day one was they were designed to use in the workplace.

They're not biased against different races, genders, preferences, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a really important thing from my perspective. Yeah. Awesome.

Well, Scott, thanks so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. I know I had a lot of fun, and I'm definitely gonna force you, whether you like it or not, to come back. I appreciate it.

Well, I had fun, too. The time did fly by. I hope I wasn't too wordy about getting off on tangents. You were great.

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. My pleasure.

That brings us to the end of our episode. Thank you for listening. I'd encourage you to head on over to my website, Kent Coach, and start a conversation with me there. Or check out my promoted leader Toolkit at Kent Coach Toolkit.

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