David Hume had five tips for becoming the most likeable person in the room:
- Stop making everything about yourself.
- Be light-hearted.
- Let other people shine.
- Read the room.
- Wash occasionally and do not smell like onions.
Honestly, this is also a surprisingly good summary of Hogan Assessments’s dark-side assessment.
Because most leaders do not fail due to a shortage of intelligence, strategy decks, or inspirational quotes printed on office walls.
They fail because, under pressure, they become Ralph.
Ralph talks too much. Ralph has an urgent need to be the smartest person in every meeting. Ralph mistakes domination for leadership. Ralph is unable to tell whether the room is bored, intimidated, offended, or quietly updating LinkedIn. Ralph has confidence, but not enough humility. Energy, but no calibration. Ambition, but no awareness of the human debris left behind.
The Hogan Development Survey does not ask whether you are a nice person on a sunny Tuesday morning after a good coffee.
It asks a much more useful question: “What happens when you are tired, stressed, promoted too quickly, surrounded by people afraid to challenge you, and given a title with the word ‘Chief’ in it?”
That is when the charming, decisive leader can become bold, mischievous, colorful, skeptical, excitable, reserved, leisurely, diligent, dutiful… or simply impossible to sit next to in a meeting.
Hume’s philosophy was basically this: likability is not fake modesty. It is the ability to make space for other people. That is leadership in one sentence. The best leaders do not enter a room thinking, “How can everyone notice me?” They enter thinking, “What does this room need from me?” Sometimes it needs confidence. Sometimes it needs a joke. Sometimes it needs a difficult decision and sometimes it just needs you to stop shadow-boxing, interrupting, explaining your CV, and taking up all the oxygen.
Good leadership is not becoming smaller. It is knowing when your personality has become bigger than the problem you are supposed to solve.
And yes: please wash your clothes now and again. There is no Hogan scale for onions, but there should be.