What Leadership Personality Type Am I? Allison Howell, Hogan Assessment's CEO, on the Science of Who Should Actually Be Leading

Allison Howell, CEO of Hogan Assessments, joins Craig Dowden to reveal why the leaders getting promoted may be exactly the wrong people for the job, and what the data from 11,000 global respondents says about the leadership qualities that actually matter.
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Listen to the full episode of Do Good to Lead Well with Craig Dowden wherever you get your podcasts. Allison Howell, CEO of Hogan Assessments, shares the science behind personality-based leadership assessment, the findings of Hogan Assessment’s landmark global research, and what it really takes to close the leadership divide.

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TL;DR

Q: What leadership personality type am I?

A: Tools like Hogan Assessments measure how your personality shows up to others across three dimensions, your everyday strengths, your stress-triggered behaviours, and your core values. It's a far more reliable answer than any quick quiz, because it's based on how you're actually perceived, not just how you see yourself.

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Q: Do personality tests actually work for hiring?

A: Reputation-based, scientifically validated assessments (like Hogan) have strong predictive validity. Self-report-only tools are more variable. The best hiring processes use personality data as one structured, objective input among several, not as the whole picture.

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Q: Should I take a personality test for a job interview?

A: Yes, and rather than trying to game it, use it as a window into your own strengths, stress responses, and working style. A good assessment isn't a trap; it's a map.

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Q: What is the difference between emergent and effective leadership?

A: Emergent leaders attract attention and get promoted. Effective leaders build high-performing teams. The two profiles often don't overlap, which is exactly what Hogan's global research confirms.

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Q: Can personality change?

A: Core personality is relatively stable after around age 25. But individual behaviours within that personality can be managed, developed, and deliberately shaped, especially with self-awareness and targeted coaching.

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The Question More Leaders Should Be Asking, But Aren't

What leadership personality type am I? It sounds like the kind of question you'd type into a quiz on a slow Friday afternoon. But when you're talking about who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who ends up shaping the culture and performance of entire organizations, it becomes one of the most important questions anyone in a position of authority can ask.

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Allison Howell, CEO of Hogan Assessments, is one of the few people in the world who can answer it with real data behind her. In this episode of Do Good to Lead Well, she joins Craig Dowden to discuss Hogan's landmark global research report, The Leadership Divide, and what roughly 11,000 respondents across more than a hundred countries reveal about the enormous gap between the leaders employees have and the leaders they actually want. The findings are both uncomfortable and clarifying, and if you lead people, or hire people who do, they matter enormously.

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The Leadership Divide: What the Data Actually Shows

The qualities that help leaders get promoted are almost entirely different from the qualities that make them effective once they're in the role.

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Hogan calls this the distinction between emergent leadership and effective leadership. An emergent leader is charismatic, visible, self-promoting, and highly attuned to social dynamics. They draw attention, they know how to work a room, and they tend to look the part. Politicians are the clearest example, you need those emergent qualities just to get on the ballot. An effective leader, on the other hand, focuses relentlessly on team performance. They provide resources, build trust, communicate clearly, act with integrity, and do the unglamorous work of actually moving the team forward.

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The data from The Leadership Divide shows that employees, globally, want the effective leader. They want someone who communicates with honesty, holds themselves accountable, demonstrates good judgment, and shows genuine care for the people they lead. What they're actually getting from most organizations is the emergent profile. And as Allison puts it: "There is essentially zero overlap between the top attributes that executives are displaying and what employees say they want."

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This is producing the disengagement, mistrust, and quiet exit that organizations are grappling with right now. The good news is that closing it starts with awareness. Which brings us to one of Hogan's most foundational ideas.

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Do Personality Tests Actually Work for Hiring?

This is one of the most common questions HR leaders and executives ask, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on the type of test.

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Many personality assessments, including household names like Myers-Briggs, are built around self-perception. They ask you to describe yourself, and then they describe you back. The problem, as Allison explains, is that we're not always reliable narrators of our own behaviour. She uses a simple analogy. Everyone thinks they're a good driver. Get on the road, and you'll quickly see that's not true. But the people you identify as bad drivers almost certainly still believe they're good ones.

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Hogan takes a different approach. Rather than measuring how you see yourself, what they call identity, they measure how you're seen by others. That's reputation, and it's far more predictive of real-world performance. Hogan's questionnaire doesn't just capture your self-reported tendencies; it cross-references those responses with a validated framework of how people who answer similarly actually show up in the world, in terms of observable, peer-verifiable behaviours.

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The result is an assessment that's considerably more objective, and, as Allison points out, considerably more useful. Because whether or not you land a promotion, get fired, or build a high-performing team has very little to do with how you see yourself. It has everything to do with how others experience you.

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For hiring specifically, this distinction matters enormously. Evidence-based, reputation-focused tools like Hogan have demonstrated strong predictive validity for job performance. The self-report-only tools are much more variable. So the question is whether the one you're using is measuring the right thing.

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The most effective hiring processes, Allison says, use personality data as one structured input among several, combined with other objective measures, to counteract the very human tendency to hire people who feel like a good fit based on bias and gut instinct alone. "That's a trap that we all fall into," she says. "Even those of us who know better."

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Should I Take a Personality Test for a Job Interview?

If you're on the candidate side of the equation, a slightly different set of questions applies. Should you worry about a personality assessment in a hiring process? And is there any way to "game" the results?

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With a well-designed, scientifically rigorous assessment, trying to present a more favourable version of yourself tends to backfire. The patterns that emerge from high-quality personality tools are sophisticated enough that inconsistency shows up. More to the point, Allison would argue that if you successfully misrepresent your personality and land a role that doesn't actually fit you, you've only delayed an inevitable mismatch.

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The more productive frame is to see a personality assessment as a tool for self-understanding, not just an obstacle between you and a job offer. Hogan's model covers three dimensions. The bright side (your personality under normal, optimal conditions), the dark side (how you behave under stress, when your usual self-management starts to slip), and the inside (your core values, motivators, and what gets you excited about work).

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Understanding all three gives you a genuinely useful map of where you'll thrive, where you'll struggle, and what environments and team structures will bring out your best. That's valuable whether you're interviewing for a new role or managing your development in your current one.

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Allison also makes a point worth sitting with. After around age 25, core personality is relatively stable. But that doesn't mean growth is impossible. "Personality is like climate," she says, "and behaviour is more like weather." The climate doesn't change dramatically, but you can absolutely manage the daily weather, learning to recognize your stress triggers, understanding how your tendencies impact the people around you, and building habits that keep you from letting a strength become a liability.

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That capacity for strategic self-awareness, as she calls it, is itself one of the most valuable leadership traits. And it's one you can develop, regardless of which personality type you are.

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How to Close the Leadership Divide in Your Own Organization

If you're a leader reading this, there's a useful question embedded in everything Allison shared: where are you on the emergent-to-effective spectrum? And what would it take to shift the balance?

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The starting point, Allison suggests, is curiosity rather than defensiveness. Getting an empirically grounded picture of how you show up, even when it's uncomfortable, gives you something to work with. Without that, you're left managing blind spots you can't see.

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For organizations, the implications go beyond individual assessment. The way companies hire, promote, and develop leaders sends a signal about what actually gets rewarded. If you keep selecting for emergent qualities, charisma, visibility, competitive drive, and neglecting the effective ones, the cycle repeats itself. But when you use structured, objective tools alongside deliberate development, you start building the kind of leadership culture that employees aren't just tolerating but actively rallying behind.

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Allison's parting thought is grounded in the Edelman Trust Barometer research, which has been tracking global trust for over two decades. Among all the institutions people rely on, governments, media, academic bodies, NGOs, employers still have the smallest trust gap to close. That's an opportunity. Leaders who choose to listen, to act with integrity, to communicate transparently, and to genuinely align their behaviour with their stated values are in a position to build something rare right now, a team that actually trusts them.

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Ready to learn what defines a great leader today?

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Did you like this article about what defines a great leader? Does it help you become a better leader? Then check out these articles to help hone those skills even further:

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Craig Dowden

CEO
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