APS Blog

Case Study: From Technical Experts to Engaged People Leaders

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:00:00 Z

Since 2023 APS have been working with a prominent healthcare organisation to unlock hidden leadership potential —driving engagement, performance and retention.

Background:

In many healthcare and professional services contexts, teams generally expect their leaders to have technical expertise - typically resulting from years of direct application experience - in order to be seen as credible. Such roles often call for sensitive communication with patients and an ability to cope with the pressure of high demand, limited resources, and tension. Morale levels and attrition are often effects of such situations, which adds further pressure - challenging clinical leaders to work on their teams in addition to the demands of their core professional calling.

An effective development programme typically starts with helping participants become aware of what their strengths are and why they should work on any development to help gain more effective results personally, for the teams and for the organisation. As you would expect, PhD level leaders are smart and deal with complex issues day to day – they expect evidence-based diagnostic tools and approaches that are backed up with significant research and scientific grounding.

Feedback following previous participant experiences indicated a disappointment with tools used, comments suggested they seemed shallow, generic and technically superficial. As a result, participants saw little value and impact on their day to day work. Despite best intentions by HR, this didn’t help them to help their colleagues.

Our Approach

1. Assess and Reflect

Provide Hogan Assessment tools to help participants understand their reputation at work – what drives them, likely every-day behaviour in the workplace, how they react to pressure and how all this compares to other adults.

Help the HR team to acquire the knowledge of such tools to support deployment and build collective insight and buy-in regarding strengths, focus and skill development areas - both individually and collectively.

Rapid Deployment of Hogan Assessments: Delivered within four weeks of first contact. In-house certification workshops enabled HR to own and interpret the data—predicted to cut recurring assessment costs by over 50%.

2. Exposure and Experience

Ongoing expert support: APS advisors worked alongside the cohort to guide initial debriefs and continue to maximise the value they were getting from the tools. APS consulted with the organisation about the benefit of understanding collective characteristics for cohorts of leaders, and agreed with the client to provide a bespoke “Team Insights Masterclass©” synthesising individual profiles into collective leadership dynamics.

3. Skills Development & Performance Tracking

Hands-on group development: Interactive workshops to translate assessment insights into real-world peer-to-peer strategies. Key focus areas included on self-awareness, communication styles and the ripple effect of senior leaders’ behaviours.

This approach provided insights about some of the frequently identified strengths of leaders within the organisation and also emphasised the challenges arising as a result of some ‘over-played’ characteristics. This opened the door for collective discussions about how to drive change and have a positive impact on the culture of the organisation and placed more focus on self-development, people leadership and organisational influence.

The “Aha” Moment

During the Masterclass, leaders realised that understanding their own tendencies wasn’t just “nice to have”—it was the linchpin to building team morale and sustaining high performance. That shift from technical command to people-centred leadership sparked genuine curiosity: “What else could we achieve if we channelled this insight across the organisation?”

Potential Outcomes

Psychometrics become indispensable: Hogan Assessments are becoming the go-to tool for leadership programmes in the teams we have worked with so far, anticipated to boost HR-led engagement.
Leadership pipeline: Advanced Leaders, Future CEOs and Medical Directors receive Hogan Assessments, executive coaching and targeted masterclasses—a closed loop from assessment to measurable growth.
Behavioural agility unlocked: Senior leaders are expected to develop heightened self-awareness, adapting their styles for diverse team needs and carving out time for strategic planning.
Data-driven talent decisions: HR are predicted to identify emerging leaders with greater accuracy, accelerating promotions and slashing time-to-fill critical roles.

Better Decisions: Making Sense of Complexity - Key Takeaways

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 12:00:00 Z

It’s events like today that remind me just how challenging it is for leaders in our complex and complicated world. Juggling decisions and achieving goals with so much ambiguity, considering consequences, process, information, and politics.

As CRF program partners I got to hear insights from keynote speaker Dave Snowden, Director of Cynefin, who opened with points around not having end goals. Small fluid movements in the right kind of direction lead to doing the next best thing. Focusing on the next best decision avoids aiming for the wrong goal and keeps organisations flexible and agile in times of crisis, and fast-moving market trends.

Naturally, I’m considering the impact of layering personality on top of this theory - how do our values play in here? If we are driven by security, traditional and long-term goals, how comfortable will this feel? If decisions should be made to keep options open rather than to solve a problem, how do people who value results and success feel about this fluidity? Self-awareness as well as team data around collective values and motivations would help to identify areas to support strategies for those who might need more energy to change their ways of working.

I really loved the concept around informal networking to solve problems with small groups of 3 cross-functional people sharing ideas to make decisions. Psychological safety is a hot topic with our clients and creating these networks of mini teams would help to increase trust within organisations, reduce politics, speed up decisions and increase relevant information flow.

Embracing the benefits of positive conflict

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:00:00 Z

Conflict can be the catalyst for progress, growth, and innovation

It may not feel like it at times, but conflict can be a hugely important factor in successful organisations and effective teams. The notion that not all conflict is negative or unhelpful is an important one. Without conflicting ideas, opinions, and motives the world and our organisations would stagnate and become stale.

Creating an environment where people feel empowered to challenge and share their opinions is a crucial step towards creating the psychological safety that is needed in order for conflict to be seen as a positive contribution rather than a nuisance factor. This may not be easy, but it is certainly productive as it will foster open dialogue and trust amongst people, which in turn can lead to the richness of ideas and diversity of opinion that help to solve problems, make effective decisions, and create innovation.

Managing negative conflict

‘Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.’

Ronald Regan

The first step on the road to handling negative conflict and difficult conversations in a productive way is to understand the cause of the issue. Here are some examples of common causes of conflict;

Clashes in behaviour and communication styles
Conflicting priorities and motives
Confusion and misunderstanding
Stressful, pressurised situations.

Raising self-awareness is a great way to help people to manage and moderate these interpersonal conflict-causers. Personality assessments are a proven way of identifying communication styles, motives, and coping mechanisms when under stress, which then pave way for effective feedback and coaching conversations.

Turning difficult conversations into effective conversations

Start with the intention…..

Before engaging in, or encouraging others to engage in a difficult conversation it is crucial to establish what the intended outcome is, and what the motive behind that is.

If the motive doesn’t come from a positive place, then the outcome is unlikely to be a productive one. Begin with a positive, productive intention.

Align the impact with the intention…..

This is where planning and preparation become even more important. Often, conflict can be caused due to ‘tone of voice’ or ‘selection of language’ issue, which wasn’t helpful. For the conversation to be effective, the person initiating it will need to be able to put their positive intention across without causing offense and creating defensive behaviour.

This isn’t easy, it takes time, planning, and practice. It is a skill that can be refined though. Finding a suitable way to prepare and practice managing difficult conversations can be the key to resolving conflict.

Potential, Performance and Promises

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 12:00:00 Z

Traditionally, succession planning has been the process of identifying internal people to move into business-critical positions and leadership roles, often with a confidential, top-down, highly structured approach. Today, organisations are looking for simpler, faster and scientifically valid ways to identify successors; in essence, creating a more efficient talent “pipeline”.

Succession planning is often driven by senior executives seeking to reassure their boards (think classic “what if they get hit by a bus” scenarios) and entrusted to HR leaders to make it work. Creating a successful succession programme is not a simple task and HR leaders face numerous challenges. Organisational politics may influence who gets put on the fast track for promotion, creating disillusionment for those who are equally competent but less skilled at making themselves known. Long-term leaders may feel entitled to that next move up the ladder and be dismayed when external change agents are parachuted in to take the lead. Key talent may have been promised future opportunities that dissipate when business requirements shift or mentors leave.

Trying to ensure fairness and mindful of employee engagement, HR leaders have long sought to instil rigour in succession planning; giving rise to the popularity of nine-box grids and talent reviews. However, the time, money and effort put into assessing potential and reviewing performance often creates mixed results; for all the reasons we associate with the realities of a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous).

Past performance is not predictive of future success if the role changes in scope, scale, or complexity and it may be time to add more rigour to the traditional nine-box framework. Adding inputs from reliable and valid personality-based and cognitive assessments, coupled with real-life performance data (multi-rater assessments , portfolio examples, performance reviews) can create more assurance. Technological innovations have also made it possible to assess skills in virtual environments, adding even more opportunities to identify the strengths and opportunities of future leaders.

Who wants to be a game changer and what might get in the way?

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 12:00:00 Z

It was encouraging to hear from so many attendees about their existing experience of using Hogan Assessments to support executive recruitment, at the AESC 'Sustaining Growth' Global Conference, London 2022, reflecting the growing awareness of Hogan to support talent identification and placement.

The themes of the conference provided an ideal platform to discuss the impact of personality, values and ‘dark-side’ risk behaviours on the approach to sustainable growth at board level as well as other strategic applications using Hogan Assessments.

Dr Annalisa Jenkins, when addressing key questions around equality, diversity and inclusion, spoke about the importance of culture and leadership as well as highlighting the key question – ‘how do you ensure a high-performing, effective team’.

In his keynote speech, futurist, Gerd Leonhard, highlighted some of the elements of what he called a Key Human Index for future success including such elements as flexibility, empathy, resilience, intuition and imagination as well as values.

Reflecting on some of these critical behaviours, which experts expect to see in the leaders of the future, and their boardrooms, Hogan Assessments can provide key insights into all of them. Providing clear perspectives as to how natural tendencies, behaviours and values are likely to show up or get in the way, is a key element not only to help support those who want to be the game changer leaders, but also those whose mission is to identify and place them in the right roles.