I wanted to take a step back away from the topic of competencies today since I had several conversations this week with a client regarding self esteem. We were working together on a search involving very highly educated individuals (all Ph.D and some M.D. Ph.D. – all researchers and all very intellectual).
We talked about the impact that self esteem had on leadership skills and competencies. As I have written before in earlier blogs, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of self esteem. I went to my computer hard drive and pulled this up. It is written by Robert Hogan and Rodney Warrenfeltz of Hogan Assessments Systems. Those of you who follow me know that I have the highest regard for Bob Hogan and for his firm. This quote from a very well done article clearly presents the argument for self esteem. (Read the full article by going to the Hogan website www.hoganassessments.com).
The domain of intrapersonal skills is the traditional subject matter of psychoanalysis, but a detailed explication of that claim would take us too far afield. Intrapersonal skills develop early and have important consequences for career development in adulthood. This domain seems to have three natural component. The first can be described as core self-esteem (Judge, Locke, Durham, & Kluger, 1998), emotional security, or perhaps resiliency. People with core self-esteem are self-confident, they have stable, positive moods, they are not easily frustrated or upset, and they bounce back quickly from reversals and disappointments. Persons who lack core self esteem are self-critical, moody, unhappy, easily frustrated, hard to soothe, and need frequent reassurance and positive feedback. Core self esteem is easy to measure, which means we can give managers reliable feedback on the subject. Moreover, measures of core self-esteem predict a wide variety of career outcomes, including job satisfaction and performance evaluations, which means clients should pay attention to feedback on this topic.
From – Educating the Modern Manager ROBERT HOGAN & RODNEY WARRENFELTZ
Hogan Assessment Systems. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2003, Vol. 2, No. 1, 74 – 84.
http://www.hoganassessments.com/_hoganweb/documents/Educating_the_Modern_Manager.pdf