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Teams are not simply the sum of individual talents. They operate as complex systems in which a behavior under stress can trigger a chain reaction and influence the entire collective dynamic.
This article explains the concept of domino derailers: individual behavioral tendencies that, when they emerge under pressure, can activate the derailers of other team members and undermine collective effectiveness. It also shows how Hogan Assessments’ personality inventories, particularly the HDS (Hogan Development Survey), help teams understand these mechanisms and transform them into drivers of trust, performance, and sustainable leadership.
For executives, HR leaders, Talent Management professionals, and team coaches, the challenge is strategic: learning to recognize chain reactions before they erode trust, collective energy, and the quality of decision-making.
Teams are far more than the sum of their parts. They are complex systems in which individual behaviors can trigger chain reactions that either strengthen or weaken team effectiveness.
The concept of domino derailers reveals how one team member’s behavior under stress can spread across the group. This dynamic can silently erode collective effectiveness and drain organizational energy. Yet, when properly understood, these same patterns become powerful levers for building effective teams.
In episode 123 of The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman and Blake Loepp spoke with a panel of experts from the Hogan Coaching Network about domino derailers. The guests were Trish Kellett, Executive Advisor for Strategic Initiatives at Hogan Assessments; Rebecca Feder, Principal Consultant at Princeton HR Insight; and Rebecca Ghanadan, Founder and CEO of Aspis Coaching Group.
Trish Kellett, who led the Hogan Coaching Network for 15 years, coined the term domino derailers based on her experience facilitating team development sessions. According to her, it is not always the highest derailer in a team that creates difficulty, but rather the interaction between individual derailers.
Short definition — Domino derailers: Domino derailers refer to the chain reactions that occur when an individual behavior under stress activates the derailers of other team members, to the point of weakening collective performance.
This question relates directly to the HDS (Hogan Development Survey), which assesses the dark side of personality through 11 different derailers.
Derailers are negative behaviors that emerge when individuals stop self-regulating, usually as a result of stress, complacency, or boredom. In everyday life, these tendencies can be personality strengths. They become problematic when they are overused.
The HDS (Hogan Development Survey) is based on reputational data, meaning how others perceive a person’s behavior. When it comes to team performance, individual strengths reveal where and how the team may potentially derail.
Short definition — HDS (Hogan Development Survey): The HDS is the Hogan Assessments personality inventory that measures behavioral tendencies likely to emerge under stress, pressure, fatigue, boredom, or reduced self-control.
Rebecca Ghanadan emphasizes that the power of the HDS is widely recognized in individual development work. According to her, clients regularly say that these insights are especially enlightening and that they do not receive them anywhere else.
For team members to understand themselves, they must also recognize the impact their behavior has on others. This understanding of how each person individually contributes to a spiral of negative reactions can develop the awareness needed to interact more skillfully with colleagues.
According to Rebecca Ghanadan, instead of triggering a reaction in someone else, it becomes possible to respond in a way that begins to build trust. Trust is efficient. Trust is effective.
Rebecca Feder shares this view. She explains that it is possible to change the tone of conversations under stress so they become more supportive and useful. The goal is to focus on how one can help the other person and respond differently when people are not at their best.
Short definition — Behavioral reputation: Behavioral reputation refers to the way others perceive our recurring behaviors, particularly in moments of pressure or tension.
Teams are made up of individuals who have different potential derailers. A team may experience conflict and become less effective without its highest collective derailer ever coming into play.
One person’s derailer can activate other people’s derailers, creating a domino effect. According to Trish Kellett, this is where the team begins to enter a spiral.
She gives the example of a team whose highest collective derailer is the Cautious scale of the HDS. Suppose a team member with a high score on Imaginative shares an idea that reminds a colleague with a high score on Colorful of a story. Their lively conversation may then trigger the reaction of a team member with a high score on Reserved, who withdraws, or a member with a high score on Bold, who interrupts with an even more ambitious idea.
In this example, Cautious does not appear anywhere in the actual dynamic. The domino derailers are the individual derailers interacting with one another.
For effective teams, it is essential to understand how they manage stress collectively. Rebecca Ghanadan explains that the concept of domino derailers redirects attention. It encourages each person to ask how they can develop strategic awareness of their own patterns under stress and how they can choose their response to others.
In practice, team effectiveness does not depend only on skills or strategy. It also depends on the group’s ability to recognize stress reactions before they become relational habits.
Rebecca Feder and Rebecca Ghanadan described a detailed hypothetical interaction around the concept of domino derailers.
In day-to-day work, Rebecca Feder tends to be organized and structured in her planning. In a moment of vulnerability, she might display a high level of Diligent by stepping in to micromanage Rebecca Ghanadan’s work.
If this triggers a stress reaction in Rebecca Ghanadan, she might display her high Imaginative score and resist Rebecca Feder’s expectations around structure. She might also show her high Reserved score by withdrawing from the interaction.
The two colleagues then begin moving in completely opposite directions: Rebecca Feder zooms in on the details, while Rebecca Ghanadan takes a broader view or moves away from the immediate framework. As members of the same team, they are likely to feel frustration and lose energy in relation to their shared goals.
Now imagine that Rebecca Ghanadan’s Reserved behavior triggers resentment in Trish Kellett, whose high Leisurely derailer shows up as passive resistance. The situation may then look like total dysfunction.
According to Rebecca Feder, these moments of stress are actually real opportunities for team progress. If Rebecca Ghanadan had recognized Rebecca Feder’s derailing reaction, she could have invited her to discuss the details and review the plan. Rebecca Feder adds that they could then have become closer than if they had never had the opportunity to build trust together.
Team effectiveness therefore requires more than general insights. In this example, Rebecca Ghanadan, Rebecca Feder, and Trish Kellett need to work together to understand what drives each person’s behavior and their dark-side derailers.
Short definition — The dark side of personality: The dark side of personality refers to the behaviors that can emerge when a person’s usual strengths are overused or poorly regulated under stress.
When presenting Hogan inventory results to leaders and team members, the three coaches observe that people tend to show more resistance to feedback about their dark-side behaviors.
In a team session, one of the major objectives is therefore to reduce that resistance and facilitate constructive dialogue about derailers.
Team effectiveness, especially under stress, can be highly complex. However, the domino derailers model makes it understandable for team members. According to Rebecca Feder, at its core, it comes down to three simple actions: pause, manage yourself, and create the space needed to be present for others.
In a business context, work on derailers is not about labeling people. It is about helping the group better understand what happens in moments of tension, so that automatic reactions do not take control.
Rebecca Feder describes a team-session exercise focused on derailers. This exercise helps reduce resistance and complements Hogan reports.
Each participant completes a self-assessment questionnaire about their derailers, places it in an envelope, and then passes that envelope clockwise. Next, each team member evaluates how they perceive the others under stress, adds their feedback to the envelope, and continues passing it around until it returns to its starting point.
At the end of the process, each participant retrieves their envelope and discovers both how they thought they behaved under stress and how others actually perceive them.
Participants then take a break to absorb what they have learned. Afterward, they come back together to share their risk tendencies and needs. Each person takes notes and reflects on their own reactions.
According to Rebecca Feder, it is possible to stop the dominoes from falling. Any team member can show up differently and help interrupt the chain.
Short definition — Behavioral self-assessment: A behavioral self-assessment is an exercise in which a person describes their own tendencies, then compares that perception with feedback received from their professional environment.
For a leader, this exercise illustrates a fundamental principle: collective effectiveness improves when individual perceptions become discussable, explicit, and actionable.
Once the team has a shared language for discussing derailers, it becomes important to create space for dialogue.
Rebecca Ghanadan mentions three major areas of real-time learning:
Responding more effectively to colleagues in order to give them more of what they need.
Understanding what is happening beneath a person’s derailers.
Developing interpersonal self-management skills in a team context.
Sharing these data-based insights can genuinely change team performance outcomes.
Through the process of discussing the dark side, Rebecca Feder observes that teams gain hope. The concept of domino derailers humanizes people. According to her, the team moves from a primary emotional reaction to a moment of thoughtful leadership.
She explains that a team can move upward or downward. It can become irritated and create distance, or it can build trust and become stronger.
Rebecca Ghanadan shares this observation. She indicates that trust truly grows and deepens in this type of team session. Hogan inventories have always provided a language that catalyzes a higher level of awareness: a language that is nonjudgmental and simply descriptive.
Short definition — Shared team language: A shared team language is a set of common words and concepts that enables members of a group to describe their behaviors, tensions, and needs without unnecessary judgment.
Derailers often appear when people stop self-regulating. Signals may include withdrawal, excessive criticism, dominating the conversation, passive resistance, micromanagement, or generating many ideas without a clear framework.
Identifying these signals early helps prevent them from becoming a collective dynamic.
The risk does not always come from the team’s highest score. It may come from the interaction between several individual tendencies. A highly structuring behavior can trigger resistance to constraint. A very expansive way of speaking can trigger withdrawal. A dominant stance can provoke caution, mistrust, or passivity.
In practical terms, teamwork involves understanding not only “who I am under stress,” but also “what my behavior triggers in others.”
The pause is a simple but powerful tool. It interrupts behavioral automaticity, allows for self-regulation, and makes it possible to choose a more constructive response.
For a leader, this pause can transform a defensive reaction into a moment of leadership. It creates the space needed to ask a question, clarify an intention, or acknowledge an impact.
Trust is built when team members see that difficult moments can be handled differently. Responding with curiosity rather than judgment, with clarity rather than avoidance, and with support rather than control helps interrupt chain reactions.
A team becomes more effective when it learns to use moments of stress as opportunities for development.
The concept of domino derailers is particularly useful for executives and leadership teams. In high-stakes contexts, behaviors under stress can have disproportionate consequences for decision-making, trust, and strategic execution.
A leader who understands their own derailers can better anticipate their impact. A team that understands its derailer dynamics can better prevent negative spirals. An organization that develops this shared language can strengthen its ability to learn, adapt, and perform sustainably.
Hogan Assessments personality inventories, especially the HDS (Hogan Development Survey), do not merely describe individuals. They help explain the interactions that shape collective performance.
Domino derailers show that team performance does not depend solely on individual talent. It depends on how behaviors interact, especially under stress. A single unregulated behavior can trigger a chain of reactions that weakens trust, collaboration, and collective energy.
But this dynamic can also become a powerful lever. When teams have a clear, descriptive, and nonjudgmental language for discussing their derailers, they can move from automatic reaction to more conscious leadership. They learn to pause, manage themselves, understand others’ needs, and respond differently.
For executives, HR leaders, and Talent Management professionals, personality assessment is therefore a strategic tool. Hogan inventories, and particularly the HDS (Hogan Development Survey), help identify the behavioral risks that influence team effectiveness, trust, and sustainable performance.
By understanding domino derailers, a team can prevent negative chain reactions, strengthen the quality of its interactions, and transform moments of stress into opportunities for collective development. It is precisely this ability to learn together under pressure that distinguishes truly high-performing teams.
