A team is far more than the sum of the individual talents that make it up. Under pressure, certain behaviours can chain together, reinforce one another and create a genuine domino effect, with direct consequences for trust, cooperation and collective effectiveness.
The idea of domino derailers helps explain how the behaviours associated with the dark side of personality can set one another off within a team. But it also shows that anyone able to spot these mechanisms can interrupt the dynamic and help restore a more constructive interaction.
This article sets out how the derailers measured by the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) shape collective interactions, why a team's dominant derailer is not necessarily the one causing the most difficulty, and how personality assessment can become a powerful lever for talent management, leadership development and team transformation.
Teams are far more than a simple addition of the individuals who compose them. They are complex systems in which individual behaviours can trigger chain reactions capable of strengthening collective effectiveness or, on the contrary, of weakening it.
The idea of domino derailers shows how the behaviour of a single team member under stress can spread to the whole group, quietly degrade the way it works and absorb a considerable share of the organisation's energy.
Yet when they are properly understood, those same mechanisms can become powerful footholds for building more effective teams.
In episode 123 of the podcast The Science of Personality, hosts Ryne Sherman and Blake Loepp spoke with several experts from the Hogan Coaching Network about the idea of domino derailers.
Three guests took part:
Having spent 15 years at the head of the Hogan Coaching Network, Trish Kellett coined the phrase domino derailers out of her experience running team development sessions.
"It is not always their highest derailer that puts teams in difficulty. It is rather the interaction between the individual derailers," she observes.
Which brings us to the Hogan Development Survey (HDS). This inventory covers 11 distinct derailers and reads what Hogan calls the dark side of personality.
Derailers correspond to potentially counterproductive behaviours that surface when someone stops regulating their behaviour sufficiently, usually under the effect of stress, of situational overconfidence or of boredom.
In day-to-day working life, these characteristics can be genuine personality strengths. They become problematic when they are overused.
The HDS rests on a logic of reputation, meaning the way others perceive someone's behaviour. Where collective performance is concerned, the individual strengths of team members also make it possible to identify where and how the team might potentially derail.
Rebecca Ghanadan explains:
"We all appreciate how powerful the HDS is for individuals. Clients regularly say: 'This is extremely illuminating. I do not get this kind of information anywhere else.'"
To understand each other better, team members also need to become aware of the impact their behaviours have on others.
Understanding how each person can individually feed a spiral of negative reactions builds better self-awareness and teaches people to interact more effectively with their colleagues.
Ghanadan continues:
"Instead of triggering a reaction in the other person, you respond in a way that starts to build trust. Trust is efficient. Trust is effective."
Rebecca Feder shares that reading:
"You can change the tone of these conversations under stress to make them more supportive and more constructive. You start asking yourself how you can help and how you might respond differently to people when they are not at their best."
This ability to grasp the impact of one's personality on others is one of the foundations of sustainable leadership and of an effective assessment and development strategy.
Teams bring together individuals who each have their own potential derailers.
A team can therefore run into conflict and lose effectiveness without its highest collective derailer ever genuinely coming into play.
One person's derailer can set off another in a colleague, who can in turn activate a third person's stress behaviour. A genuine domino effect takes hold.
"From there, the team simply starts to spiral," Kellett explains.
She gives the example of a team whose highest collective derailer is Cautious, one of the HDS scales.
Imagine a team member with a high score on Imaginative shares an idea. That idea then reminds a colleague with a high score on Colorful of a story.
Their animated conversation may trigger a reaction in a team member with a high score on Reserved, who starts withdrawing.
It might equally trigger a colleague with a high score on Bold, who cuts across the conversation to put forward an even more ambitious idea.
The Cautious derailer never came into it at any point.
The domino derailers that actually shaped the interaction here are the individual ones.
To build effective teams, it is therefore essential to understand how their members handle stress collectively.
Ghanadan explains:
"When you start working with the idea of domino derailers, it changes what you pay attention to. How can I develop strategic awareness of my own patterns under stress? How can I choose the way I respond to others?"
This shift in perspective is fundamental: the point is no longer simply to know your personality profile, but to understand the relational dynamic your behaviour produces.
Feder and Ghanadan describe a detailed hypothetical interaction illustrating the idea of domino derailers.
In her day-to-day working life, Feder tends to be organised and to plan.
In a moment of vulnerability or under pressure, however, she might display a high level of the Diligent derailer, stepping into Ghanadan's work excessively to the point of micromanaging.
If that attitude in turn triggers a stress reaction in Ghanadan, she might display her high score on Imaginative and resist Feder's expectations around structure.
She might also express her high score on Reserved by withdrawing from the interaction.
The two colleagues would then start moving in completely opposite directions: Feder focusing more and more on detail, while Ghanadan pulls further and further back.
As members of the same team, they would then risk feeling frustrated and losing some of the energy they could be devoting to their shared objectives.
Now imagine that Ghanadan's Reserved behaviour causes resentment in Kellett, whose high Leisurely derailer might show up as passive resistance.
At this point, the situation could look like total dysfunction.
And yet this moment is also an opportunity.
"These moments of stress are genuine moments of opportunity within a team," Feder explains.
Had Ghanadan spotted Feder's derailing reaction, she could have suggested going back over the various details together and revisiting the plan.
Feder continues:
"All of a sudden, we might end up closer than if we had never had that chance to build trust between us."
A team's effectiveness therefore cannot rest solely on general lessons that apply to everyone.
In this example, Ghanadan, Feder and Kellett have to work together to understand what drives each other's behaviour, and also the derailers tied to their dark side of personality.
This is precisely where personality assessment proves its worth within a talent management approach: it provides a shared language that moves past judgement and helps make sense of relational mechanisms.
All three coaches support leaders and team members through the feedback of their Hogan results, and all three notice the same thing: resistance runs higher as soon as the feedback turns to the behaviours tied to someone's dark side.
In a session devoted to a team, one of the main objectives is therefore to reduce that resistance and to make constructive dialogue about derailers possible.
Collective effectiveness, particularly under stress, can be especially complex. The domino derailers model nonetheless makes these mechanisms far easier for team members to grasp.
Feder sums up the principle this way:
"In the end, it simply comes down to pausing, managing yourself and creating the space you need to be genuinely present for others."
This capacity for self-regulation is a central component of leadership potential: the point is not to suppress certain personality characteristics, but to learn to manage them so that they remain strengths rather than becoming risk factors.
Feder also describes an exercise run in team sessions around derailers. It aims to reduce resistance to feedback and to complement the Hogan reports.
Each participant first completes a self-assessment questionnaire about their derailers, then places their answers in an envelope which they pass to the next person, clockwise.
Each team member then writes down how they perceive that person when under stress. They add their feedback to the envelope before passing it on in turn, until it has gone right round the table.
Feder explains:
"At the end of this process, I get my envelope back and I can compare how I thought I behaved under stress with the implications of how others perceive me."
Participants then take a break in order to absorb what they have just discovered.
When they reconvene, each person shares their risk tendencies along with their needs.
Everyone takes notes and also reflects on their own reactions to their colleagues' behaviour.
"You can stop the dominoes from falling," Feder explains. "Any member of the team can step in and do it."
This lesson is essential for developing relational skills: interrupting a negative spiral is not the sole responsibility of the manager or the leader. Every team member can help shift the collective dynamic.
Once a team has a shared language for talking about derailers, it becomes essential to create a genuine space for discussion.
Ghanadan identifies three main areas of real-time learning.
The first is learning to respond more effectively to colleagues, so as to give them more of what they need.
The second is understanding what sits underneath your own derailers, in other words the mechanisms, needs or reactions that can feed certain behaviours under pressure.
The third is developing skills in interpersonal self-regulation in a team setting.
Sharing these evidence-based lessons can genuinely change a team's results and performance.
Through discussions about the dark side of personality, Feder also finds that teams recover a sense of hope.
Put simply, the idea of domino derailers helps to humanise individuals.
She explains:
"You move from a primitive emotional reaction to a genuine moment of considered leadership. As a team, we can move upwards or downwards. We can get irritated and create distance, or we can build trust and become stronger."
Ghanadan shares that observation:
"We clearly see trust developing and deepening in this kind of team session. The Hogan inventories have always offered a language capable of catalysing greater awareness: without judgement, simply descriptive."
Derailers should not be seen merely as "weaknesses" to be eliminated.
They often correspond to characteristics which, in everyday situations, can be genuine strengths. It is their overuse, particularly under stress, that can gradually damage relationships and reduce collective effectiveness.
The strategic challenge is therefore to build in leaders and teams a better understanding of their own behaviours, and also of the way those behaviours shape other people's reactions.
This is where personality assessment, embedded in a broader approach to talent management, coaching and skills development, takes on its full dimension.
It allows organisations to move beyond a purely individual reading of leadership and to better understand the relational systems that shape performance.
When a team can talk about its derailers without judgement, identify its reactions under pressure and learn to interrupt domino effects, it gradually strengthens trust, the quality of cooperation and its capacity to face complex situations.
For organisations, this knowledge contributes directly to a more sustainable HR strategy, to the development of leadership potential, to team transformation and, in time, to more solid collective performance.
The full conversation is available in episode 123 of The Science of Personality.
To avoid missing an episode, follow The Science of Personality on your usual podcast platform.
Happy listening to you all!
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: Team Effectiveness and Domino Derailers
