Creativity is often held up as an essential leadership quality. It feeds innovation, makes it possible to imagine new solutions and helps organisations set an ambitious vision. But once it loses its grounding in execution and strategy, that same creativity can become an obstacle to performance.
In this article you will find how the Imaginative derailer, measured by the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), can turn a genuine leadership strength into a source of confusion for teams. You will also find how to recognise the signs of imagination-driven derailment and how to help highly creative leaders channel their ideas in support of HR strategy, collective performance and more sustainable management.
Most of us have come across a leader who turns meetings into personal brainstorming sessions. By the end, everyone leaves confused or unsure what to do next.
That same leader may also be known for firing off several vague ideas at once, very quickly. Some may even be imprecise enough to seem contradictory. And yet the leader still expects their team to implement them.
There is every chance that leader is displaying the dark side of creativity. Hogan calls this behaviour Imaginative: it appears when imagination derails performance and teams are left with the resulting confusion and lack of direction.
Innovation and creativity are strengths Hogan Assessments measures through three personality inventories:
Within the HDS, the Imaginative scale assesses the extent to which these qualities may become career risks by reducing a person's effectiveness.
In day-to-day work, creative and unconventional thinking is often a genuine asset for a leader. Overused or applied to the wrong situation, though, it can become counterproductive. Hogan calls that derailment.
Derailment most often shows up in situations of stress, boredom or relaxed vigilance, when a person pays less attention to their own behaviour. Imaginative sits among the eleven derailers the HDS assesses, those characteristics Hogan groups under the dark side of personality.
Leaders scoring high on the Imaginative scale generally bring original thinking, curiosity and real innovative potential to their daily work.
But once stressful or tedious situations trigger Imaginative derailment, those same leaders can come across as disorganised, easily distracted or even hard to follow, because their creative energy ends up taking precedence over concrete execution.
Excessive creativity can then make them appear eccentric, short on judgement, or overly confident in their own hunches.
In the accompanying video, Jaclyn Menendez, PhD, Talent Solutions Manager, explains Imaginative behaviour through a concrete example and shares practical advice for managing the derailment risks tied to creativity.
Innovation, the ability to set a vision and creative problem-solving are particularly sought-after qualities when creativity is put at the service of the company's strategy.
But extremely creative leaders, Steve Jobs being a well-known illustration of the type, can also create serious difficulties for their organisation when they derail frequently.
Their imagination can derail performance when they put forward unrealistic ideas their teams cannot implement, when they are convinced they hold some special understanding of complex problems, or when they decide more from intuition than from the available data.
This erratic behaviour generates confusion within teams. People can feel swamped by the constant flow of ideas and frustrated by the absence of clarity.
Imaginative derailment can damage a leader's credibility and their team's trust.
When a leader jumps endlessly from one idea to the next, their unpredictable behaviour weakens the team's confidence and can leave the impression that they lack focus or direction.
When they put forward ideas that cannot be implemented, this creative chaos gradually erodes trust. A very unusual way of speaking or behaving can also make them seem odd or singular.
And when spontaneous ideas repeatedly fail to rally people, the consequences can spread across the whole organisation: lost confidence, greater disengagement and rising turnover.
Leaders scoring high on the Imaginative scale would do well to think about why they share their ideas, and also about how they choose which ideas to share at all.
Creative leaders can head off derailment by learning to recognise the moments when their imagination needs a frame and a strategic direction.
One essential question can guide their thinking:
"Does this creative idea genuinely serve the company's objectives, or does it risk derailing the team's performance?"
This capacity to step back is an important component of developing leadership potential. It preserves the benefits of creativity while strengthening execution, managerial clarity and trust within teams.
Strategic self-awareness can be built, and several development activities help highly Imaginative people do exactly that.
Leaders first have to identify what triggers their Imaginative derailment: stress, boredom, a lack of accountability, or some other factor.
Keeping a list of ideas, or using a tool to track their progress, can help them limit scatter and see their commitments through.
Their team members can also benefit from explicit rules allowing them to question, challenge or clarify the leader's thinking.
Another lever is to identify a trusted person capable of evaluating ideas before they are implemented and of giving direct feedback, someone comfortable enough to say plainly: "Here is why that is probably not going to work."
The people reporting to an Imaginative leader need precise instructions.
Team members should ask, in particular, which ideas genuinely need implementing, and should set out deadlines and concrete actions.
To limit the overproduction of ideas, teams can also draw a clear line between brainstorming sessions and meetings devoted to strategy.
When teams clarify how proposed actions will affect other teams or contribute to the company's strategy, that frame channels creative energy productively. It also offers a legitimate and constructive way of questioning ideas that look unrealistic.
Leaders naturally drawn to innovation need to keep a close watch on their Imaginative behaviour.
Strategic creativity means finding a balance between imagination and execution, so that innovation genuinely serves the organisation's objectives without derailing team performance.
When creative leaders learn to manage their behaviour, they can turn their imagination into results that support the company's strategy, rather than generating confusion.
Within an assessment and development approach, personality assessment is precisely what makes these mechanisms visible. It helps executives, HR directors and heads of talent management understand how a recognised strength, in this case creativity, can become a risk when it is overused.
That understanding is a powerful lever for coaching, for skills development and for team transformation.
Creativity is not the problem. What really matters is a leader's capacity to understand when, how and in what context that creativity should be expressed.
Personality assessment, particularly through Hogan's methodologies, makes it possible to identify these watch-out areas and to help leaders build a better awareness of how they behave under pressure.
For organisations, this understanding reaches well beyond individual development. It improves the quality of leadership, strengthens trust within teams and brings individual potential into closer alignment with organisational culture and HR strategy.
Effective talent management is therefore not only about identifying strengths. It is also about understanding how those strengths can turn into risks when they are overused.
By supporting leaders towards that awareness, organisations can preserve their capacity to innovate while encouraging lasting performance, better cooperation and more effective management.
Jaclyn Menendez, PhD, is an industrial and organisational psychologist and leads the consulting team at Hogan Assessments.
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: The Dark Side of Creativity: How Imagination Derails Performance
