Reaching a leadership role is a significant achievement. But earning the title is only the first step: the real challenge is building, rallying and growing a high-performing team over time.
Why do some executives, capable, intelligent and experienced as they are, end up weakening their people's trust? The answer lies less often in their technical skills than in aspects of their personality that surface under pressure.
Research on leadership shows that certain counterproductive behaviours can damage relationships, slow decision-making and affect team engagement lastingly. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) identifies 11 derailers, behavioural tendencies liable to become risk factors as stress, fatigue or pressure rise.
Understanding these derailers matters greatly for talent management, for personality assessment, for developing leadership potential and, more broadly, for any HR strategy aiming at lasting performance.
Being handed a leadership role within an organisation can feel like a tremendous achievement. Yet it represents only half the road. The second half, and arguably the more important one, is building and sustaining a genuinely high-performing team.
According to a study of employees in the United Kingdom, many managers fail badly at this and instead help generate feelings of hostility and resentment among their people.
The survey indicates that 22% of British respondents say they hate their manager, while a still more striking 52% say their line manager is their main source of dissatisfaction at work.
So where do managers go wrong? And what can they do to improve how their people see them?
The particularly illuminating work of V. Jon Bentz, vice president of human resources at Sears in the 1970s, showed that managerial failure had little to do in the end with IQ or personal appeal.
It was, by contrast, directly tied to interpersonal competence.
And since personality sits at the heart of interpersonal competence, personality assessment can identify certain behavioural tendencies that lead leaders to fail time and again.
The tools developed by Hogan Assessments identify 11 personality dimensions that may represent risk factors for leadership.
Introduced in 1997 by Drs Robert Hogan and Joyce Hogan, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) is a personality inventory designed to identify the critical blind spots liable to derail a career.
It lets leaders better understand their counterproductive tendencies, or "risk factors", liable to lead to managerial difficulty.
These characteristics tend to intensify in periods of stress. They can then damage relationships with colleagues and with other key stakeholders across the organisation.
To lead a team better, leaders therefore need to be aware of these 11 personality dimensions, or derailers.
People scoring high on the Excitable scale generally have a great deal of energy and show strong enthusiasm for new projects.
They can lose interest quickly, though, once projects stop going to the original plan.
They also tend to voice their frustrations about people or projects publicly, sometimes through marked emotional reactions.
That can create an unsettling working climate, in which colleagues constantly feel they are walking on eggshells for fear of annoying or disappointing their manager.
Leaders scoring high on the Skeptical scale tend to mistrust others. They may believe the people around them will end up betraying them the moment they drop their guard.
The attitude can certainly make them unusually alert to the less appealing aspects of organisational politics.
But in time, these leaders struggle to earn other people's trust themselves.
A deeply dysfunctional working environment can then take hold, in which decisions get taken in confidential meetings, with no genuine open exchange or transparent discussion.
Cautious leaders act in constant fear of making a mistake.
They take the view that nothing can be known with total certainty and therefore tend to consider situations through the lens of the worst possible outcome.
They hesitate, in consequence, to try new approaches or to take decisions with real consequences.
In time, their colleagues learn to go around them whenever they genuinely want to move something forward.
Reserved leaders often consider that work is best done when everyone can concentrate alone and uninterrupted.
They keep face-to-face interaction to a minimum and tend to withdraw further as pressure rises.
These leaders can also be less alert to the difficulties others are facing.
Their colleagues may then see them as cold, hard and unwilling to help.
People scoring high on the Leisurely derailer can come across as polite and socially adept when leading a team.
That is one of the reasons they are often liked and respected within their organisation.
After working alongside them long enough, however, their colleagues can gradually see behind the façade and identify several significant weaknesses.
Faced with genuine difficulty, these leaders can become unproductive and look for ways to avoid or deflect responsibility.
Bold leaders can be inspiring, courageous and unusually confident.
Their colleagues can learn a great deal from them, not least about the behaviours that carry people upward towards the highest levels of an organisation.
But working for them can also prove hard.
For fear of losing face, they may refuse to acknowledge their mistakes or failures and struggle to take responsibility for them. The blame then often lands on their people.
In the same way, these leaders may take credit for major successes while finding it hard to recognise and reward the significant effort their teams have put in.
Mischievous people enjoy thrills, excitement and high-intensity environments.
Leaders scoring high on this dimension are willing to take risks and can move to action quickly under stress.
In a leadership role, that capacity can obviously be useful, even necessary.
Difficulties nonetheless appear when the tendency becomes excessive.
These leaders can sometimes give too little thought to the people who did all the preparatory work their success rested on, even though those colleagues are often the first to face the consequences of unusually ambitious or risky projects.
Colorful leaders like being the centre of attention. They too can thrive in high-pressure situations, but for different reasons.
Where Mischievous leaders seek the adrenaline attached to risky projects, Colorful leaders enjoy the visibility, the recognition and the attention such projects can bring them.
The tendency can end up working against them.
Colleagues often find these leaders chaotic or unpredictable, and can run into organisational problems along with a certain indecisiveness.
Imaginative people are generally very creative and particularly enjoy brainstorming sessions.
They may consider that even the simplest problems are extremely complex and call for unusually innovative solutions.
In a leadership role, they can quickly tire of day-to-day activities and tasks, and be easily distracted by their own ideas.
Their colleagues then sometimes come to see them as scattered and short on pragmatism.
People scoring high on the Diligent derailer are perfectionists and can find it hard to delegate work effectively.
They therefore often end up doing a great deal of it themselves.
They take on more work than they can genuinely absorb, which ends up affecting quality as well as deadlines.
These leaders can be hard to work alongside day to day, not least because they slow productivity down and tend towards micromanagement.
Dutiful leaders can be short on initiative and resourcefulness.
At the opposite end from the Diligent leader, these people tend to lean excessively on the members of their team.
They hope those colleagues will carry the project through to the end without their having to take real responsibility themselves or make decisions carrying an element of risk.
As dissatisfaction at work rises, the quality of the relationship between employees and employers becomes ever more decisive.
To steer a team effectively and carry it towards ambitious results, leaders in every organisation have to be able to build authentic, meaningful relationships with their people.
Developing and then maintaining a genuine awareness of these 11 derailers can help executives and team leaders build stronger working relationships.
That awareness is not about treating these characteristics as intrinsically "good" or "bad". What it does above all is show how certain behaviours, useful enough in normal circumstances, can become counterproductive as pressure rises.
This is exactly what assessment and development is for: turning knowledge of personality into concrete levers for progress, for coaching and for skills development.
Sustainable leadership does not rest on expertise, intelligence or experience alone. It also depends on a leader's capacity to understand the impact their behaviour has on others, particularly when they are under pressure.
Personality assessment makes these risk areas visible, identifies blind spots and supports leadership potential more effectively.
For organisations, building this understanding into HR strategy and talent management makes development decisions safer, strengthens the quality of management and supports team transformation.
By becoming aware of their derailers and learning to regulate them, leaders can build stronger relationships, encourage engagement and create the conditions for genuinely lasting performance.
On that condition, a manager can fully rally their team, develop its potential and carry it towards exceptional results.
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 Leadership: 11 Reasons Leaders Fail
