The qualities that let a professional succeed early in their career can, pushed too far, become genuine brakes on their progress. As responsibility grows, behaviours once seen as strengths can weaken leadership, team dynamics and, in time, the organisation's performance.
This article explains how personality derailers can turn a strength into a weakness, why they matter so much in developing leadership potential, and how organisations can identify and manage them. It also highlights the part played by strategic self-awareness, by the Hogan personality inventories and by coaching within a durable approach to talent management, assessment and development, and team transformation.
"What is your greatest weakness?"
Faced with this classic interview question, many people answer by presenting a quality pushed to an extreme as a weakness, along the lines of: "I care too much about my clients." That kind of answer may be closer to the truth than it seems. One of our greatest strengths can indeed become one of our principal weaknesses when it is overused.
Personality characteristics that look like assets at the start of a career can end up limiting someone's potential once they reach higher levels of leadership.
An excellent individual contributor, used to working independently, may for instance carry on prizing that independence excessively on becoming a manager for the first time. They then risk seeming distant or hard to reach, at the very moment their team is looking to them for more direction and support.
As leaders progress through their careers, the stakes rise, and the consequences of overusing certain strengths grow with them.
By taking steps to identify and manage the behaviours liable to derail a leader, organisations can help them keep drawing on their greatest strengths without letting those strengths turn into their greatest weaknesses.
Derailers belong to the dark side of personality.
In everyday situations, dark-side characteristics can be genuine strengths. But when someone is stressed, bored or overconfident, those same characteristics can turn into obstacles to their career.
Being extraverted and socially skilled, for example, is generally an advantage. Without proper regulation, though, that behaviour can drift towards excessive attention-seeking or a tendency to put oneself forward constantly.
Everyone has derailers, because everyone has a dark side to their personality.
When Hogan speaks of the "dark side", it means neither the dark triad of personality nor clinical personality disorders. Hogan is referring to characteristics measured by the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), which can be overused once a person stops watching and adjusting their behaviour.
These tendencies can show up at work as much as in other areas of life.
The charisma that lets someone emerge naturally as a leader can, in a high-stakes situation, leave them looking narcissistic or excessively grandiose.
The most common way leaders fail comes down to unsuitable interpersonal behaviour that undermines their ability to build and sustain effective teams.
Derailers can be hard to spot, because they tend to appear in particular circumstances, when the leader is no longer paying enough attention to their own behaviour.
The same characteristics that were strengths in the early stages of a career can then be overused, damaging a leader's professional reputation and compromising their chances of success.
Erin Lazarus, senior director of business development at Hogan, observes:
"When leaders have no awareness of their derailing behaviours, they risk having a negative impact on their own career, on their teams' success and, ultimately, on the organisation's results. They may not be present enough or may fail to communicate at crucial moments, may not hear essential feedback signalling that change is needed, or may fall into analysis paralysis instead of acting."
The consequences of the dark side of personality can be considerable for organisations.
According to Erin Lazarus:
"Dark-side behaviours bring many negative effects: duplicated work, a lack of alignment between tasks and objectives, an inability to change course, and disengagement."
Early intervention lets people learn to manage their derailers before those derailers affect team performance and business results.
But before anyone can act on these behaviours, they first have to be aware of their own dark-side characteristics.
The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) is one of the three main Hogan personality inventories which, used together, build an overall picture of a person's strengths, their potential derailers and their values.
The HDS is distinct from clinical assessments, particularly those used to assess personality disorders.
What it measures instead is 11 behavioural tendencies associated with leadership difficulties. It draws on the personality theory developed by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney and on research into the causes of managerial failure.
Dark-side characteristics are not automatically negative, however.
They can often be advantages, and become problematic only when pushed to an extreme.
A high level of conscientiousness, for example, is generally beneficial. Yet that same quality can turn into perfectionism, an obsession with work or micromanagement when it is overused.
Because the HDS describes the behavioural risks liable to affect performance at work, it can be used to anticipate leadership performance and to steer skills development.
Dark-side characteristics can be grouped into three broad categories, according to how a person tends to react to others when they stop consciously regulating their behaviour.
Hogan takes up the terminology from Karen Horney's work. Three tendencies emerge:
Personality can be defined particularly usefully through two perspectives: identity and reputation.
Identity is personality seen from the inside, that is, the way a person sees themselves.
Reputation is personality seen from the outside: it is the way others perceive that person.
Unlike identity, which shifts with our perception of ourselves, reputation tends to stay relatively stable over time.
Most people find a certain gap between how they see themselves and how others see them.
Where a significant gap exists between identity and reputation, a leader may fail to hear certain feedback, deny their weak points, resist change and end up slowing their professional progress, or even derailing their career.
Strategic self-awareness lets leaders recognise when they need to adapt their behaviour to become more effective.
In leadership development, it means understanding where the openings for change and progress lie. It involves recognising the moments when certain strengths are being overused.
As Erin Lazarus explains:
"Changing behaviour is hard. It takes intent, accountability and measurement of progress over time. The good news is that with strategic self-awareness and deliberate effort, leaders can change."
An effective leader has to keep adapting and progressing, at every stage of their career.
Setting development objectives that help leaders manage their derailers better is therefore an essential component of an effective talent management strategy.
Erin Lazarus explains that the first step is identifying dark-side behaviours through precise psychometric tools, such as the Hogan personality inventories, along with 360-degree assessments.
The data from these assessments then has to be presented to the leader and placed in the context of their role, their objectives and their aspirations.
Working with a coach, the leader can then build a personalised development plan targeting the most relevant behaviours.
Work on derailers thus sharpens a leader's interpersonal skills and lifts what their team can deliver.
"Most organisations stop at this stage," Erin Lazarus points out.
Yet to help leaders reach their long-term development objectives, organisations should put an accountability mechanism in place, built on coaching grounded in the assessment results and aimed at genuinely shifting professional reputation.
"Without that personalised, individualised effort, most people have neither the resources nor the capacity they need to change," she adds.
So what can organisations do?
Building a talent strategy that takes account of the dark side of personality lets organisations get more out of leadership potential and offer more relevant development support.
The saying "What got you here won't get you there" captures precisely why leaders should not exaggerate the strengths that contributed to their success as they move up an organisation.
By identifying future leaders' derailers early enough and putting measures in place to limit their effects, organisations let those leaders adapt their behavioural approach.
Leaders can thus learn to preserve the great strengths that carried them forward, without letting those same qualities become the weaknesses that bring them down.
Leadership potential does not rest solely on possessing certain qualities. It also depends on a leader's capacity to understand when, how and in what measure to use their strengths.
A quality used with judgement can support performance, rally teams and strengthen leadership. The same quality, once it becomes excessive or automatic, can instead damage relationships, weaken trust and limit collective effectiveness.
This is why personality assessment, embedded in a structured HR strategy covering talent management, assessment and development, and coaching, is far more than a simple tool for self-knowledge. It makes behavioural tendencies visible that can otherwise be hard to perceive, anticipates risks and builds development plans that are genuinely personalised.
For organisations, this approach helps develop leadership potential, support team transformation and strengthen an organisational culture built on self-awareness, adaptability and accountability.
Identifying derailers is therefore not about hunting for a leader's flaws. It is about letting them use their strengths with more judgement, so as to build sustainable leadership and management, serving team performance and the organisation's long-term success.
Erin Lazarus, MS, who leads business development at Hogan Assessments as senior director
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: How Your Greatest Strength Can Become Your Greatest Weakness
