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The question “What is your greatest weakness?” often leads candidates to cite an exaggerated strength: “I care too much about my clients,” “I am too much of a perfectionist,” or “I work too hard.” Yet this answer may be more accurate than it seems.
This article explains how a leader’s greatest strengths can become their greatest weaknesses when they are overused. It presents the concept of derailers, measured by Hogan Assessments’ HDS (Hogan Development Survey), and shows why these behaviors can limit careers, harm teams, and affect organizational outcomes.
For executives, HR leaders, and Talent Management professionals, the issue is strategic: identifying derailers early helps leaders preserve their strengths without allowing them to turn into performance risks.
“What is your greatest weakness?” Most people answer this very common interview question by naming a weakness in the form of an exaggerated strength, such as: “I care too much about my clients.”
Yet this kind of statement may be more accurate than they realize. Our greatest strengths can indeed become our greatest weaknesses when they are overused.
What appears to be a personality strength early in a person’s career can limit their potential at higher levels of leadership. An excellent individual contributor who is used to independence may rely excessively on autonomy when becoming a manager for the first time. They may then appear distant and detached at the very moment their team expects direction and support.
As leaders progress, the stakes increase — and so do the consequences of their overused strengths.
By taking steps to address derailing behaviors, organizations can help leaders leverage their greatest strength without succumbing to their greatest weakness.
Short definition — Overused strength: An overused strength is a behavioral quality that is useful in some situations but becomes counterproductive when applied too intensely, too often, or in the wrong context.
Derailers are part of the dark side of personality.
In everyday circumstances, dark-side personality characteristics can be strengths. However, these characteristics can become career obstacles when a person is stressed, bored, or complacent.
For example, being extraverted and socially skilled can turn into attention seeking or self-promotion if the behavior is not managed.
Everyone has derailers because everyone has a dark side. When Hogan talks about the dark side, it is not referring to the Dark Triad or to clinical personality disorders. It refers to characteristics measured by the HDS (Hogan Development Survey) that can be overused when a person is no longer monitoring their behavior.
These characteristics can be activated at work or in any other area of life. For example, the charisma that helps a person emerge as a leader can also make them appear narcissistic or grandiose in high-stakes situations.
Short definition — Derailer: A derailer is a behavioral tendency that can become counterproductive when overused, particularly under stress, boredom, pressure, complacency, or reduced self-control.
Short definition — Dark side of personality: The dark side of personality refers to behaviors that may appear when a person’s usual strengths are poorly regulated and begin to undermine their effectiveness.
The most common way leaders fail is through ineffective interpersonal behaviors that limit their ability to build and maintain functional teams.
Derailers can be difficult to identify because they tend to emerge in specific circumstances, when the leader is not paying attention to their behavior. The same characteristics that showed up as strengths in early-career roles may then become overused, harm the leader’s professional reputation, and derail their chances of success.
According to Erin Lazarus, Senior Director of Business Development at Hogan Assessments, when leaders are unaware of their derailing behaviors, they risk having a negative impact on their own careers, the success of their teams, and ultimately organizational outcomes.
They may fail to be present or communicate during crucial moments, miss essential feedback signaling the need for change, or experience analysis paralysis instead of taking action.
The implications of the dark side for organizations can be significant. According to Erin Lazarus, dark-side behaviors can lead to many negative outcomes: duplicated work, misalignment between tasks and goals, inability to pivot, and disengagement.
Early intervention helps people learn to mitigate their derailers before they affect team performance and financial results. But before these behaviors can be addressed, people need to know what their dark-side characteristics are.
Short definition — Analysis paralysis: Analysis paralysis refers to a situation in which a person delays action because they seek too much information, too much certainty, or too many guarantees before making a decision.
The HDS (Hogan Development Survey) is part of a set of three core Hogan Assessments personality inventories. Used together, these inventories provide a complete picture of strengths, potential derailers, and values.
The HDS differs from clinical assessments, such as those used to evaluate personality disorders. Instead, the HDS measures 11 behavioral tendencies associated with ineffective leadership.
It is based on the personality theory of psychoanalyst Karen Horney and on sources related to managerial failure.
Dark-side personality characteristics are not automatically negative. They are often advantageous, but they can become problematic when taken to extremes.
For example, highly conscientious behavior is generally beneficial. But it can turn into perfectionism, work obsession, or micromanagement.
Because the HDS describes performance risks at work, it can be used to predict leadership performance and guide development efforts.
Short definition — HDS (Hogan Development Survey): The HDS is the Hogan Assessments personality inventory that measures 11 derailers likely to emerge under stress, pressure, boredom, or reduced self-control, and that can affect leadership performance.
Dark-side personality characteristics fall into three major categories, based on how a person tends to react or respond to others when they stop self-regulating.
At Hogan Assessments, following Karen Horney, these categories are called:
Moving away from others
Moving against others
Moving toward others
People in this group tend to be alert to signs of criticism, rejection, betrayal, or hostility.
When they think they detect a threat, they respond by keeping their distance or pushing others away.
The stereotypical manager in this category keeps their office door closed.
In practice, these behaviors may protect the person from immediate relational discomfort, but they can also reduce trust, limit communication, and create distance from the team.
People in this category expect to be liked, admired, and respected.
They generally resist acknowledging their mistakes and often struggle to learn from experience. They tend to manage their anxiety by manipulating or controlling others, for example by yelling at team members.
In concrete business terms, these behaviors may create an impression of confidence or power in the short term. But over time, they can damage trust, weaken psychological safety, and reduce the team’s ability to speak candidly.
People in this group want to please authority figures.
In conflict situations, they tend to side with people in positions of authority rather than support their subordinates.
Imagine a manager who seeks to please their superior at the expense of their team members.
In practice, this type of derailer may promote alignment with the hierarchy, but it can also lead to avoiding difficult conversations, lacking managerial courage, or losing the team’s trust.
HDS_OverusedStrengths_Table
When overused, your greatest strength can become your greatest weakness.
This table illustrates the article’s central idea: a useful characteristic in one context can turn into counterproductive behavior when exaggerated, poorly adapted, or triggered under stress.
Personality is best defined from two perspectives:
Identity
Reputation
Identity is personality from the inside — how you see yourself. Reputation is personality from the outside — how others see you.
Unlike identity, which changes as our self-perception changes, reputation tends to remain stable over time.
Most people experience some gap between how they see themselves and how others see them. A significant gap between identity and reputation can lead leaders to miss feedback messages, deny their limitations, resist change, and block or derail their careers.
Short definition — Identity: Identity refers to the way a person sees themselves, their intentions, qualities, values, and inner self-image.
Short definition — Reputation: Reputation refers to how others actually perceive a person’s behaviors, impact, and reliability.
Strategic self-awareness enables leaders to recognize the need to adapt their behaviors in order to increase their effectiveness. In the context of leadership development, it refers to understanding opportunities for change and growth. It means knowing when a person is overusing their strengths.
According to Erin Lazarus, behavioral change is difficult. It requires intentionality, accountability, and measurement over time. The good news is that with strategic self-awareness and intentional effort, leaders can improve.
Short definition — Strategic self-awareness: Strategic self-awareness is the ability to understand one’s strengths, behavioral risks, reputation, and behavioral impact in order to adapt one’s leadership to the context.
An effective leader must continually adapt and improve at every stage of their career.
Setting development goals to help leaders manage their derailers is an essential part of an effective Talent Management strategy.
Erin Lazarus explains that the first step is to identify dark-side behaviors using accurate psychometric tools, such as Hogan personality inventories, and 360 reviews.
The data from these assessments should be presented to the leader and contextualized according to their role, objectives, and aspirations.
Then, in collaboration with a coach, the leader should create a personalized development plan targeting the relevant behaviors. Addressing derailers enables leaders to develop more effective interpersonal skills and improve their team’s performance.
According to Erin Lazarus, most organizations stop at this stage. But to help leaders achieve their long-term development goals, organizations should provide an accountability system based on coaching grounded in personality inventories, in order to facilitate true reputation change.
Without these personalized and individual efforts, most people lack the resources and capacity needed to change.
Short definition — 360 review: A 360 review gathers feedback from multiple sources, such as the manager, peers, direct reports, and sometimes internal or external clients, in order to understand a person’s real impact.
Short definition — Reputation change: Reputation change refers to the lasting evolution of how others perceive a leader’s behaviors.
So what can organizations do?
Building a Talent Management strategy that recognizes the dark side of personality helps organizations maximize leadership potential more effectively and provide appropriate developmental support.
The expression “what got you here won’t get you there” reminds leaders of the need to avoid exaggerating their strengths as they move up in the organization.
By identifying and mitigating leaders’ derailers early in their careers, organizations give them the means to adapt their behavioral approach.
Leaders can thus learn to preserve the greatest strength that helped them progress, without allowing it to become the greatest weakness that could cause them to fall.
Work on derailers is not about correcting a “defective” personality. It is about understanding how useful strengths can become excessive, then learning to use them with discernment.
For a leader, this means observing the situations in which their behaviors change: stress, boredom, pressure, conflict, fatigue, ambition, or overconfidence. It also means asking for feedback, comparing identity with reputation, and accepting that intention is not enough to guarantee impact.
For HR leaders and Talent Management professionals, the challenge is to integrate derailers into development pathways, high-potential programs, succession planning, executive coaching, and leadership decisions.
An organization that understands the dark side can prevent leadership failures before they become costly.
A leader’s greatest strengths can become their greatest weaknesses when they are overused. Autonomy can become distance. Charisma can become narcissism. Rigor can become micromanagement. Prudence can become paralysis. Loyalty can become complacency toward authority.
Hogan Assessments’ HDS (Hogan Development Survey) makes it possible to identify these risks by measuring the dark-side derailers of personality. Used with the other Hogan inventories, it gives leaders a more complete understanding of their strengths, vulnerabilities, and real impact on others.
For executives, HR leaders, and Talent Management professionals, this understanding is a strategic lever. It helps develop leaders who are more self-aware, more adaptable, and more capable of building functional teams.
Sustainable performance is not about eliminating strengths. It is about using them with precision. When leaders develop strategic self-awareness, they learn to recognize the moment when their greatest strength risks becoming their greatest weakness — and to choose a more effective behavior before their career, team, or organization pays the price.
