Why do certain behaviours become harder to manage as pressure rises? And how can coaching help leaders and talent turn these automatic reactions into levers for development?
Derailers are habitual behavioural patterns that can limit our effectiveness, particularly under stress. Often sitting outside our immediate awareness, they can seem harmless as long as pressure stays moderate. But once they take up too much room, they shape the quality of decisions, interpersonal relationships and, more broadly, leadership potential.
Drawing on the stress-performance curve, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) and coaching practices built on self-observation, this article shows how to build a better awareness of your reactions under pressure, widen your behavioural repertoire and strengthen your effectiveness lastingly.
For executives, HR directors and talent management professionals, this approach offers a particularly useful perspective: personality assessment is not only about identifying behavioural tendencies. It can become the starting point for genuine work on skills development, coaching and support.
Derailers matter because they are habitual behavioural patterns liable to get in our way.
Since they generally operate below the threshold of awareness, these behaviours are often easy to overlook. Overused, though, they can harm performance.
Helping someone, through coaching, to understand their derailers and manage their stress better can open the way to a new understanding of themselves and let them become more effective.
The relationship between stress level and performance level can be represented by a bell curve known as the stress-performance curve, also called the Yerkes-Dodson law.
At a very low level of stress, a person can feel lethargic and unmotivated. They are then in a zone where stress is insufficient.
As they move along the stress-performance curve, stress rises, but productivity rises too. This is a zone where stress can be stimulating and energising.
A positive relationship then sets in between the level of challenge and the reward cycle attached to moving forward, completing tasks, concentrating and receiving feedback.
In this zone, a person may even reach a state of optimal experience, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.¹
As stress keeps rising, however, performance eventually peaks and then starts to decline.
Once a person enters a zone of excessive stress, their capacities can narrow, their judgement tighten and their behavioural resources become more limited.
In this zone, they tend to lean more on habitual patterns and reflex behaviours, with less capacity to take account of context and of other people.
As stress rises further still, the person may gradually feel overwhelmed. Their range of available responses then narrows to fight, flight or freeze, aimed at handling what is perceived as danger and limiting its consequences.
Where does this person sit on the stress-performance curve? Answering that is the first step towards managing their derailing tendencies, and the reputation they can build under pressure, more effectively.
The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) brings out common behavioural patterns along with coping mechanisms liable to surface under stress and pressure.
Each behavioural pattern, or HDS dimension, has an adaptive, functional side. But each also has a less well-suited facet, which generally corresponds to an exaggerated response or an automatic, rigid reaction to certain situations.
The top of the stress-performance curve is precisely a zone in which these behaviours become more visible and tend to dominate a person's responses.
It is worth noting that HDS behaviours can also appear when a person is relaxed, particularly when they are not especially trying to regulate their behaviour. In some people, certain HDS characteristics may be present a good deal of the time.
This article focuses, however, on behavioural responses triggered by stress.
What plays out at the top of the curve significantly shapes a person's capacity to lead and to collaborate.
Each HDS tendency can, in its own way, get in the way of functioning well with others and of maintaining effective interpersonal relationships.
This zone therefore deserves particular attention. Building a better awareness of what plays out there can become a doorway to more behavioural flexibility and more effectiveness.
Behaviour change gets talked about a great deal. Yet behaviour does not change simply because a person wants it to.
It is not, in other words, purely a matter of will.
Behaviour change grows out of a gradual transformation of the patterns and responses attached to habitual stimuli.
That means a shift in perceptions and in the internal reactions that then determine behaviour. And only the latter is directly observable by others.
Pairing the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) with coaching techniques built on self-observation and practice can be a particularly powerful method for building self-awareness.
The approach gradually allows more effective responses and behaviours as pressure rises.
The author of this article trained in Integral Coaching, where self-observation and a set of practices serve to develop new ways of responding to situations and to widen the range of ways of being and acting.
The two techniques can be described as follows:
Self-observation is particularly effective for identifying unconscious behavioural patterns and habitual responses.
Practices then introduce a new behaviour and gradually build greater familiarity with it.
HDS behaviours can be hard to work on, largely because most stress reactions happen below the threshold of awareness.
The whole power of self-observation and practice lies in the fact that, once we manage to see how we tend to react, we can start to consider other options.
Within an engagement, the coach can begin by presenting the stress-performance curve and asking the person to put a cross on the part of the curve matching their stress level at that moment.
They can then suggest using this diagram over the working day and pausing several times, three times a day for instance, over a set period such as two weeks, in order to place themselves on the stress-performance curve.
The exercise leads the person to interrupt their activity momentarily in order to observe their state of regulation.
It also builds a gradual familiarity with the idea of the curve.
Through this work, participants generally become better at identifying their energy and stress levels across the day, then at using those observations as material for reflection in coaching sessions.
That can help determine which behaviours a person would do best to work on first, starting from situations they have actually lived through.
Once someone can recognise their state, they can start examining the behavioural patterns associated with stress more precisely.
This is the moment at which the coach can introduce self-observation.
They might, for instance, ask the person to observe themselves in a specific situation liable to trigger a stress behaviour.
Afterwards, they are invited to take notes across three dimensions:
These reflections are often highly illuminating for the person being supported. They deepen their understanding of their internal perceptions, their habitual responses and the triggers tied to context.
This process of self-observation also creates a space in which a new behavioural practice becomes possible to introduce.
The coach can then help the person design a tailored practice, while gauging their readiness for change.
Practices can take the following forms, among others:
Take the example of a leader with a strong Bold tendency, known for finding it hard to listen to feedback during meetings.
They could benefit from a self-observation exercise on noticing that they are the only person in the room speaking.
Through semi-structured self-observation, they could look for a real situation in which this behaviour appears.
Drawing on the three dimensions above, context, perceptions and actions, they can then reflect independently on what the observation teaches them.
Starting by observing alone what happens, then discussing it in a coaching session, can bring a new awareness to the surface and encourage more freedom in how to respond, rather than simply react.
One potentially useful practice might be to try the following behaviour: ask between one and three questions, listen to the answers and check your understanding before sharing a new idea.
An essential component of this practice is also observing, in real time, the impact of the new behaviour on yourself and on others.
Building awareness of your own patterns and then starting to try new behaviours is a deeply individual process.
The journey is helped along by curiosity, experimentation and an absence of judgement.
Establishing new patterns also calls for several forms of feedback.
The attention of a coach fully engaged in the work, combined with a healthy dose of curiosity, can help a person work effectively on their derailers and generate significant benefits.
Within talent management and the development of leadership potential, this work is particularly valuable: it connects personality assessment, the concrete situations lived day to day, and actual behaviour change.
Managing your derailers means building the capacity to observe yourself, to react differently and to establish more productive practices.
Strengthening that capacity improves both individual effectiveness and the ability to work with others under pressure.
While behaviour change demands attention, introspection and continuous practice, the skills developed can also be put to use well beyond working life.
Derailing behaviours are, on that count, a particularly powerful area for development.
Used in combination with coaching, the Hogan Development Survey can help build this capacity and improve performance.
Understanding your derailers is not about trying to make them disappear. The point is rather to learn to recognise the situations in which certain tendencies risk becoming excessive, then to develop better-suited responses.
This is precisely where the combination of personality assessment, coaching and skills development shows its worth.
For organisations, building this kind of work into a talent management, assessment and development, or leadership development strategy means going beyond self-knowledge alone. It creates the conditions for concrete behavioural change, capable of improving collaboration, collective performance and the quality of management.
In time, the capacity of leaders and teams to regulate themselves better under pressure is also an essential lever for sustainable leadership, for team transformation and for long-term organisational performance.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial, New York.
This article was written by Rebecca Ghanadan, PhD, founder of Aspis Coaching Group and a member of the Hogan Coaching Network.
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: Working with Derailers: Coaching Insights at the Top of the Stress-performance Curve
