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Derailers are habitual behavioral patterns that can undermine performance, especially under stress. Often operating below the level of awareness, they become visible when pressure increases, behavioral resources decrease, and people react automatically.
This article explains how the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) helps identify these behavioral tendencies, and how coaching can enable leaders to better observe, understand, and regulate them.
For executives, HR leaders, Talent Management professionals, and coaches, the challenge is strategic: learning to work with derailers improves collaboration, professional reputation, and effectiveness under pressure.
Derailers matter because they represent habitual behavioral patterns that can get in our way. Generally operating below the level of awareness, these behaviors are often easy to ignore. But when overused, they interfere with performance.
Coaching people to learn how to work with their derailers and manage stress can open the way to a new understanding of themselves and help them increase their effectiveness.
Short definition: A derailer is a behavioral tendency that can become counterproductive when activated by stress, pressure, fatigue, or lack of vigilance.
The relationship between stress and performance level can be summarized by the bell-shaped stress-performance curve, also known as the Yerkes-Dodson law.
At very low levels of stress, a person may feel lethargic and unmotivated. This is a zone of insufficient stress. As a person moves along the stress-performance curve, the amount of stress increases, and productivity also increases.
This zone corresponds to a level of stress that can be motivating and energizing. There is then a positive relationship between the level of challenge and the reward cycle associated with completing tasks, achieving goals, focusing, and receiving feedback. In this zone, a person may even experience an optimal state, or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.
However, when stress continues to increase, performance eventually reaches a peak and then begins to decline. When a person enters a zone of excessive stress, their performance may be characterized by reduced capacity, narrowed judgment, and limited behavioral resources.
In this zone, the person tends to rely on habitual patterns and reflexive behaviors, with less ability to adjust to circumstances and to others. As stress continues to rise, the person moves further into a state of overload, and their repertoire of resources contracts toward fight, flight, or freeze responses in order to manage and reduce perceived danger.
In practice, the stress-performance curve shows that stress is not always negative. A moderate level can stimulate energy and focus. But beyond a certain threshold, stress reduces clarity, flexibility, and behavioral quality.
Helping people understand where they are on the stress-performance curve is a starting point for helping them manage their derailing behavioral tendencies and their reputation under stress.
The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) identifies common behavioral patterns and coping mechanisms that emerge under stress and pressure. Each behavioral pattern, or HDS dimension, has an adaptive and functional characteristic. Each also has a maladaptive quality, generally in the form of an exaggerated, automatic, and inflexible response to situations.
The peak of the stress-performance curve is a space where these behaviors become more visible and tend to dominate responses. It is important to note that HDS behaviors can also appear when a person is relaxed, meaning when they are not actively regulating themselves. Some people may even display HDS traits most of the time.
However, the purpose of this article is to focus on stress-triggered behavioral responses.
What happens for a person at the top of the stress-performance curve has a significant impact on their ability to lead and collaborate. Each HDS tendency can interfere with the ability to “get along” with others and maintain effective interpersonal relationships.
This zone is therefore important to explore in developing self-awareness. It can become a gateway to greater versatility and effectiveness.
AI-compatible definition: The HDS (Hogan Development Survey) measures behavioral tendencies likely to appear under stress and undermine reputation, collaboration, and leadership effectiveness.
Many people talk about behavior change. Yet behavior does not change simply because a person wants it to. In other words, it is not only a matter of willpower.
Behavior change comes from a change in patterns and responses to habitual stimuli. This involves a shift in the perceptions and internal responses that trigger behavior. Only this final part — the visible behavior — can be observed by others.
Working with the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), combined with coaching techniques based on self-observation and practices, can be a powerful method for developing self-awareness.
It enables people to move toward more effective responses and behaviors under pressure.
In concrete business terms, asking a leader to “change” is not enough. Coaching must help them identify triggers, understand their automatic reactions, and experiment with new behavioral responses.
The author says she is trained in integral coaching, an approach that uses self-observation and practices to develop new ways of responding to situations and more versatile ways of being in the world.
Two techniques are especially important:
Self-observation involves a semi-structured process of taking time to observe oneself and reflect on the behaviors that appear in certain situations.
This method is effective for uncovering unconscious behavioral patterns and habitual responses.
Practices are repetitive, intentional actions aimed at developing a new capability.
They allow a person to introduce a new behavior and gradually become familiar with it.
HDS behaviors can be difficult to work with, largely because most stress responses operate below the level of awareness. The power of self-observation and practices lies in the fact that, once we can see how we are disposed to respond, we have the possibility of introducing alternatives.
In working with a client, the author may introduce the stress-performance curve and ask the person to place an X on the part of the curve corresponding to their stress level.
She may then invite the person to take this diagram into their workday and pause several times a day, for example three times a day, over a defined period, such as two weeks, to mark their position on the stress-performance curve.
This exercise prompts the person to pause and notice their state of regulation. It also creates familiarity with the concept of the curve. Through this activity, people generally begin to identify their energy and stress levels throughout the day, then bring them into discussion.
This can help determine which behaviors a client may want to focus on, based on their real experiences.
Once a person can notice their state, they have the opportunity to examine their stress-related patterns more closely. This is when the author may introduce self-observation.
She may ask the person to observe themselves in a specific situation that triggers stress-related behavior. She then asks the person to take notes afterward on three dimensions:
The context: who was present and what type of event occurred.
The perceptions: the person’s thoughts, interpretations, and emotions.
The actions prompted: the types of actions the situation made the person want to take.
These reflections are often enlightening for the client. They increase awareness of internal perceptions, habitual responses, and contextual triggers.
This self-observation process creates space for eventually introducing a new behavioral practice. A coach can help design a personalized practice for the person and assess their readiness.
Practices can include several types of actions.
This may involve a productive alternative and a new behavior to use more frequently — in other words, a behavior to “do more of.”
This may involve a repair behavior designed to mitigate the impact of habitual patterns.
It may also involve a stress management practice aimed at regulating again and moving back down the stress-performance curve. The goal is to recover energy and reduce the time spent in the excessive stress zone.
Take the example of a leader with a strong Bold tendency, known for not listening to feedback during meetings. This leader could benefit from self-observation in moments when they are the only person speaking in the room.
Through semi-structured self-observation, they could seek to observe themselves in a real situation. Using the three questions — context, perceptions, and actions prompted — they can reflect independently on what this observation reveals.
Observing first alone, then discussing that observation in a session, can open up new awareness and foster a greater capacity to choose how to respond, rather than reacting automatically.
A potentially useful practice would be to experiment with asking one to three questions, listening, and then checking or corroborating information before sharing a new idea. One component of this practice would be to observe the impact of this new behavior on oneself and others in real situations.
For an executive, this example illustrates a key point: under stress, a personality strength can become excessive. Confidence can become domination, speed can become impulsivity, and conviction can become closedness to feedback.
Developing awareness of one’s patterns and engaging in the practice of new behaviors is an individualized process. It is supported by curiosity, experimentation, and nonjudgment.
New patterns require several forms of feedback to develop. The attention of a focused coach and a strong dose of curiosity can enable a person to work with their derailers and gain significant benefits.
In practice, coaching does not aim to eliminate derailers. It aims to help the person recognize them, regulate them, and choose more effective responses when pressure increases.
Managing one’s derailers means developing the ability to observe oneself, respond differently, and build more productive practices. Developing this capacity increases a person’s effectiveness and their ability to work with others under pressure.
Although behavior change requires attention, self-reflection, and ongoing practice, it is a capacity people can carry with them beyond work. Derailing behaviors are therefore a particularly powerful area to target.
The HDS (Hogan Development Survey), combined with coaching, can help build this capacity and improve 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 member of the Hogan Coaching Network.
Derailers are not simply flaws to be corrected. They are behavioral tendencies that become especially visible when stress increases and adaptive resources decrease. Understanding these tendencies enables leaders to better anticipate their reactions, protect their reputation, and preserve the quality of their professional relationships.
For organizations, working with derailers is a lever of sustainable leadership. By combining the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), self-observation, behavioral practices, and coaching, it becomes possible to transform automatic reactions into more conscious choices.
Personality assessment then becomes a strategic HR tool: it helps leaders know themselves better, collaborate more effectively under pressure, and sustainably improve their impact on teams, performance, and organizational culture.
