Personality psychologist Robert Hogan had an insight every leader must grapple with. Poor leadership is not about lacking some essential quality, but rather it is the excess of an undesirable one.
Leaders are derailed by their profound weaknesses more than by missing strengths. These counterproductive weaknesses loom even larger in times of stress and complacency. In Hogan’s view, understanding those personality traits that derail a leader can enable them to work at making them minor weaknesses rather than potentially career-limiting qualities.
Derailers accentuate a feature of a leader’s personality to such a degree as to make it an extreme liability. Take Excitability, as an example. High-energy and passionate leaders are typically great advocates for what they believe. They excite people and often lead the charge by sharing their enthusiasm for the biggest and smallest assignments.
While their excitability can inspire and motivate others to action, if taken to an extreme, it can derail a leader’s ability to be taken seriously. Excitability can easily overwhelm people and leave them shaking their heads when a leader brings energy to a problem or issue that deserves deliberate thought.
An extremely excitable leader often engages in inconsistent or erratic behavior when they allow their enthusiasm to shift their thinking and commitment too quickly. Like many other personality traits, Excitability can be a friend or a foe for a leader.
In their most recent work, Hogan and his colleagues have identified 10 other common derailers for leaders, including skepticism, cautiousness, mischievousness, colorfulness, diligence, and imagination. Even being overly imaginative can create serious negative consequences for a leader who can’t moderate their influence.
Hogan’s list is not exhaustive. We could easily add arrogance, close-mindedness, perfectionism, impulsiveness, passive-aggressiveness, and dominance, among many others. Nearly any predisposition or personality trait when taken to extreme can derail the long-term success of a leader.
When left unchecked, personality derailers hijack how leaders think, act, and respond. The key is to not deny that you have one or more derailers. We all do. Knowing your derailers allows you to become more conscious of them and to find avenues to offset them, curtail them, moderate them, or tether them.
Remember, a leadership derailer is never just a weakness. It is simply a personality extreme that requires improvement for any leader to realize their full potential.
In the event your derailers are unknown to you, the internet is stacked full of derailer assessments many of which can be taken at no cost. Find one you like and see what you learn. Then, get to work minimizing the effect the derailers might have on your success.
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