Nobody gets promoted for being difficult. They get promoted for being decisive, or exacting, or persuasive, or unwilling to let a bad number pass. Then the role gets larger, the pressure gets steadier, and the same quality that earned the promotion starts costing the company people.
The scale of this is larger than most boards assume. Reviewing twelve studies, Hogan, Hogan and Kaiser reported that the base rate of managerial failure runs from 30 percent to 67 percent, with a mean of 47 percent and a median of 50 percent, a finding summarized in a 2024 review of the derailment literature in Behavioral Sciences. Roughly half of people in management roles are judged ineffective by the people who work for them.
What derails them is consistent and unglamorous. When the Center for Creative Leadership re-ran its derailment interviews with senior executives in the 1990s, only two themes were named by more than half of the North American interviewees: an inability to develop or adapt, and poor working relationships. Not strategy. Not intelligence. If you are reading this because a capable executive is losing their team and you cannot name why, that finding is where to start.
Where the idea came from, and what it is not
Derailment research is older than most of the products built on it. Jon Bentz ran a thirty year study of failed managers at Sears, Roebuck and Company beginning in the 1960s. Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo then built the comparative study that named the field, published by the Center for Creative Leadership in 1983.
Their method was simple and it is why the findings held. They interviewed senior executives at three large industrial companies and collected forty case studies, twenty of executives who reached the top and twenty of executives who had been seen as likely to and did not. Then they compared the two groups.
The two groups looked almost identical early on. Both were bright, both were identified as promising, both had strong track records. The difference emerged with scale. As these executives moved up and the demands of the job changed, some early strengths turned into weaknesses, and some early weaknesses started to matter.
That is the whole idea, and it is worth separating from two things it is not. A derailer is not a clinical diagnosis. It is also not a fixed personality label to be pinned on someone in a talent review. It is a description of behavior that is usually an asset and becomes a liability under specific conditions.
How a strength turns into a liability
Three conditions do most of the work.
Pressure is the obvious one. Under strain, people stop monitoring how they come across and fall back on what has worked before, turned up louder. The decisive leader becomes unilateral. The careful one becomes unable to commit.
Scale is the one people miss. A behavior that works with six direct reports can be corrosive across six hundred employees. Personally reviewing every proposal is thoroughness in a startup and a bottleneck in a company of four thousand. Nothing about the person changed. The multiplier did.
Absence of correction is the one that makes it permanent. Senior leaders receive progressively less honest feedback the higher they go, which is precisely when the consequences of their behavior get larger. By the time someone tells a chief executive plainly that their temper is costing them their best operator, two good people have usually already gone.
Three directions the behavior moves
Hogan's framework, built on the Hogan Development Survey, sorts risk behavior into three directions of movement. The Hogan Development Survey covers 11 scales and 33 subscales describing qualities that emerge under increased strain. The three groupings are a useful way to read any leader, with or without the instrument.
Moving away from people
Withdrawal and distance. The Hogan scales in this group are Excitable, Skeptical, Cautious, Reserved and Leisurely. In practice it looks like a leader who goes quiet when a decision gets contentious, who assumes bad intent behind an ordinary email, or who becomes unreachable in exactly the week the team needs a call made. The team learns not to bring problems, and the leader concludes there are fewer problems.
Moving against people
Intimidation, charm and self-promotion. The scales here are Bold, Mischievous, Colorful and Imaginative. It looks like a leader who dominates the room, who treats rules as suggestions when the timeline is tight, who needs the meeting to be about them, or whose ideas arrive faster than they can be executed. These leaders are often the most impressive in an interview, which is exactly the problem.
Moving toward people
Conformity and deference. The scales are Diligent and Dutiful. It looks like a leader who cannot delegate because nobody meets the standard, or who will not disagree with their own boss in public and then privately tells their team they disagreed. Both read as loyalty and both stall decisions.
The six patterns that show up in bosses' ratings
A separate line of the same research, by Lombardo and McCauley in 1988, factor analyzed 355 bosses' ratings of managers and collapsed the original derailment themes into six. They remain a good checklist because they are written from the outside, as a manager would describe the problem.
- Problems with interpersonal relationships
- Difficulty in molding a staff
- Difficulty in making strategic transitions
- Lack of follow through
- Overdependence
- Strategic differences with management
Two of those deserve a note. Difficulty in molding a staff is often mistaken for high standards, and it is the single most reliable early indicator, because it shows up in turnover data before it shows up in anyone's opinion. Overdependence, on a single advocate or a single predecessor's playbook, becomes visible only when the sponsor leaves.
What this looks like in an ordinary week
Derailers rarely announce themselves. They show up as small operational facts that nobody connects.
Meetings that run long because one person reopens settled decisions. A second, informal decision-making group that forms to route around someone. Two competent people resigning within a quarter from the same team, both citing growth elsewhere. A skip-level conversation in which nobody offers anything negative, said with an odd carefulness. An executive whose peers have quietly stopped copying them on things.
Each of those has an innocent explanation. Three of them together, in the same team, do not.
What actually changes the behavior
The honest answer is that the underlying tendency does not change much. What changes is the leader's ability to see it coming and to interrupt it, which in practice produces the same result.
Three things need to be true. The leader has to accept the description, which is why feedback delivered as data about impact works better than feedback delivered as an opinion about character. They have to know their own trigger conditions specifically enough to anticipate them, not stress in the abstract but the particular board meeting, the particular peer, the last week of the quarter. And they need a mechanism of correction close to the behavior, usually a person with permission to say it in the moment.
Coaching is the common route because it supplies all three, and derailing behavior is the most frequent reason a chief executive picks up the phone. If you are weighing whether that is proportionate to the problem, our breakdown of executive coaching cost covers what the market actually charges.
Four things standing in the way, and two that are not
- Nobody will say it out loud. The behavior has been discussed for two years in corridors and never once to the person. This is the binding constraint in most cases, and no instrument solves it. Someone has to be willing to have the conversation and to survive it.
- The results are good. A leader who delivers has enormous latitude, and the organization tolerates the cost because it is paid by other people in the form of attrition and silence. The cost is real. It is just recorded somewhere other than the profit and loss.
- The trigger is structural, not personal. If a leader becomes unreasonable every quarter end because the forecasting process is broken, coaching them to manage their reaction treats the symptom. Fix the process first and see what remains.
- There is no mechanism for correction in the moment. Insight from a report fades. What holds is a colleague, a chief of staff or a coach with standing to interrupt the behavior while it is happening. Without that, month four looks exactly like month one.
Two things get raised constantly and matter less than people think. The first is whether personality can change. It largely does not, and it does not need to; leaders manage tendencies they cannot remove all the time. The second is whether you need a particular assessment instrument to begin. Useful instruments exist, and we compare two common ones in Hogan vs DISC, but exit interviews, turnover by manager and a candid hour with three peers will surface the pattern without buying anything.
The trade you are actually making
The choice is rarely between a difficult leader and a better one. It is between the output you get from this person as they are, and the compounding cost of what they do to the people around them.
That cost is measurable if you look. Regretted attrition on their team, time to fill their open roles, how long decisions sit, how many of their direct reports have been promoted elsewhere in the company in three years. Put those numbers next to what the person delivers and the trade becomes explicit rather than a matter of taste.
Sometimes the answer is that the trade is worth it for now, with a defined review date. Sometimes it is that you have been paying for years without counting. What you should not do is keep the decision implicit, because implicit is how an organization loses four good people to keep one.
Getting a clear, evidence-based read on how a senior leader operates under pressure is what leadership assessment is for, and it is more useful before the conversation than after it.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is a leadership derailer?
A derailer is a behavioral tendency that helps a leader at one stage and undermines them at another, typically surfacing under pressure, at greater scale, or when feedback dries up. It is usually an overused strength rather than a deficit. The original research found that derailed and successful executives shared most of the same qualities.
Are derailers the same as weaknesses?
No. A weakness is something a person cannot do. A derailer is something they do very well and keep doing when the situation has stopped rewarding it. That distinction matters because the fix is different: a weakness needs skill building, a derailer needs awareness of triggers and a way to interrupt the pattern.
Can a derailer be fixed?
The underlying disposition is stable, so the realistic goal is management rather than removal. Leaders who improve do so by recognizing their trigger conditions early, agreeing specific substitute behaviors, and keeping someone close enough to flag it in real time. That combination produces visible change within a few months.
How do you spot a derailer before it causes damage?
Look at operational evidence rather than opinion. Regretted attrition concentrated under one leader, decisions that keep reopening, peers routing around a person, and an unusually quiet skip-level conversation are all observable. Any one has an innocent explanation; three together in the same team rarely do.
Do you need an assessment to identify derailers?
An instrument makes the conversation faster and less personal, because the language comes from the report rather than from a colleague. It is not a prerequisite. Structured feedback from peers and direct reports, read alongside turnover data, will identify the same patterns for a fraction of the cost.
Why do high performers derail more visibly at senior levels?
Two reasons. The behavior now affects hundreds of people rather than a handful, so the same tendency produces a much larger effect. And senior leaders receive less candid feedback than anyone else in the organization, so the correction that would have arrived earlier in a career never comes.