Career Derailer Profile
Primary Style:
Volatility leading: reacts strongly under pressure. Teams tread carefully; honest feedback stops.
Emotional reactivity and inconsistency under pressure
Scepticism, cynicism, and difficulty building trust
Overconfidence and resistance to feedback
Conflict avoidance and indecisiveness under pressure
Excessive control and inability to delegate
Impossibly high standards that paralyse progress
A detailed read of each dimension at your score band, with what's likely a strength, what to watch, and where to invest.
Reacts strongly under pressure. Teams tread carefully; career ceiling lowers.
From the research: Emotional volatility is a top predictor of executive derailment (CCL longitudinal research).
Extends trust with normal calibration.
From the research: Trust-related derailers predict team dysfunction (Hogan).
Balances confidence and humility.
From the research: Bold/arrogant pattern predicts derailment, especially with low self-awareness (Hogan).
Handles normal conflict; avoids complex ones.
From the research: Conflict avoidance common in consensus cultures; predicts delayed decisions and team dysfunction.
Delegates most work; tightens under stress.
From the research: Perfectionism plus low trust predicts micromanagement (Hogan).
Standards appropriate for stakes.
From the research: Perfectionism derails when it prevents shipping (Stoeber & Otto, 2006).
No low-scoring dimensions — nothing stands out as a growth area from this assessment.
Six patterns that most commonly stall otherwise-capable careers, mapped to your responses. Colour-coded by risk band: red where the pattern is likely visible to colleagues and costly, amber where it leaks under compound stress, green where it's not a current threat. Draws on McCall & Lombardo's foundational CCL research (1983) and Hogan's Development Survey.
Volatility
high risk
Emotional reactivity under pressure is likely to be visible to colleagues and costly when it lands.
Distrust
moderate risk
You're appropriately cautious; watch the edge where caution tips into cynicism.
Arrogance
moderate risk
You hold your views firmly; watch for moments where conviction tips into dismissiveness.
Avoidance
moderate risk
You handle most friction directly; the hardest conversations are where avoidance shows up.
Micromanagement
moderate risk
You delegate on the familiar and hold the reins on the unfamiliar — watch the second category.
Perfectionism
moderate risk
Your quality bar serves you on most work; on low-leverage tasks it becomes expensive.
The top derailers in your profile, with what the pattern is, how it tends to show up, and what it's likely costing you. These are working-life risks, not personality flaws — the goal is awareness precise enough to act on.
Volatility describes emotional reactivity and inconsistency under pressure — the derailer McCall and Lombardo (1983) found most often in technically brilliant leaders whose moods dictated the team weather.
Under stress you can swing between engaged and withdrawn, warm and sharp, without the people around you knowing which version will show up. The reactions are honest; the unpredictability is the cost.
Colleagues adapt by managing you rather than working with you. Information flows narrow — people bring you less news because they can't predict the reception. The derailer is not the feeling, it's the consistency.
Distrust is an over-active scepticism about others' motives. In the Hogan framework it's the 'Sceptical' pattern — useful in small doses, corrosive in large ones. McCall & Lombardo flagged it as the derailer that most damages cross-functional work.
You read simple oversights as political moves; you hold information close in case it's used against you; you stay a step removed from new relationships until you've tested them.
Collaboration runs slower because every exchange is read for subtext. Information sharing becomes asymmetric — you receive more than you give. High-trust cultures around you feel friction you don't.
Arrogance is confidence without the mechanism to update — a closed loop where feedback that contradicts self-image is reinterpreted rather than integrated. Hogan (1997) lists 'Bold' and 'Colorful' as the dark-side faces of this pattern.
You dismiss input that doesn't match your read of the situation; you speak first and longest; you over-weight your own prior experience when advising others.
Good ideas from quieter colleagues get overwritten. Course-correction is late because early warning signs are filtered out. Over time the team stops surfacing the data that would help you most.
One strategy per flagged risk, with a short checklist of actions you can start this week. The research on derailment (McCall & Lombardo 1983; Sessa 1997) consistently finds that structural mechanisms outperform willpower — put the scaffolding in, not just the intent.
Decouple the reaction from the response. Your feelings can be accurate signals without needing to be next week's workplace weather.
Test the benign interpretation first. You'll still be sceptical of the real bad actors, and cheaper about the rest.
Install feedback mechanisms you can't filter. Put structure where willpower won't hold.
Derailer assessments trace to Hogan's Development Survey (HDS) and McCall & Lombardo's (1983) work at the Center for Creative Leadership. The core insight: derailers are strengths taken too far or deployed wrong. Under pressure, your defaults can become career-limiting.
Derailer effects compound with seniority — a behaviour neutral at IC level can be career-ending at VP level. Self-awareness is the strongest protective factor (Eichinger & Lombardo, 2004).