CEOs as well as leaders are vulnerable to 11 derailers written by David L. Dotlich, Peter C. Cairo in their book called ‘Why CEOs fail?. Derailers are deeply embedded personality traits that affect their leadership style and actions. These traits are hardwired into you, therefore, it is difficult to step back and realize what is at time when strength has become a leadership derailer. When you reach senior leadership levels, however, even small distortions can have an impact on your career and the decisions you make.
Here are the 11 derailers:
- Arrogance – you are right and everybody else is wrong
- Melodrama – you always grab the center of attention
- Volatility – your mood swings drive business swings
- Excessive caution – your decision making takes way too long
- Habitual distrust – you focus on the negatives
- Aloofness – you are disengaged and disconnected
- Mischievousness – rules are made to be broken
- Eccentricity – it’s fun to be different just for the sake of it
- Passive resistance – your silence is misinterpreted as agreement
- Perfectionism – get the little things right, even if the big things go wrong
- Eagerness to please – winning the popularity contest matters most
It is important to know that these derailers surface most commonly under stress, but what is stressful for one person isn’t stressful for another. The key is figuring out what kind of stress you are vulnerable to and what triggers your derailers. Sometime it takes years for leaders to encounter situations or people that catalyse their derailers. Until then they may come across or viewed favourable and even attractive. Also some derailers are both strengths and weaknesses.
For example until arrogance leads to derailment a leader may be seen as extremely self-confident. One of the toughest balancing acts in the leadership business is between confidence and too much confidence. There is a fine line to cross here as well as with all the derailers. Arrogance, from an organizational leadership perspective, is a kind of blinding belief in your own opinions. As a result you can easily stop reading social cues. You stop noticing when your team sat quietly. Slowly but surely you lose trust and respect among the peers. Because you become so convinced of the rightness of your perspective that you turn others off. You stop learning; however, a leader who cannot learn and adjust is someone who is bound to fail in today’s world. Arrogant leader reconfigures the data to fit his strongly held views. Arrogance discourages people to give this type of leader information. This type of leader is resistant to change, although he wants others to change, but cannot see himself as part of it.
As an Executive Coach I must say don’t be reluctant to take a walk on the dark side while looking into the mirror. However nowadays this dark side is often considered taboo. We live in a celebrity culture where leaders seem to be expected to be perfect. Awareness of your derailers makes you stronger. During the Transformational Leadership executive coaching you explore your own limitation, your blind spots and derailers in order to raise your self-awareness to make you stronger in the whirlpool of triggers and impulses of today business environment.