Leadership Derailer Traits

Derailers knock you off track to success.

A derailer to your health and fitness goals could be eating too much junk food, staying up late partying, or outright skipping your physical exercise sessions.

In business this could simply be a lack of sound contracting and accounting practices, missing sales opportunities because a product wasn't ready, or pursuing too many options rather than focused excellence in a niche area.

We see derailers commonly displayed in leadership roles manifesting as micromanagement, analysis paralysis, or attempts to be everything for everyone.

The variety of derailers are as vast as the types of situations and roles we occupy, but generally we can boil down the root cause of these negative and most often unintended outcomes, to the five most common leadership derailer traits.

First, we have to acknowledge that every single person has all of these characteristics but they are activated and manifested to varying degrees since every person and situation is different. Second, it's important to recognize that the derailers are internal automatic reactions - they stem from how we think, feel, and behave regarding the myriad of factors in a given situation. And third, mitigating the negative impact of our derailers takes concerted effort.

The Five Most Common Leadership Derailer Traits:

1. JUDGEMENT: By far the primary and most intertwined derailer attribute is how we judge others, circumstances, and ourselves. This prevailing characteristic is the most ingrained into our personal beliefs which sets the tone for the other derailer traits and how we react.

2. CONTROLLING: That urge to make things be a particular way - how they "should be" or how they "must be." Impatience, perfection, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, resentment, arrogance, demands, stickler, and compliance are all relevant themes of this derailer.

3. AVOIDANCE: This derailer is not about being shy or introverted, but a tendency to avoid things that are hard to handle and unpleasant, including responsibility and ownership for poor behavior of ourselves and others or deadlines and decisions. Fake it till you make it, dusting things under the rug, and not taking risks, all play a part as well.

4. RESTLESSNESS: An amplified version of our classic overachiever and shiny-object-syndrome, where good enough is never good enough. Beyond multi-tasking, this derailer is a constant pursuit of something different or more, in order to obtain the just out-of-reach happiness and success.

5. PLEASING: Taking on extensive commitments over personal well-being and boundaries. This well-intended derailer is centered around accommodation and agreeableness, which prioritizes the opinions, time, and needs of others.

Any form of these sound familiar for yourself? The first step in mitigation of our derailers is to simply recognize and label the characteristics as we notice them arise. When we're aware, we are better positioned to respond more effectively. Consider where an aspect of your life might seem a bit harder than it needs to be - that’s probably an area where you may have a derailer taking you off track to your success…