I have been in the room when it becomes clear that a leader is struggling. Not the early stages, when the signs are ambiguous enough to explain away as a difficult transition period or an unusually demanding set of external circumstances. The point at which the pattern is undeniable, when the people around the leader have been watching it for months without quite knowing what to do about it, and when the leader themselves has begun to sense that something is wrong in ways they cannot fully articulate.
What is consistently striking about those conversations is that the failure mode is almost always something the leader was once celebrated for. The person who derailed for being impossible to work with was once described as someone who held the highest standards. The one who became dangerously isolated in their judgment was once praised for their ability to move quickly without getting bogged down in consensus-building that slowed everyone else down. The one who was eventually removed for an arrogance that had alienated the board was, a decade earlier, the most confidently decisive person in the room, the one everyone turned to when a direction was needed.
The quality did not change. The context changed. The quality did not adapt with it. And the developmental system around the leader, which had rewarded the quality without examining it, failed to create the conditions in which the leader could see what was happening before it compounded into a career-ending pattern.
Four decades of research on a preventable problem
Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo at the Center for Creative Leadership began studying executive derailment systematically in the early 1980s, and their conclusions have been consistently replicated across four decades of subsequent research in different industries, geographies, and organisational types. The dominant pattern is not weakness producing failure. It is strength overused, applied to contexts for which it was never suited, and, crucially, never examined honestly enough to recognise the problem before it compounds into something that cannot be quietly corrected.
This finding is more counterintuitive than it initially appears, because most organisations still design their talent management and development systems around the assumption that derailment is primarily caused by skill deficits. If a leader is failing, the instinct is to look for what they do not know or cannot do and to provide the relevant training, coaching, or exposure assignment. This instinct is not entirely wrong. There are cases where genuine skill gaps contribute significantly to performance difficulties at higher levels of complexity. But the research suggests these are considerably less common than the cases where the problem is a strength, operating without self-awareness or developmental examination, in a context where its shadow side has become more consequential than its benefit.
The specific derailment patterns that McCall and Lombardo identified have proved remarkably durable across four decades of replication. Problems with interpersonal relationships: the leader who is difficult to work with, who produces conflict and damage in team relationships, whose interpersonal style creates a trail of hurt and disengagement that the organisation eventually can no longer absorb. Difficulty in building and leading a team: the leader who is excellent individually but who struggles to create collective capability, who often does the work themselves rather than developing others’ capacity to do it. Difficulty in making the strategic transition: the leader who executes brilliantly within known parameters but struggles when the role requires generating new direction rather than implementing existing strategy. Difficulty in adapting to differences in style, culture, or context: the leader who was effective in one organisational or cultural environment and who brings those same methods to a context where they do not fit.
The strength-to-liability conversion mechanism
Understanding why strengths become liabilities requires examining the specific mechanism through which this conversion occurs. It is not simply that strengths are overused in a general sense, which is the most common framing of this observation. The mechanism is more specific than that.
Strengths become liabilities when they are no longer responses to the situation but automatic expressions of identity. The decisive leader who has built their professional identity around their decisiveness will be decisive regardless of whether the situation calls for it, because decisiveness is not, for them, a tool that gets deployed when appropriate. It is who they are. The analytical leader whose intellectual rigour has been the foundation of their credibility will apply that rigour to every problem, including the ones that are primarily relational or political, because the rigour is not a skill they choose. It is a reflex they enact.
This is the identity trap that makes derailment prevention so difficult. The leader cannot simply be told to use their strength less. The strength is not experienced as a choice. It is experienced as an expression of their most authentic self. Telling them to use it differently feels, to them, like being asked to be less themselves. The developmental work required to address this is not skills training. It is the much more demanding work of helping the leader develop a different relationship to their own identity, one in which their strengths are genuinely available as tools they can choose to deploy rather than as expressions of self that operate on autopilot regardless of what the situation requires.
The five most common precursors I observe
In facilitation and coaching work across many organisations and many senior leaders, I have learned to notice specific conversational and behavioural patterns that reliably precede more visible derailment. None of them is dramatic in isolation. Cumulatively, and especially in combination with a significant contextual shift, they are diagnostic.
The first is the consistent pattern of finishing others’ sentences. The leader who regularly completes what colleagues are saying before they have finished saying it is broadcasting something important: they are not primarily attending to what is actually being said. They are matching incoming information to a pre-existing model and responding to the model rather than the person. In a new or more complex context, this pattern produces systematic misreading of situations that the leader’s experience-based model cannot accommodate.
The second is the reflexive attribution of agreement. The leader who consistently interprets the absence of objection as consensus, who does not actively create conditions for honest dissent, who reads managed compliance as genuine alignment, has developed a systematic blind spot that becomes more dangerous as their positional authority increases. As they become more senior, the social pressure not to challenge them increases, the information that reaches them becomes more filtered, and the gap between their model of the organisation and the organisation’s actual state grows silently wider.
The third is the pattern of connecting every new idea back to something the leader has already done or already knows. The leader who consistently positions themselves as the prior authority on each new topic, who demonstrates their expertise by the speed with which they can relate the unfamiliar to their existing framework, has developed a relationship to learning that will become limiting in genuinely novel contexts. The capacity to be genuinely surprised, to encounter something that does not fit the existing framework and hold that encounter with curiosity rather than anxiety, is one of the most important capabilities available to a leader in a complex environment.
The fourth is the management of upward relationships with a distinctly different quality than the management of peer and team relationships. The leader who is warm, curious, and genuinely engaged in one-to-one peer conversations but who becomes careful, managed, and politically calculated in the presence of those with power over their career, has a split that the organisation will eventually pay for. These leaders often have excellent reputations with their own teams while being experienced by more senior stakeholders as insufficiently honest or strategically self-serving.
The fifth is the progressive narrowing of the inner circle. As leaders become more senior, the natural tendency is to rely increasingly on a small group of trusted advisors who understand their style and with whom they feel psychologically safe. When this inner circle becomes too small, too homogeneous, and too protective, it progressively insulates the leader from the honest input they most need. The inner circle that was a source of strength in one context becomes, in a larger and more complex role, a filter that prevents the leader from receiving the information that would allow them to adapt.
What actually changes the trajectory
The intervention that makes a genuine difference in derailment prevention is almost always earlier than organisations typically attempt it, and it almost always requires creating the conditions for honest feedback from people who know the leader well enough to name what they actually observe. This is harder than it sounds, because the people closest to the leader are also the people with the most to lose from honest feedback and the most social pressure to provide managed input rather than genuine assessment.
The structured stakeholder interview process that forms the foundation of well-designed coaching engagements is valuable here not primarily because of the data it produces but because of what the process itself communicates to the leader: that the people around them have been attending carefully to the gap between the leader’s self-understanding and their actual impact, and that this gap is significant enough to be the subject of a structured developmental conversation. The leader who can hear that message with genuine curiosity rather than defensive explanation, who can sit with the specific discomfort of discovering that their most celebrated qualities are producing effects they have not been seeing, has made the most important developmental move available to them.
The organisations that manage derailment most effectively are those that make this kind of honest developmental conversation a normal feature of high-potential leadership, rather than a crisis response to visible performance problems. By the time derailment is visible to the organisation, it has usually been visible to the people around the leader for some time. The intervention that prevents the crisis is the one that names the pattern while it is still a pattern, rather than waiting for it to become a problem. That intervention requires developmental courage from the organisation as much as from the individual leader.
Derailment is rarely a sudden event. It is a slow accumulation of small behavioural patterns that, unchallenged and unseen, eventually produce a crisis that could have been prevented with earlier, more honest developmental attention.