How do I make sure the strength that got me promoted doesn’t become the thing that trips me up?

The skill that got you promoted can be one of the more likely things to eventually derail you. Derailment researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership found that one of the things most likely to trip up a successful leader usually isn’t a weakness at all. It’s a strength, deployed exactly the way it always has been, in a role or a context that no longer rewards it.

Nobody promotes someone for a strength and expects it to become a liability. But strengths don’t stay fixed in their effect just because you’ve kept using them the same way. What changes is the context around them, and if you’re not watching for that shift, the strength keeps running long after it’s stopped serving you.

What this actually buys you as a leader of yourself

Most leadership development effort goes into building new capability, closing gaps, adding skills you don’t yet have. Almost none of it goes into watching the capability you already rely on most heavily, the one nobody’s suggesting you need to work on because it’s the reason you’re in the room in the first place. That’s precisely the blind spot this article is about.

Catching a strength before it tips into overuse isn’t about becoming less decisive, less driven, or less detail-oriented. It’s about noticing when the dose that used to be exactly right has quietly become too much for the context you’re now in, and adjusting before someone else has to point it out, or before it costs you the role the strength originally earned you.

Why it matters

Leadership derailment has a fairly consistent shape. When researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership sat down with executives who’d derailed after real, early success, the cause was rarely a lack of skill or a hidden weakness. Far more often it was overreliance on the very strengths that had driven their earlier success, deployed without adjustment once the role, the team, or the stakes had changed around them (McCall and Lombardo, 1983).

That overreliance has a name now, the “too much of a good thing” problem. A strength’s relationship to its own effectiveness isn’t a straight line where more is always better, it’s curvilinear. Too little of a trait genuinely is a weakness, but past a certain point, more of it stops adding value and starts costing you, decisiveness curdles into impulsiveness, thoroughness into an inability to finish, confidence into a refusal to hear disagreement. The strength itself hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how much of it the situation can actually absorb (Kaplan and Kaiser, 2009).

That also explains why it tends to show up specifically under pressure rather than all the time. The traits most likely to derail a leader are usually exaggerated versions of otherwise ordinary tendencies; confidence in a calm meeting can look like arrogance in a high-stakes one, not because the trait itself changed but because pressure amplifies it (Hogan and Hogan, 2001). It’s common enough to have its own entry in the research: overdependence on existing strengths is one of six specific derailment clusters later identified in the data, sitting alongside more familiar problems like difficulty building a team (Lombardo and McCauley, 1988).

It’s worth spelling out how this connects back to self-awareness, since that’s the thread this whole series of “leading yourself” has been following so far. High-performing managers, it turns out, are distinguished less by an absence of weaknesses than by how closely their own view of themselves matches how others actually see them (Church, 1997). An overused strength is exactly where that gap tends to open. You’re still experiencing it as the thing that’s always worked, while the people around you have quietly started experiencing it as a cost. The strength hasn’t changed. Your read on its current effect has just fallen behind.

How a strength flips into a derailer

Notice that nothing in the middle column is the opposite of the strength in the first column. Reckless isn’t the opposite of decisive, it’s decisive with nothing left to check it. That’s the core of the overuse problem: the fix is essentially never “stop being this,” it’s “notice when this needs a counterweight it currently doesn’t have.”

Five practices for catching a strength before it trips you up

Exercise 1: The highest rating review

Overview: Standard 360 feedback tools are built to catch weaknesses, so they systematically miss overuse; it hides in your highest ratings, not your lowest. Kaplan and Kaiser also point to a sharper self-test: the trait you privately feel superior to other leaders on is usually the exact one being overdone (Kaplan and Kaiser, 2009).

Steps:

1. Pull your most recent 360 report or any informal feedback you’ve collected.
2. Find the items rated highest, not lowest, that’s where overuse actually hides.
3. For each of the highest rated items, ask plainly, “is this too much of a good thing.”
4. Separately, ask yourself honestly whether you privately feel superior to other leaders on any one trait. That discomfort is usually a signal, not a fact to dismiss.
5. Pick the strongest candidate from either method as the one to actually work on.

Variations: Without a formal 360, ask two or three people who work with you regularly what they’d rate you highest on, then run the same “is this too much” question against their answers.

Why it matters: This is the actual diagnostic the research points to, not a generic self-rating exercise, and it works precisely because it looks exactly where standard feedback tools don’t.

Exercise 2: The pressure trigger map

Overview: Hogan and Hogan’s research found derailing traits surface specifically under pressure, not evenly across every situation. Knowing your specific triggers means you can watch for overuse precisely when it’s most likely to appear, rather than trying to monitor yourself equally at all times (Hogan and Hogan, 2001).

Steps:

1. Think back to the last two or three times your signature strength clearly tipped into overuse.
2. For each, note what kind of pressure was present, time pressure, high stakes, public visibility, personal criticism.
3. Look for a repeated trigger across the instances, rather than treating each as unrelated.
4. Name the specific situations coming up in the next month where that same trigger is likely to be present.
5. Decide, in advance, what you’ll watch for in yourself when you’re in one of them.

Variations: If you can’t immediately recall clear instances, ask the same people who gave you feedback in exercise 1, they’ll often remember the trigger more clearly than you do.

Why it matters: This turns “watch yourself more” into a specific, narrow instruction, watch yourself when this particular trigger shows up, which is far easier to actually sustain than constant general vigilance.

Exercise 3: The redirect

Overview: Rather than simply dialling a strength down, redirect it at a new target, pointing the same quality at reining in its own excess, the way one executive applied his own determination to interrupting his own aggression, rather than trying to be less determined (Kaplan and Kaiser, 2009).

Steps:

1. Name the strength you’re overusing.
2. Instead of asking how to do less of it, ask what else you could aim the same quality at.
3. Pick one specific instance this week to redirect it, using your decisiveness to decide when to hold back, for example, rather than trying to suppress decisiveness itself.
4. Try it once and notice how it felt compared with plain restraint.
5. Refine the target with the next instance, based on what actually worked.

Variations: This works well alongside exercise 1’s findings, redirect whichever strength the highest rating review actually surfaced.

Why it matters: Pure suppression feels like a loss and rarely sticks. Redirection lets you keep exercising the actual strength, just pointed somewhere it’s currently needed more.

Exercise 4: The named flag

Overview: Because an overused strength still feels, from the inside, exactly like the strength that’s always worked, you’re structurally unlikely to catch it in the moment yourself. A pre-agreed signal from someone else closes that gap in real time rather than after the fact.

Steps:

1. Choose one person you trust who’s regularly in the room when your strength tends to tip into overuse.
2. Agree on a short, low-friction way for them to flag it in the moment, a specific word, a simple gesture, a direct but brief comment.
3. Ask them to use it the next time they see it happening, without waiting to be sure or softening it first.
4. When it happens, resist the instinct to explain or defend, just take the flag on board.
5. Afterwards, briefly tell them what you noticed once they flagged it, so they know the signal is actually landing.

Variations: This works especially well paired with exercise 3, use the flag to catch the moment, then apply the redirect the next time you see that same trigger coming.

Why it matters: This is the exercise most directly aimed at the core problem, that overuse is invisible from the inside precisely because it still feels like the strength working normally.

Exercise 5: The context recalibration

Overview: McCall and Lombardo’s original finding was specifically about context changing around a fixed strength, promotions, new teams, higher stakes, without the leader recalibrating how much of the strength the new context could actually absorb (McCall and Lombardo, 1983). This exercise runs that recalibration deliberately, rather than waiting for it to happen by accident.

Steps:

1. Think of a recent, genuine change in your role, team, or level of responsibility.
2. Ask what your signature strength looked like, and how much of it was needed, in the context before the change.
3. Ask what the new context actually calls for, honestly, rather than assuming it’s simply more of the same.
4. Identify the specific gap between the two, where the old calibration might now be too much or too little.
5. Choose one concrete adjustment to test in the new context, and revisit it again at the next genuine change in role or responsibility.

Variations: This is worth running as a matter of course at every promotion or significant role change, not only once something has already gone wrong.

Why it matters: This is the exercise that targets the actual mechanism McCall and Lombardo identified, not a fixed personal flaw, but a strength that hasn’t been recalibrated to a context that’s already moved on.

Exercise wrap up

These five exercises move from diagnosis to real-time practice: exercise 1 finds the strength most likely to be overdone by looking in your highest ratings rather than your lowest, exercise 2 identifies when overuse is most likely to appear, exercises 3 and 4 give you a way to redirect it and a live catch for it, and exercise 5 addresses the specific mechanism, a changed context, that most often causes overuse to develop in the first place. You don’t need all five running constantly. Knowing your trigger and having one person willing to flag it, exercises 2 and 4, will catch most of what actually matters. Not every week allows for that level of deliberate practice, which is where the micro-practices below come in.

Five micro-practices to start today

Five things you can start doing today, no dedicated time required.

• Before a high stakes moment, name the trait you privately think makes you better than most other leaders. That’s the one most likely overdone right now, watch it today.
• When the familiar pressure starts building, don’t switch the strength off, point it at itself: use the decisiveness to decide to wait, the drive to decide to slow down.
• When someone flags it, say only “noted, thank you,” nothing more. Go back a day later and ask exactly what they saw.
• In your first month in a new role, list three things about how you operate that worked in the old one, then test each one, one at a time, rather than assuming all three still hold.
• Next time the strength lands well, write down exactly what was different, the audience, the stakes, the timing, so the pattern is there to spot later rather than lost to memory.

Conclusion

The strength that got you promoted isn’t the problem. What derails leaders usually isn’t a flaw they were missing all along. It’s a genuine asset, deployed at the same setting, in a context that’s quietly stopped being able to absorb it. Catching that shift early is less about becoming a different kind of leader and more about staying honest with yourself about how much of a good thing the room actually needs right now.

That’s really what this whole series has been building towards: knowing your own worth and how you actually come across, seeking out feedback rather than waiting for it, finding your blind spots, understanding why your confidence moves the way it does, and now, watching the strength that carried you here so it doesn’t quietly carry you too far.

Reflective questions

• If you asked the people around you right now, would they say your signature strength is well calibrated, or has it drifted into too much?
• Think of the last genuine change in your role or responsibilities. Have you actually recalibrated how you use your strengths since then, or are you running the old setting?
• Who in your life would actually flag it to you in the moment if your strength tipped into overuse, and have you ever asked them to?

Explore further

• Self-awareness: why knowing yourself and being known are two different skills, the first piece in this series, which this article closes the loop on
• Feedback seeking behaviour: why waiting for it keeps you in the dark, for more on actually building the kind of relationship exercise 4’s named flag depends on
• How do I spot my own blind spots before they become a problem?, for more on why overuse is so hard to see from the inside
• Why does my confidence swing so much depending on the room I’m in?, for more on how pressure affects how a trait actually shows up

Sources

Church, A.H., 1997. Managerial self-awareness in high-performing individuals in organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(2), pp.281-292.

Hogan, R. and Hogan, J., 2001. Assessing leadership: A view from the dark side. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9(1-2), pp.40-51.

Kaplan, R.E. and Kaiser, R.B., 2009. Stop overdoing your strengths. Harvard Business Review, 87(2), pp.100-103.

Lombardo, M.M. and McCauley, C.D., 1988. The dynamics of management derailment (Technical Report No. 34). Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.

McCall, M.W. and Lombardo, M.M., 1983. Off the track: Why and how successful executives get derailed (Technical Report No. 21). Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.