The Hogan Assessment: Understanding Your Derailment Risks
The Promotion That Becomes a Crisis
Every year I watch talented physicians step into leadership roles and, within eighteen months, find themselves in trouble they never saw coming. Not because they lack intelligence or clinical skill. Because a behavioral pattern they never examined finally caught up with them.
The Hogan assessment for physicians -- specifically the Hogan Development Survey, the part of the suite designed to measure derailment risks in leadership -- gives physician leaders something their training never provided: a map of how they are likely to fail. That sounds harsh. It is also extraordinarily useful.
What Derailment Actually Looks Like
Derailment does not mean incompetence. It means that behavioral tendencies -- often the very ones that fueled your early success -- begin undermining your effectiveness in a new context. Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo at the Center for Creative Leadership published foundational research on this in the 1980s. The pattern was clear: executive failures were rarely about skill gaps. They were about interpersonal behaviors that went unmanaged.
In practice, derailment looks like this:
- A division chief promoted for her thoroughness starts requiring approval on every minor decision, and her faculty quietly stop proposing new ideas
- A department chair whose directness was admired begins shutting down dissent, and critical information stops flowing upward
- A program director whose calm detachment was an asset in the ICU becomes perceived as indifferent to residents' concerns
None of these leaders intended harm. Each was relying on a behavioral pattern that had worked for years. The Hogan Development Survey identifies exactly these patterns before they become entrenched.
How the HDS Differs from Other Assessments
Most leadership assessments measure your strengths or your preferences on a good day. The HDS measures what happens when your guard is down -- when you are fatigued, under pressure, or operating on autopilot.
The instrument identifies eleven "dark side" tendencies. These are not psychiatric categories. They are normal personality characteristics that become problematic when they intensify under stress. Think of them as the volume knob on your personality getting stuck at maximum.
What makes the HDS valuable for physician leadership derailers specifically is that academic medicine selects for several of these tendencies at extreme levels. The rigor that got you through residency, the self-reliance that carried you through fellowship, the perfectionism that earned you grants -- each corresponds to a derailment risk the HDS will surface.
Robert Kaiser and Robert Kaplan describe this in The Versatile Leader: leadership strengths become weaknesses not through some mysterious transformation, but through simple overuse. The HDS tells you which strengths you are most likely to overuse and under what conditions.
Why Your Department Feels It Before You Do
Your derailment risks do not just affect you. They shape the culture of your entire team.
A leader high on the Cautious scale creates an environment where faculty learn that proposing anything bold is a waste of time. A leader high on the Colorful scale creates a culture where substance takes a back seat to performance and quieter team members disengage. A 2011 study by Peter Harms, Seth Spain, and Sean Hannah in The Leadership Quarterly found that leaders' dark side traits predicted not just their own outcomes but the climate and morale of the teams they led. Your derailers are not a private matter. They are an organizational reality.
This is why departmental coaching often surfaces the need for the Hogan. When a team is struggling and the usual explanations do not fully account for the dysfunction, the missing variable is frequently the leader's unexamined behavioral patterns.
What to Do With What You Learn
The Hogan does not fix anything by itself. The value is in what happens after.
The assessment must be debriefed by a certified practitioner. Misinterpreting a high score as a condemnation rather than a risk factor is a common mistake. The most productive use of the HDS is as the foundation for an ongoing development plan -- building specific strategies for the situations where your derailers show up, whether that is your weekly leadership meeting, your annual review conversations, or your response to a grant rejection.
In my experience, most physician leaders have at least one result that confirms something they have been half-aware of for years. Start there. You already have data from your own life about how it operates.
The Risk You Do Not Manage Is the One That Manages You
Nobody enters a leadership role planning to alienate their team or damage their reputation. But derailment risks do not require your intention or awareness to cause harm. They just need stress and time.
The Hogan assessment gives physician leaders a rare advantage: the chance to see the pattern before it plays out. In the high-stakes environment of academic medicine, that is an edge worth having.
If your department is navigating leadership challenges and you want to understand the behavioral patterns at play, that is exactly the kind of work we do. Learn about coaching for departments.
