Human Risk: How Personality Derailers Sink Value

Even top-tier leaders can exhibit personality derailers. Yet these characteristics often remain hidden beneath talent and charisma – until it’s too late. The problem isn’t always capability. It’s whether your leaders have the psychological resilience to sustain performance under pressure, complexity, and scale.

“Leadership capital drives returns as clearly as financial engineering. But unmanaged derailers can quietly erode the value you’ve worked to create.”

The hidden risks undermining your leadership capital, and how to detect them early.

This whitepaper reveals:

Nine distinct personality derailers that predict leadership risk

Evidence-based assessment framework grounded in research with 20,000+ employees

Four-step process to detect, monitor, and derisk derailers across your organisation

Every organisation faces a hidden threat: personality derailers. Characteristics that can lead to narcissism, manipulation, impulsive risk-taking, and more can destabilise teams, erode trust, and jeopardise enterprise value.

The challenge? These tendencies often hide beneath more visible qualities like talent, charisma, and ambition. Leaders may unwittingly promote those whose actions undermine success, with the damage only becoming evident when it’s too late.

Under pressure, rapid growth, or increased authority, latent derailers surface in ways that:

Elevate operational and compliance risk
Weaken execution and decision-making
Drive talent loss and cultural deterioration
Impair EBITDA and financial outcomes
Reduce value creation, exit multiples, and investor confidence

This whitepaper provides boards, investors, and HR leaders with a structured, evidence-based approach to identify and mitigate personality-driven leadership risk before it crystallises into performance or value-erosion issues.