THE READING QUESTION
Leadership research requires a clear outcome. Being noticed, gaining a role, and helping a team perform are different questions that can demand different evidence.
Locate the review's problem
Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan reviewed leadership and its relationship with personality. A useful way to approach this historical review is to track what leadership means at each point in the argument. A person can become a leader, be perceived as leader-like, or contribute to collective effectiveness. Treating these outcomes as interchangeable can make a broad claim sound more precise than it is.
A fictional promotion conversation
Imagine a fictional service organization considering a highly visible presenter for a larger management role. The presenter explains strategy confidently and receives enthusiastic comments after meetings. Their team, however, reports unclear priorities and frequent last-minute reversals. The two observations are not logically inconsistent. Presentation impressions and the experience of coordinating daily work are different outcomes. The organization should not settle the disagreement by deciding whether the person has a single good or bad leadership personality. It needs to specify the work the role requires and examine evidence about those activities over time.
Design a more useful comparison
For this exercise, separate entry into the role from performance within it. List the signals that influence selection, then list the behaviors needed after appointment. Include how information reaches the leader, how decisions are explained, and how corrections occur when a plan fails. Next identify who can observe each behavior. A senior sponsor may see presentations while team members see delegation and follow-through. Disagreement among observers can therefore contain useful information about exposure. It should not automatically be averaged away or treated as proof that one group is biased. The fictional organization should investigate what each group actually observed.
Questions for reading a leadership review
Ask how the authors define effectiveness and distinguish it from emergence or reputation. Which evidence concerns stable differences between people, and which concerns the circumstances in which they lead? What alternative explanation could produce a relationship between personality and a leadership outcome? Consider access to opportunities, role expectations, and the way success is measured. Then write a development question that follows from the fictional case without claiming to diagnose a derailment pattern: when priorities change, what explanation and handover do team members receive? That question can lead to an observable experiment in everyday management.
Keep developmental claims specific
Machiavelli Leadership Derailers is an original reflection framework about habits that may become costly under pressure. It cannot predict who will fail as a leader. The fictional presenter could test a weekly priority review and invite specific feedback about reversals. Such an exercise evaluates a practice in context. It does not turn a historical research review into direct evidence about our new questionnaire or a promotion recommendation.
FOLLOW THE ORIGINAL SOURCES
Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1994) ↗Continue the reading
Leadership derailment research and a behavior-focused alternative →