The new boss is openly excited about collaborating on a project. Things appear to be going well. After a minor roadblock, however, the boss suddenly explodes with frustration, yells at the team, and stalks from the room. Uh, what just happened? The team is so confused. These are signs that a leader is too temperamental at work.
Some leaders have intense, energetic personalities that make them passionate and invested in their work. But when they allow their intense emotions too much free rein, they can seem moody or unpredictable to their teams. At Hogan, our name for this emotional volatility is Excitable.
The behaviour of a temperamental leader can cause them to struggle with team management. Let’s explore the pros and cons of Excitable behaviour in leadership.
Characteristics of Excitable Leaders
The three core Hogan personality assessments together measure personality strengths, derailers, and values. Derailers or dark-side personality characteristics are assessed using the Hogan Development Survey (HDS). These are behaviours that are overused during times of stress, pressure, complacency, or boredom. Excitable is a scale on the HDS that evaluates the potential for intense and energetic behaviour to cause derailment of a person’s performance. While passion and energy might be a person’s strengths on an everyday basis, the same person might seem easily disappointed, directionless, and emotionally explosive when they stop monitoring their behaviour. A leader who is enthusiastic one day and irritable the next may gain a reputation for inconsistency and unpredictability over time. Excitable is just one of the 11 derailers Hogan measures using the HDS.
Excitable leadership is rooted in the strength of passion; a leader who scores high on Excitable is one who cares about people and projects. They tend to prefer new things and work in bursts of energy. A leader who is comfortable showing a range of emotions makes an excellent counterpart to a less expressive colleague. (You see this duo often in television tropes, such as Star Trek’sKirk and Spock.)
Showing passion keeps a leader from appearing unemotional, indifferent, or uninterested. But a display of emotional ups and downs isn’t always helpful in leadership. When stress causes emotions to swell, leaders must adapt how they communicate negative feelings.
How Emotional Outbursts Cause Disruption
Temperamental behaviour can damage a leader’s reputation and cause workplace disruption. A leader who yells (or otherwise expresses negative emotions inappropriately), pulls away, or quits putting energy toward tasks greatly hinders productivity. At worst, this leader behaviour can make teams feel uncertain, hurt, or even afraid to speak up.
Excitable leaders can be volatile, prone to overreacting or losing control of their emotions. They also tend to show initial passion for work but can easily become disappointed. Often cooperative and helpful, they can nevertheless seem to lack direction or resilience. Their unpredictable reactions create directional uncertainty and contribute to their reputations for being indecisive and unreliable.
For Excitable leaders, emotional regulation requires strategic self-awareness. This is understanding one’s strengths and limitations and how others perceive them (i.e., reputation). Strategic self-awareness enables leaders to modify or limit behaviours that may not always be effective at work. For someone who tends to be temperamental or moody, this might entail constraining emotions within a bandwidth that is more tolerable for others.
Techniques for Temperamental Personalities
An Excitable leader should keep acting with passion, energy, and enthusiasm, but they should avoid allowing their emotions to spiral out of control. Fortunately, it’s possible for people to learn to moderate their behaviour by managing their emotional expression. First, Excitable leaders should analyse the situations in which they become frustrated and upset. Learning to recognise the signs or triggers that they are about to lose control can help them pause before they react. This can also help these leaders create distance from the situation to avoid sending unintended messages that might affect team performance. Over time, leaders who score high on the Excitable derailer can build resilience slowly by learning how much stress is sustainable.
When facing an exciting new project, these leaders should balance their enthusiasm with realistic expectations to stay motivated when obstacles emerge. When problems and challenges do arise, the leader should commit to persistence. By sticking with established plans and strategies, leaders can keep projects moving forward to build a reputation of being steady and reliable. Finding an accountability partner, listening to feedback from trusted colleagues, and being open with team members about development efforts will reinforce how much emotion is helpful—and how much is too much.
Expert Contributor
Jessie McClure, MA, is an industrial-organisational psychologist who is a senior consultant and team lead at Hogan Assessments.
This post originally appeared on Hogan Assessments
