*This article was written by Kimberly Nei and Darin Nei, and was originally published by Harvard Business Review on September 10, 2018.

Just becoming a leader is enough to exacerbate some people’s unethical tendencies. But power does not corrupt everyone. Our research suggests that key personality characteristics predict unethical leadership behavior.

We collected personality data and supervisor ratings of ethical behavior (e.g., integrity, accountability) on 3,500 leaders across 30 organizations we had worked with. The organizations included in our study were largely multinational, represented several industries, and varied in size from medium to large. We combined data across these 30 independent studies to examine the relationship between personality and ethical leadership across a range of different settings and situations. We found that characteristics related to certain traits have stronger relationships with unethical behavior.

So, what should today’s leaders do to build trust with their teams and the public? Here are a few tips, based on our findings:

Be humble; not charismatic. It is natural that we are attracted to people whom we perceive to be inspiring, fun, and engaging. It makes sense that you need a little charisma or pizzazz to stand out from others and get noticed. Charisma can also be useful for engaging and inspiring others towards the organizational mission. However, too much of this may be a bad thing in the eyes of your team members. Unchecked charisma will lead to a reputation of self-absorption and self-promotion. When team members get the sense that you are focused on your own concerns and ideas, they feel unsupported. The team may start to worry that you will no longer do what is best for the team or organization, and that you will instead do what is best for your own agenda.

Be steady and dependable; it will get you further. While you may have been noticed and promoted based on your charisma, being reliable, rule-following, and responsible is more important for your team. As a leader, you have a tremendous amount of autonomy and decision-making power. If we are to entrust our leaders with such power, we need to be confident in their ability to remain true to their word and to do what’s right for the organization. Showing your team that you exercise caution, take calculated risks, and will adhere to organizational principles will go a long way toward gaining their trust.

Remember that modesty is the best policy. At times, we may all enjoy working in an environment that is less formal, or working for a boss who knows how to keep things light-hearted. However, there is still a degree of responsibility and professionalism that people come to expect from those in charge. Trying to be liked and known as “the fun boss” can tarnish your reputation in the long run. It’s OK to stay out of the limelight and keep some space between you and your team. It sends signals that you are there for their professional benefit and that they can rely on you when needed.

Balance analysis with action. Although people appreciate a degree of logic and rationality in the decision-making process, be careful to not get so focused on data and analysis that you forget the larger context or the impact of your decisions. Spending too much time analyzing data can hold you back from making important decisions, especially in high-pressure situations that call for quick action. The data may indicate the best course of action for the bottom line, but this may not be the best decision for the broader team or relevant stakeholders. Leadership must be able to make a decision and take corrective action quickly, even if it initially hurts the bottom line.

Be vigilant; vulnerability increases over time. Learning and adjusting to a new role, especially a high-visibility leadership role, can take some time. It’s during the first few months in a new role that we usually spend more time observing what’s going on around us. We also tend to be more mindful of our interactions with others and may spend more time managing the impressions we make on others. Over time, we become more comfortable in our surroundings and we stop paying attention to our reputations. It’s usually after the six-month mark where we see an increased risk of our dark-side tendencies impeding our success or derailing our careers. Keep your guard up, stay vigilant, and continually seek feedback.

The personality characteristics that will get you chosen as a leader are not always the same as the ones that will make you effective in that role. Spending too much time trying to get noticed or having a “win at all costs” mentality to get ahead can put you (and your team) at a higher risk of engaging in unethical behavior. Having awareness of your surroundings and an understanding of the ways you influence your team will help to keep yourself (and your team) on track.

*Kimberly Nei is a manager of client research at Hogan Assessments where she manages the design and implementation of legally defensible assessment-based selection and development solutions.

*Darin Nei is a senior consultant with Hogan Assessments’ Global Alliances team where he works closely with international consulting partners to deliver science-based solutions and ensure assessment quality across a variety of cultures and languages.

*This article, authored by Ben Dattner and Robert Hogan, was originally published in Harvard Business Review in 2011. It has been republished in the HBR 2018 Summer Issue.  

In his brilliant 1950 film, Rashomon, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa depicts the story of a rape and murder four times, from the perspectives of four characters. The message is clear: Different people can see the same events in dramatically different ways.

In the workplace this phenomenon is particularly evident when it comes to underperformance and failure. An outcome that an employee regards as satisfactory may be seen by his boss as entirely unacceptable. When a project is an unequivocal flop, colleagues disagree over the reasons why. These reactions, and their effect on workplace relationships, often become more problematic than the original event. As a result, how people respond to negative feedback is of great importance to managers and organizations and is a major determinant of career success.

Consider the case of a pharmaceutical company seeking FDA approval for a new use of an existing drug. (Some details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.) Wendy, a talented researcher, was put in charge of the large-scale data analysis required to file an appli cation. She considered several approaches and recommended the one she thought best balanced the need for accuracy and comprehensiveness with the imperative to complete the work quickly and on budget. Her boss, George—the company’s head statistician—agreed with the plan, and together they presented it to the vice president of medical affairs, Don. Although Don would have liked a more thorough approach, he recognized that it would be more expensive, and he signed off on the recommendation.

After months of work the analysis failed to demonstrate the efficacy of the drug for the new use, and the application to the FDA had to be scrapped. Reactions varied. Don blamed the statistics department, and especially George, for recommending the approach it had taken. George did not think that he and his team were at fault, and he was angry with Don for allowing financial pressures to influence their choice in the first place. The two men struggled to work together. Wendy, meanwhile, felt she had personally fallen short and began having trouble focusing on her other assignments.

How could three people have such different views of the same situation?

A Matter of Type

Personality psychology provides a research-based behavioral science framework for identifying and analyzing how people respond to failure and assign blame. Using data on several hundred thousand managers from every industry sector, we have identified 11 personality types likely to have dysfunctional reactions to failure. For example, there is the Skeptical type, who is very smart about people and office politics but overly sensitive to criticism and always on the lookout for betrayal; the Bold type, who thinks in grandiose terms, is frequently in error but never in doubt, and refuses to acknowledge his mistakes, which then snowball; and the Diligent type, who is hardworking and detail oriented, with very high standards for herself and others, but also a micromanaging control freak who infantilizes and alienates subordinates. These types represent roughly 70% of the U.S. population. (See the sidebar “Recognize Your Type.”)

The 11 types can be divided into the three broad categories proposed by the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig in the 1930s, which were based on a test that he had developed to assess anger and frustration. Some people are extrapunitive—prone to unfairly blaming others. Some are impunitive: They either deny that failure has occurred or deny their own role in it. And some are intropunitive, often judging themselves too harshly and imagining failures where none exist.

In our pharmaceutical example, Don, an Excitable type, exemplifies extrapunitive tendencies. He takes the statistics team to task instead of accepting any personal responsibility or attributing the failure to the drug itself. Extrapunitive responses are all too common in the business world. Seemingly every time executives testify before Congress—whether it’s Tony Hayward, then BP’s CEO, disavowing blame for the oil spill, or Richard Fuld, then Lehman Brothers’ CEO, disavowing blame for the financial crisis—they point fingers at any organization except their own. Interestingly, long before they found themselves in the hot seat, both Hayward and Fuld were faulted for other instances of mismanaging blame. (HBR tried to reach Hayward and Fuld to give them the opportunity to respond but received no reply.)

The chief statistician, George, a Bold type, was impunitive, denying that he and his team had anything to do with the bad outcome. One well-known executive who has been accused of this sort of behavior is Carly Fiorina, a past CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Disgruntled former subordinates have described her as a self-promoting attention seeker who ignored integration challenges and day-to-day operations following HP’s 2002 merger with Compaq and took no responsibility when the combined company failed to live up to its potential. When the HP board suggested that she delegate greater authority to her team and more power to the heads of key business units, she refused and was subsequently dismissed. (When HBR contacted Fiorina’s chief of staff about this article, she declined to comment.)

Though less common than extrapunitive and impunitive personality types, people with intropunitive tendencies can also be problematic. The researcher Wendy, a Diligent type, exhibited this behavior by taking on excessive blame. This may have been due in part to her gender: Because of their socialization and other cultural influences, women are more likely than men to be intropunitive.

The underlying theme of our research is that many managers perceive and react to failure inappropriately and therefore have trouble learning from it—leading to more failures down the road. Many of us have at some point assigned (or avoided) blame in a self-serving way, only to suffer negative fallout; on the flip side, we may take self-criticism too far, resulting in paralysis and stagnation. To foster and thrive in a productive work environment, we need to recognize and overcome these tendencies.

How to Change Your Stripes

Fortunately, managers at all levels of organizations, and at any stage of their careers, can fix their flawed responses to failure. Here are some key steps you should take:

Cultivate self-awareness.

First, it’s important to determine whether you fall into one of the three categories. Several personality tests can help you assess your interaction style. Although the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably the best known, others have more empirical support. One well-established model we’ve found particularly helpful is the Big Five, which measures openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, along with subfactors of these dimensions. It does a good job of illuminating how you deal with failure in yourself and others. For example, you may find that you score high on the achievement-striving subfactor of the conscientiousness dimension, indicating that you may become easily distressed if you don’t meet ambitious goals. Or you might score high on the angersubfactor of neuroticism, suggesting a tendency to disproportionately fault others for minor errors and to exaggerate their gravity.

Another useful exercise is to reflect on challenging events or jobs in your career, considering how you handled them and what you could have done better. You might ask trusted colleagues, mentors, or coaches to evaluate your reactions to and explanations for failures. Pay close attention to the subtleties of how people respond to you in common workplace situations, and ask for formal or informal 360-degree feedback; you may be surprised at what you discover.

For example, one media industry CEO we’ve worked with, an Excitable type, saw no problem with his habit of forcefully and publicly pointing out subordinates’ minor errors. During an executive-coaching process he learned that his employees perceived him as extrapunitive. He realized that they had a more hierarchical worldview than he did and that he had underestimated how criticism from him—the boss—might affect them. He also came to accept that small mistakes should be treated differently from big ones, and that feedback on them should be balanced with encouragement.

Self-awareness is also helpful for people in the other two categories. If you find that others often see failure where you don’t or if you have a hard time pinpointing times when you’ve failed, you might be impunitive (or at least risk coming across that way). At the other extreme, if you’re constantly anxious about failing or if colleagues often reassure you that things aren’t as bad as you think, you may be intropunitive.

Although not everyone has the time, inclination, or resources to get the kind of coaching or counseling necessary to surface and address deep psychological issues with respect to failure and blame, everyone can undertake and benefit from this sort of reflection.

Cultivate political awareness.

Even if you’ve analyzed your behavior and think that you act appropriately with respect to blame, your colleagues might disagree. As the media industry CEO learned, you must know your audience and recognize that each situation is different. Behavior that was appropriate in the past might be perceived as extrapunitive, impunitive, or intropunitive in a new role or company. Whereas self-awareness helps you understand what messages you’re sending, political awareness helps you understand what messages others are receiving. It requires that you know how your organization defines, explains, assigns responsibility for, and attempts to remedy failure.

Take the case of a COO who had recently joined a health care nonprofit. As part of a large-scale change effort, he was asked to lead a task force that would identify inefficient processes and make recommendations for improvements. Other members of the executive team were assigned to lead other groups. Because he was very busy with his day-to-day work, the COO and his task force fell behind. When the CEO held a meeting to discuss the various groups’ progress and share their findings, the COO, a Reserved type, simply described his team’s activities, making no mention of their missed deadlines and failure to deliver any results. This made the CEO angry; he perceived the COO’s behavior as impunitive and felt that it set a bad example for the other task forces. Fortunately, the CEO was not a blaming type. After the meeting he privately told the COO that although falling behind schedule might have been unavoidable, he had to take responsibility for the delay. The COO realized that the nonprofit’s culture was different from the cultures he’d experienced at other companies. In his previous jobs, leaders were expected to hide their shortcomings, not acknowledge them as a means of showing their commitment to improving. The COO had to learn how to criticize himself, appropriately and publicly, in order to succeed in his new job.

Political awareness involves finding the right way to approach failure within your specific organization, department, and role. An intropunitive person might be effective at a small, highly collegial company but have to change his ways at a larger, more competitive one, where rivals might take advantage. An extrapunitive boss who only slightly softened her criticisms when independently running a sales department might have to tone them down further when coleading a cross-divisional team.

Embrace new strategies.

Once you’re aware of your bad habits, you can move toward more-open, adaptive responses. The strategies needed can work for any of the dysfunctional types. The first is to listen and communicate. It sounds obvious, but most of us forget to gather enough feedback or sufficiently explain our actions and intentions. Especially when it comes to credit and blame, never assume that you know what others are thinking or that they understand where you are coming from.

The second is to reflect on both the situation and the people. At the end of each project or performance cycle, think about things that might have pushed you or others into extrapunitive, impunitive, or intropunitive reactions. How did you respond? How did your colleagues? Was everyone on the same page? If not, why? What effect did situational and interpersonal factors have on the outcome?

The third strategy is to think before you act. When a failure seems to have occurred, don’t respond immediately or impulsively. It’s not always possible to right the wrong, but it’s almost always possible to make things worse by overreacting in a highly charged situation. If you become extrapunitive, others may become impunitive. If you become intropunitive, others may pile on. Take the time to consider several possible interpretations of the event and to imagine various ways you might respond.

The fourth strategy is to search for a lesson. Mistakes happen. Sometimes a colleague or group of colleagues is at fault. Sometimes the responsibility lies with you. Sometimes no one is to blame. Look for nuance and context and then create and test hypotheses about why the failure happened, to prevent it from happening again.

When the talented chief technology officer of an internet company, a Skeptical type, discovered that his department’s high turnover rate was caused by what employees described as an extrapunitive leadership style, he resolved to use these strategies. Previously he would excoriate his team if projects ran late or did not achieve their goals, refusing to listen to any explanations. The problem, he now learned, wasn’t that his employees lacked competence; it was that they didn’t always understand his instructions and were afraid to request clarification. So his first step was to check in with them to make sure everyone knew what he wanted. If results were unsatisfactory nonetheless, his initial response was still to criticize—but now he also spent time analyzing how the people and the situation had contributed to what went wrong. He started taking “deep dives” into failed projects, assigning blame only after careful consideration. Because of this approach, staff members began to share more information with him, which helped everyone identify weaknesses and oversights that had affected results. They also grew more comfortable telling him about minor problems earlier, making the problems less likely to cascade. Morale and productivity improved, and turnover decreased.

Let’s look at how these strategies can benefit the other types. An executive who learns that he is coming across as impunitive, as the COO at the health care nonprofit did, can ask others for feedback about whether the quality, quantity, and timeliness of work products represent success, failure, or something in between. Someone with intropunitive tendencies might make a list of all the situational factors that contributed to poor outcomes. Wendy eventually realized that she was hurting her career by taking too much responsibility for failure. So she started communicating more closely with her colleagues at the outset of a task to inoculate herself against worrying later on that she had acted without support. She pushed others to do their homework, share their opinions, and raise any objections; she also paid attention to subtle signals that she lacked consensus. The next time a drug trial she was involved in failed, she thought carefully about the reasons, soberly considered her role, and decided not to blame herself.

How to Influence Others

Just as important as understanding your own tendencies is recognizing when your bosses, peers, or subordinates might fit into the categories we’ve outlined. Having insight into their motivational biases and emotional reactions to failure can help you give them feedback in the right way and at the right time—feedback that increases their self-awareness and political awareness and ultimately helps them change their ways. Of course, sometimes dysfunctional people cannot be influenced; if this is the case with your boss, your best option may be to seek other career opportunities inside or outside your organization. However, people often conclude too quickly that their bosses can’t change.

The chief of staff at an investment firm had an extrapunitive manager, a Cautious type, who was highly successful and widely respected in the industry but completely uninterested in personal improvement. Like the CTO described earlier, he gave little direction to his employees and then snapped at them when they failed to meet his deadlines or expectations. Although the chief of staff was not herself a victim of his outbursts, she sympathized with the junior executives who were. She identified one area of constant contention: questions about how to classify investments. The boss typically told staff members to “figure it out,” and the time they spent doing so often led to delays in their analyses. She came up with a solution (forming a committee to create guidelines, which would then go to the manager for approval) and waited for the right time—when he was in a good mood and not too busy—to present it. He agreed, the committee was appointed, and things went more smoothly. The chief of staff had helped her colleagues and protected her extrapunitive boss from himself.

It’s also possible to constructively influence people who have impunitive and intropunitive tendencies. Rather than criticizing his new COO publicly and making him defensive, the CEO at the health care nonprofit gave him supportive coaching. At the pharmaceutical company, George helped Wendy see the broader organizational context for the drug application’s failure. 

Handling failure and blame the right way is key to managerial success. We believe the taxonomy we’ve presented will not only help you see your own role and responsibilities more clearly but also help you better understand the perceptions of others. And we hope this knowledge will enable you to approach failure with an open mind, react to it in a balanced and strategic way, and, most important, learn and help others learn from it.

A young friend recently remarked that the worst boss he ever had would provide him with feedback that always consisted of “You’re doing a great job.” But they both knew it wasn’t true — the organization was in disarray, turnover was excessive, and customers were not happy. My friend was giving it his all, but he needed more support and better feedback than he received. He wanted a leader who would be around when he needed them, and who would give him substantive advice, not platitudes. As a measure of his frustration, he said, “I would rather have had a boss who yelled at me or made unrealistic demands than this one, who provided empty praise.”

Researchers have studied managerial derailment — or the dark side of leadership — for many years. The key derailment characteristics of bad managers are well documented and fall into three broad behavioral categories: (1) “moving away behaviors,” which create distance from others through hyper-emotionality, diminished communication, and skepticism that erodes trust; (2) “moving against behaviors,” which overpower and manipulate people while aggrandizing the self; and (3) “moving toward behaviors,” which include being ingratiating, overly conforming, and reluctant to take chances or stand up for one’s team. The popular media is full of examples of bad leaders in government, academia, and business with these characteristics. However, my friend was describing something arguably worse than an incompetent boss. His manager was not overtly misbehaving, nor was he a ranting, narcissistic sociopath. Rather, his boss was a leader in title only — his role was leadership, but he provided none. My friend was experiencing absentee leadership, and unfortunately, he is not alone. Absentee leadership rarely comes up in today’s leadership or business literature, but research shows that it is the most common form of incompetent leadership.

Absentee leaders are people in leadership roles who are psychologically absent from them. They were promoted into management, and enjoy the privileges and rewards of a leadership role, but avoid meaningful involvement with their teams. Absentee leadership resembles the concept of rent-seeking in economics — taking value out of an organization without putting value in. As such, they represent a special case of laissez-faire leadership, but one that is distinguished by its destructiveness. 

Having a boss who lets you do as you please may sound ideal, especially if you are being bullied and micromanaged by your current boss. However, a 2015 survey of 1,000 working adults showed that eight of the top nine complaints about leaders concerned behaviors that were absent; employees were most concerned about what their bosses didn’tdo. Clearly, from the employee’s perspective, absentee leadership is a significant problem, and it is even more troublesome than other, more overt forms of bad leadership. 

Research shows that being ignored by one’s boss is more alienating than being treated poorly. The impact of absentee leadership on job satisfaction outlasts the impact of both constructive and overtly destructive forms of leadership. Constructive leadership immediately improves job satisfaction, but the effects dwindle quickly. Destructive leadership immediately degrades job satisfaction, but the effects dissipate after about six months. In contrast, the impact of absentee leadership takes longer to appear, but it degrades subordinates’ job satisfaction for at least two years. It also is related to a number of other negative outcomes for employees, like role ambiguity, health complaints, and increased bullying from team members. Absentee leadership creates employee stress, which can lead to poor employee health outcomes and talent drain, which then impact an organization’s bottom line.

If absentee leadership is so destructive, why don’t we read more about it in the business literature? Consider a story I recently heard about the dean of a well-known law school: Two senior, well-regarded faculty members called the provost to complain about their dean because, they said, he wouldn’t do anything. The provost responded by saying that he had a dean who was a drunk, a dean who was accused of sexual harassment, and a dean who was accused of misusing funds, but the law school dean never caused him any problems. So, the provost said, the faculty members would just have to deal with their dean.

Like the provost in this example, many organizations don’t confront absentee leaders because they have other managers whose behavior is more overtly destructive. Because absentee leaders don’t actively make trouble, their negative impact on organizations can be difficult to detect, and when it is detected, it often is considered a low-priority problem. Thus, absentee leaders are often silent organization killers. Left unchecked, absentee leaders clog an organization’s succession arteries, blocking potentially more effective people from moving into important roles while adding little to productivity. Absentee leaders rarely engage in unforgivable bouts of bad behavior, and are rarely the subject of ethics investigations resulting from employee hotline calls. As a result, their negative effect on organizations accumulates over time, largely unchecked.

If your organization is one of the relatively few with effective selection and promotion methods in place, then it may be able to identify effective and destructive leaders. Even if your organization isn’t great at talent identification, both types of leaders are easy to spot once they are on the job. They also produce predictable organizational outcomes: Constructive leadership creates high engagement and productivity, while destructive leadership kills engagement and productivity. The chances are good, however, that your organization is unaware of its absentee leaders, because they specialize in flying under the radar by not doing anything that attracts attention. Nonetheless, the adhesiveness of their negative impact may be slowly harming the company.

The war for leadership talent is real, and organizations with the best leaders will win. Reviewing your organization’s management positions for absentee leaders and doing something about them can improve your talent management arsenal. It’s likely that your competitors are overlooking this issue or choosing not to do anything about it, like the university provost. Doing nothing about absentee leaders is easy. Just ask any absentee leader.

This article was originally written by Scott Gregory for Harvard Business Review on March 30, 2018.