Understanding our leadership triggers
Even the most seasoned and successful leaders get triggered. It could be a Board Member making a comment after the CEO Update that makes your face flush or a COO coming into your office complaining about the lack of staffing in the call center again. Maybe it’s your VP of Risk who is overstepping relative to the internal audit and now you’re receiving complaints from senior management. Or perhaps your CTO has delivered bad news about your core conversion project timeline.
Maybe you keep your cool. Maybe you shoot off an overly curt email. Or perhaps you simply stay extra quiet during your next leadership team meeting. Maybe you don’t do anything. Maybe you stuff if down. Perhaps it leaks out later – in a different meeting or even at home.
Perhaps you’re a master at managing your triggers with self-awareness 95 percent of the time, but that 5 percent gets you. Or you could be someone who runs hotter and gets triggered more easily – 25 percent of the time. Leaders are human, after all.
Managing our triggers is part of being a leader. Understanding ourselves and our triggers is essential to emotional agility and elevating our leadership. Depending upon our makeup, personality type, and our background, each of us not only has different triggers, but we also react differently.
If you’re reading this, chances are you have worked on—or are willing to work on—your emotional agility. If so, you’ve likely tried to be conscious in the present moment, so that you better understand what’s going on with you.
You’ve worked to not under- or over-react to a situation, project your judgments onto someone else, stay in a fight or flight mode, or simply get caught up in storytelling about a situation or colleague. You’ve become friends with curiosity.
The Enneagram represents one of the best tools I’ve found to help leaders with their leadership triggers, self-awareness, learning, and growth.
While I’m a big proponent of The 6 Types of Working Genius for teamwork and productivity, the Enneagram Assessment is powerful, as it provides leaders with a clear understanding of their motivations, behaviors, and more.
Different Enneagram types have different leadership triggers, which is one of the many reasons it’s such a powerful executive coaching tool.
Enneagram Type Ones, for instance, are focused, responsible, ethical, and trustworthy. They also believe it’s not okay to make mistakes and can sometimes repress their anger. Therefore, when they get triggered, their anger can show up as rigid in their body posture.
They can get defensive about mistakes and/or demonstrate passive aggressive behavior when others don’t show up with the same ultra responsible standards as them. Just by knowing this, an enneagram one leader can work toward being more compassionate toward themselves and recognize, for instance, that everyone makes mistakes.
Helping Enneagram Ones recognize when they have a metaphorical CriticFM radio constantly playing in the background of their minds and having them change the channel—if you will—can help them shift.
Peers and colleagues around Enneagram Ones can work to appreciate the unshakeable self-discipline of Enneagram Ones and remind them that perfection isn’t the goal. Together, this can help lessen the Enneagram Ones triggers at the core and limit the amount of time and energy that gets spent on lower-level behaviors and motivations. There’s much more, but this is a glimpse of some of the learnings available.
One of my greatest rewards comes toward helping executives experience more joy and fulfillment at work, as they advance their leadership. As we better understand ourselves, the less internal politics we will all experience, the more clarity we will create together, and the greater impact we will have.
