Your Dominant Instinct Is Showing
Scene: New President joins an organization. She comes in ready to lead differently.
With an impressive background, smart as a whip and action focused, she is ready to lead through her strengths. The kind of leadership that builds connection and holds people accountable while steadying the foundation of the culture. This leader isn’t afraid to shake things up when shaking things up is exactly what’s needed. It energizes her. She also believes in self development and makes it a priority for her leadership team. Every month an in-person leadership team session, a team dinner, and something focused on the effectiveness of the team, not only the bottom line.
Her team is not built the same. And they’ve been through a lot of leadership change of late.
They aren’t bad people or resistant employees. They don’t disrespect their new leader or want the company to fail. Yet because she is leading from a fundamentally different instinctive wiring than the people she’s leading — the team isn’t gelling quite as she’d hoped. What she can’t yet see — and what most leaders can’t — is that behavior is only part of the story.
There's More to a Story than Behaviors
Underneath the behaviors — underneath the strategies, the intentions, the leadership development work — there’s something more primitive running. Something that was wired in long before you had a title or a team.
The Enneagram calls these the three instinctual drives: self preservation, social, and one-on-one. And once you see them, you can’t unsee them — in yourself, in your team, or in the culture you’re swimming in.
Instincts aren’t a choice and they don’t announce themselves. They operate underneath conscious awareness (behaviors), firing automatically in moments of stress, pressure, or uncertainty — often before you’ve had a chance to think. All of us have all three instincts, but most of us have one dominant one that colors everything: how we make decisions, what we prioritize, what feels threatening, and what we reach for when things get hard. It’s not a box or a label; it’s a lens – and a real important one given how much it can drive your behaviors. Once you understand yours, you start seeing it everywhere — in yourself, in the people you lead, and in the culture around you.
I. We. Us.
