The Ladder, the Triangle, and the Exit Door: Why Emotional Agility (Not IQ) is the Real Mark of a Powerful Leader

“My team missed another deadline! Now leadership thinks I’m unreliable,” the SVP snapped. He was ready to storm in, fix it all, and assign blame. Classic move. Also: not leadership. That’s ego.

And the trouble with ego is that it shows up in a power suit and calls itself leadership. But what it often hides is the fear of failure, of not being seen, or of being exposed. And that’s exactly where emotional agility comes in.

Coined by psychologist Susan David, emotional agility is not just about knowing how you feel, it’s about being able to stay in the discomfort of those feelings without being hijacked by them. That’s the difference between slamming your laptop shut and storming out…or asking a question that actually opens the conversation.

Even seasoned leaders fall into two traps we’ve explored before: the Ladder of Inference and the Drama Triangle:

• The Ladder of Inference: where we race up from raw data to meaning-making in milliseconds, often without realizing we’re building our conclusions on assumptions and old stories.

• The Drama Triangle: where we fall into reactive roles of Rescuer, Persecutor, or Victim, and confuse that reactivity for responsibility.

Inquiry: The Exit Door Out of Assumption and Drama

Whether you’re on the ladder or trapped in a triangle, the exit is the same. It's the inquiry process. Inquiry is how you hit pause on your inner monologue before it turns into a staff meeting. It helps you interrupt the climb up the Ladder - or the spiral into drama - and choose something else. In that pause, drama loses its grip, and possibility finally gets a seat at the table.

Over the next three blogs, we’ll take you inside familiar leadership moments:

• When gossip hijacks the room.

• When a deadline slips - again.

• When the team goes quiet, stuck in blame or silence.

No 5-step strategy. Just the guts to pause, get curious, and choose better - on purpose.

Less knee-jerk, more Jedi. Let’s open that exit door.