ACTivity/ What Triggers You
Photo by Ospan Ali on Unsplash.
Manila, 16 August 2023 – Shine a light on your emotional triggers.
Story
It happened in 2008. At a time when the application of neuroscience to management, leadership, and organizational development was growing popular, David Rock, a co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, introduced a new model to explore the top five social concerns that drive human behavior in the workplace. As the MindTools website points out in its helpful overview of Rock’s work, these social concerns “activate the same threat and reward responses in our brain that we rely on for our physical survival.” Understanding how this process works will help us a great deal because our creative leadership abilities are sabotaged when we are triggered into a threat response (like the woman in the photo), leaving us with little or no control during the emotional event.
Rock named the new model SCARF, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. Since its introduction, the model has attracted the attention of leadership development experts and coaches who help their clients to shift from a negative emotional state to a positive emotional state. For leaders in the workplace, using the SCARF model can help them to eliminate or minimize perceived threats, and maximize positive emotions from a reward response. If you would like to find out more about the SCARF model and its applications, the helpful overview by MindTools is here, and a detailed review article by Rock here.
Last month, I learned that the NeuroLeadership Institute now offers a simple test to show which of the five social concerns affects you the most. Naturally, this will be different for each of us. I recommend that you give it a go. You can find it here. What I learned about myself is that among the five social concerns, autonomy is the most important for me. It is, therefore, where I am most easily triggered. On the other hand, certainty was the least important, while status, relatedness, and fairness, scored in the middle. As I took some time to reflect on the social concerns and my work and life preferences, the results made sense to me and I will work with them as I continue to grow my leadership. What do the five social concerns mean to you?
Challenge
To make good use of the SCARF model, the first task is to understand what each of the five social concerns means in practice. Status refers to how we experience our relative importance to others, especially in dynamic situations. Certainty is about our ability to predict what will happen in our work and life. Autonomy reflects our sense of control over events, workflows, and processes that are important to us. Relatedness refers to how connected and safe we feel with others. And fairness is about how fair we perceive the interactions between people to be, which can apply to ourselves and to others.
Consider, for example, what you feel emotionally when you discover that you have been excluded from an activity at work. You might sense this as a threat to your status and relatedness. Neuroscience research has shown that such a threat response will activate the same part of the brain as physical pain does. Your brain will therefore experience pain and let you know that you are in danger. You can’t turn off this brain signal, but you can learn—with practice—to mitigate its impact and shift from a negative threat response to a positive reward response sooner than you would otherwise do. As Rock points out, the SCARF model can help you anticipate threat responses, regulate them during an emotional event (by recognizing and labeling them as one of the five social concerns), and learn from them afterward to be better prepared next time.
When you feel threatened physically or socially, your brain will release the stress hormone cortisol, which reduces your creativity and productivity. That will further increase your feeling of being threatened. On the other hand, when you are included and acknowledged with positive feedback by colleagues in your workplace, you will feel rewarded. Your brain releases dopamine, leading you to find ways to be rewarded again soon. All in all, your ability to manage your emotional responses will determine how effectively you can collaborate with others in the workplace. Clearly, that’s of critical importance.
Question
My question for you this week is this: When you last pulled a face like that of the woman in the photo, what was that about? What triggered you? You can learn essential lessons from understanding what triggers you into a threat response. That’s where the SCARF model and test can help. Was it about a threat to your status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, or fairness in how you or others were treated?
As a human, you will experience negative emotions that trigger a threat response in your brain and body. It happens to all of us and on a regular basis. The challenge for leaders, therefore, is to anticipate these threat responses, regulate them during an emotional event, and learn from these experiences afterward, for yourself and for your colleagues around you. The SCARF model can help you do that. In a next article, we will discover why SCARF spells trouble for managers and executives, and what they can do to prepare themselves.
Assessments like the SCARF test are an integral part of our coaching work with clients. As you find out what drives you in life and work—from several perspectives—a door will open to new possibilities for your growth as a leader. These insights will also help you to select a specific challenge to focus on in your next leadership transition. That’s how our leadership coaching will help you discover new ways to make the most of your current challenges at work, so that you can continue to grow your leadership and advance in your career.
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