The Hijack You Don’t See Coming

THE COACHING EDGE: A LEADING WITH IMPACT SERIES  ·  PART 2 OF 5

Two kinds of emotional hijacking — and the quieter one does just as much damage

I’ve spent a lot of time in my career thinking about the leaders who lose their temper — the ones who raise their voice in meetings, who react before they think, who leave damage behind in moments of pressure. We talk about those leaders often. We recognize them easily.

What we talk about far less is the other kind.

The leader who goes quiet when they should speak. Who defers when they should push back. Who sits in a room full of important decisions and lets the moment pass — not because they have nothing to say, but because something inside them decides that what they have to say doesn’t belong in this room, at this level, with these people.

I know that leader well. I’ve been him.

Early in my career I stepped into a VP role — a significant move, a real opportunity. I was ready for the work. What I wasn’t fully prepared for was the moment that tested whether I was ready to lead.

We gathered as a team to begin mapping out a new organizational structure — roles, reporting lines, the future shape of the organization. It was exactly the kind of conversation where a VP’s voice should be present. Where perspective, instinct, and honest pushback are not just welcome — they’re the job.

I had thoughts. Good ones, I think. But the CEO was in the room.

And something shifted.

Not dramatically. Not obviously. Just quietly — the way the most costly things often happen in leadership. I convinced myself that his position made his judgment more valid than my own. That deferring was the same as respecting. That staying quiet in the presence of authority was a form of wisdom rather than what it actually was.

A retreat.

I called it respect. It was really a hijack — just not the kind anyone would have noticed from the outside.

———

When we think about emotional hijacking in leadership, we almost always picture the outburst. The raised voice. The slammed door. The reaction that everyone in the room remembers and nobody mentions afterward.

But there are two kinds of hijacking — and the quieter one does just as much damage.

The first takes you out of the room loudly. The second takes you out of the room silently. Both represent the same failure: the moment when your emotional response overrides your leadership presence.

The outburst hijack is visible. People see it, name it, work around it. Leaders who struggle with it usually know they struggle with it.

The silence hijack is invisible. It looks like deference. It looks like humility. It can even look like emotional maturity — the composed leader who never loses their cool.

But composure and presence are not the same thing. You can be perfectly calm and completely absent. You can sit in a room without raising your voice and still fail to lead.

I never found a way to get that moment back. My voice was never heard in that conversation — and the decisions moved forward without it. It took years, and a great deal of reflection, to fully understand what had happened in that room and why. What I gained from that experience wasn’t a fix. It was perspective — the kind that only comes from living through something and being honest enough to examine it. I know now what I didn’t know then. And I know what I won’t let happen again.

That’s the hijack nobody warns you about.

———

Emotional intelligence — real emotional intelligence — isn’t the ability to suppress what you feel. It’s the ability to stay present with what you feel, name it honestly, and choose your response rather than be driven by it.

The silence hijack happens when status, fear, uncertainty, or the sheer weight of the room convinces you that your voice doesn’t belong here. That the safer move is to wait. To watch. To let someone else carry the moment.

Sometimes waiting is wisdom. But chronic silence in the face of authority isn’t wisdom — it’s a pattern. And patterns have costs that are hard to trace back to their source until long after the damage is done.

The org chart conversation I sat in years ago didn’t produce a dramatic failure. No one noticed my silence. The decisions got made. The meeting ended.

But I carried something out of that room that took me a long time to name: the quiet erosion of my own credibility — not in anyone else’s eyes, but in my own. I had been in the room. I hadn’t been present in it.

That’s the cost of the hijack nobody sees.

———

Here’s what I’ve learned — from my own experience and from coaching leaders through theirs:

The first step isn’t speaking up. It’s noticing when you’ve gone quiet and asking why.

Not with judgment. With curiosity.

What just happened in me? What did I tell myself in that moment? Whose voice did I trust more than my own — and why?

Those questions don’t fix the pattern immediately. But they make it visible. And you can’t change what you can’t see.

Staying present when everything in you wants to leave — whether that means leaving loudly through an outburst or quietly through silence — is one of the most demanding things leadership asks of us.

It’s also one of the most important.

Have you ever recognized your own silence hijack — a moment when you went quiet and later understood why? I’d welcome hearing about it in the comments.

Jim Pacey runs Pacey Consulting & Coaching, specializing in emotional intelligence-based leadership development and executive coaching. With 38+ years of nonprofit C-suite leadership experience, Jim helps leaders develop the full range of skills that sustainable leadership requires. Learn more at paceyconsulting.com.