6 | Leadership Development using the Enneagram
Have you ever wondered if an issue you were facing at work was related to the task or could be related to personality styles? Do you long to feel more confident in your ability to be a great leader? What if I could share data that could give you x-ray vision into your team dynamics?
In this episode, I share how I use the Enneagram personality system to help teams reach their full potential. We cover how the Enneagram can help with leadership development, how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your team, how to build stronger relationships to reduce friction and inefficiencies, and how to be more effective communicators.
Episode Contents:
The problem with traditional team building efforts (1:23)
The first way I use the Enneagram with teams: leadership development (2:30)
Four types of leaders - which one are you? (5:03)
The second way I use the Enneagram with teams: identifying strengths and weakness of team style (8:20)
(The third and fourth way I use the Enneagram with teams are explored in Part 2 next week.)
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Sample Integrative Enneagram’s team report
(Note: I can offer a slight discount when you run the report through me, and I get access to additional resources that can help you unpack what is in the report.)New to the Enneagram? Check out my guide to getting started with the Enneagram here.
Have a favorite podcast player? Here are direct episode links to:
Transcript
(This transcript was generated with the help of AI - please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.)
Welcome to episode five: How I use the Enneagram to help teams. I'm Michelle Kay Anderson and I'm excited to bring you this two-part series on four ways that you can use the Enneagram to help improve performance at work.
I recorded this episode after conducting a team workshop with a group that I've been working with for a couple of years. And I was celebrating the fact that we did some really deep work over a couple of days and how that opportunity becomes available to teams when you've been working with a system like the Enneagram for a little bit. So I thought I'd share specifics on how you can apply the Enneagram at work so you can evaluate if this might be a good fit for you.
The problem with traditional team building efforts
Typically managers who are working on team building might have the team take a personality test or bring in an expert to conduct a workshop. But often within like a week, things seem to go back to normal. Working with a system like the Enneagram allows you not just to understand each other better, but to begin to identify interventions and pattern changes that will move the needle for you collectively.
But working with a system like the Enneagram is a little bit different in that it allows you not just to understand each other better or to put each other into categories. Right. But it allows you to begin to identify specific interventions and patterns that you can change that are going to move the needle for you collectively. The conscious leaders that I work with know that 📍 categorizing people is not a useful way to build connection.
There are four main ways I use the Enneagram at work
I just completed a team workshop with a group that I’ve been working with for a couple of years. We were doing some deep work that can only happen when you’ve been working with the system for a little bit.
The 4 main things that I tend to work on with teams when I’m using the Enneagram are leadership development, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the current team style, improving relationships on the team, and becoming more effective communicators.
Let’s start by looking at leadership development specifically…
1 - Leadership Development
In 21st-century organizations, every employee is encouraged to think of themselves as leaders - and that seems to come with a seemingly endless set of challenges beyond just ‘doing your job.’ Being a leader in this new world means dealing with the fast pace of change, the need to improve communication to foster better collaboration, and the need to relate to an increasingly diverse workforce and stakeholders. Now more than ever we need reliable tools to help decode and resolve the misunderstandings and relationship problems that happen all the time in business.
One of the mistakes new managers make when they get promoted or take on the responsibility of a new team is that they try to adopt a new leadership style or to strengthen their leadership style by modeling it after (typically) a mentor or the previous manager or someone who has been successful at the organization. But the type of leadership development that I’m interested in is helping you to trust your unique style and the gifts that you bring and the perspective that you have about the work that needs to be done.
We don’t just need one kind of leader! There is a lot of value in organizations of having a diverse set of experiences and personalities that are leading the way.
Warren Bennis, a prominent author, scholar, and leadership expert is quoted as saying:
"Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.”
And Peter Hawkins, who is also an author, leadership professor, and management consultant thinks that:
To develop leadership is less about learning new skills and more about unlearning habits and breaking free from limiting mindsets we have already aquired.
I love the idea of thinking about leadership development as a homecoming to who you really are and the potentiality that already exists inside of you. And working with the Enneagram types can help you really embrace what makes you unique and more clearly see the ego defensiveness that might be getting in the way or become unconscious habits that are no longer serving you.
It also allows you to access the wisdom of all three of your centers - your mind, body, and heart - so that you can lead from a more grounded place and access a deeper source of wisdom.
According to research by Daniel Goleman and others, the key factors in developing high-quality leadership are self-awareness and emotional intelligence
Self-awareness = The ability to be mindful, or conscious about what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.
Emotional intelligence = The ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions + the capacity to recognize, understand, and empathize with the emotions of others.
Imagine I’m drawing a graph that is divided into four quadrants. Along the horizontal axis we have emotional intelligence, and along the vertical axis we have self-awareness. Across the bottom we have leaders who are not self-aware, and across the top ones that are highly self-aware. And on the left of this graph, we have leaders who have low emotional intelligence, and on the right ones with higher emotional intelligence.
Leadership styles in a four-quadrant model using self-awareness and emotional intelligence.
So if we were to put a name to each of these quadrants, I might call the lower left quadrant that has low emotional intelligence and low self-awareness TASK MANAGERS. These people will put their head down and do what they need to do - as long as the rules are clear, they are good to go.
As a leader develops higher self-awareness, but maybe they still have low emotional intelligence (so we are in the upper left quadrant here), I might call this the EGOCENTRIC ARCHITECT. The high self-awareness makes them acutely aware of their own desires, but they can be blind to the needs of other people because they have low emotional intelligence. These folks tend to be outlaws and a little bit oblivious. And their self-interest tends to drive them a little more, which is why I call them the egocentric architects. They are often quite smart and know how to get things done.
Now we go over to leaders who have high emotional intelligence. So in the lower right quadrant you have high emotional intelligence and low self-awareness. I might call these leaders EMPATHIC MARTYRS. They are very attuned to the needs of other people but a little blind to their own wants and needs. They can be self-sacrificing and super warm.
And finally, you have leaders with high emotional intelligence and high self-awareness in that upper right quadrant. These leaders I call RESILIENT VISIONARIES because they are self-aware of their own strengths (and limitations and patterns that tend to get in their own way) and they have high self-awareness. So they can self-regulate, attune to the needs of others, and even see into the environment. These are folks who have better access to the wisdom of all three of the centers of intelligence - that allows them to be more creative and innovative because they can see things more clearly.
The idea here is that working with the Enneagram can help you develop both self-awareness and emotional intelligence in a way that can help you collectively move up and into that upper right quadrant.
So that is how I use the Enneagram to help with leadership development.
2 - Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your team style
The second way that I use the Enneagram to help teams reach their full potential is by running the Integrative Enneagram report that creates a team profile. And with that team profile, I’m able to identify the strengths, weaknesses, and risks associated with your current team style.
We look at the dominant style on your team and the two supporting style that come up underneath it. In your report, you get this bar chart that shows you each of the 9 styles where you rank. So it is really easy to see which style you might be overusing, and which ones might be supporting and coloring the certain strengths you have on your team. But it also identifies the lowest used styles on your team to help you understand where you might have a weakness or a blind spot.
Excerpt from a team report from the Integrative Enneagram. This team has a type 2 style (Relational support) that is supported by 3 (Smart effectiveness) and 7 (Enthusiastic networking). But they have a style of action that looks more like a 1 (Disciplined structure). And an underutilized style of 5 (Technical specialization) and 6 (Risk awareness).
Seeing these imbalances visually can help you name some dynamics that might be playing out on your team that you couldn’t fully understand or put your finger on. And the combination of all of this knowledge helps us identify risks associated with relying on our strengths too much, or some of those blindspots - so as you plan your project you can mitigate those risks by planning to add more data or pull in more resources depending on how risk averse you are or what resources are available too.
This is also where we use Tuckman’s stages of development (LINK) and overlay that with the Enneagram styles. So you can look at how your team style shows up in each of those stages of development that we talked about in episode 2 and pinpoint specific interventions that are going to accelerate through those stages faster so you can get to high performance as a team more efficiently.
How a type 2 team would experience each of Bruce Tuckman’s stages of development. (Excerpt from Integrative Enneagram’s team report.)
So that is the second way - identifying strengths, weaknesses, and risks associated with your team style.
Conclusion
So that covers the first two ways that I work with teams to improve performance, using insights from the Enneagram - we're cultivating your unique leadership style and identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your team style. These are the first steps and becoming a more empowering, conscious leader.
In the next episode, I'm going to cover building trust and becoming more effective communicators. Because I go into detail on Enneagram patterns in the next episode, you might want to brush up on the system, if it is new to you. In addition to the free content available on my blog at michellekayanderson.com/enneagram101,
I also have a course that breaks it all down for you in under two hours. You can find that at michellekanderson.com/enneagramforteams.
If you already know that you want access to this type of information for your team and are interested in running a team report, you can DM me or go to michellekayanderson.com/services to learn more.
And if you have a specific question that you want me to answer on this podcast, you can go to uplevelingwork.com. Click on leave a voicemail. And I'll get in touch with you for a future episode.
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