The Enneagram In Organisations

The Enneagram is used increasingly within a wide variety of organisations as a tool for mentoring, appraising, training, interviewing and selecting. We are often asked to run these programmes within organisations; the usual format is one or two two-day workshops but the material can also be arranged to fit your organisation’s needs.

Introduction

There are many Personality Typing tools around today but we have yet to find one that is as accurate or as dynamic or as challenging or as useful as the Enneagram. Please use the links to get a deeper understanding of the model itself.

The Enneagram is an extremely powerful tool, which describes nine basic personality types or ‘spaces’.

For example, there are three very different ways of making decisions, each of which is valuable but which appears very strange to those that don’t use the same strategy. Some use their heads and their logical side. Some use their emotions and values. Some use their instincts and their gut. Of course, in a business context, we have to explain these decisions in a logical way but for two thirds of the business population this is a post-rationalisation of the their feeling-based or their gut-based decision making strategy. Imagine how useful this information will be when relating to people from different arenas.

At a more detailed level, there are three sub-types within these three domains adding a further degree of complexity that will enable you to understand business colleagues, customers in ways that you could only imagine before.

Previous participants have used the model within the context of:

Personal Growth & Development
Gaining a better understanding of their own motivations and behaviours and developing these to achieve real personal growth.

Team Building
Understanding how different spaces are more likely to fit into certain roles, recognising the contributions of all, even when these are very different, understanding conflict and interpersonal problems and developing strategies to transform them, and utilise the strengths of all members of the team.

Leading, Managing & Supervising
Recognising that groups contain a multiplicity of spaces and that strategies need to be tailored to meet the needs of all and not just our own space, truly understanding the motivation strategies of others and amending these to meet the needs of as many as possible, and developing presentations that capture all of the audience.

Influencing, Selling & Relationship Building
Understanding more quickly the motivations of others and developing behaviours to pace these, developing true empathy with others as you start to understand these other spaces.

The course

The way that the programme is usually structured is that on Day One we spend time helping you to discover your own Enneatype that you operate from in your professional and in your personal life. Discovering this “home space” will help you to understand how you are motivated, how to develop your values and your beliefs, and how these are then reflected in your behaviours. Previous participants have reported their amazement at how closely and deeply this model reflects their own life experiences. As other participants share their own experiences we really discover how very different are our motivations.

On Day Two we usually start exploring how you can use this information when working with others. As the model helps us to predict our own and others’ behaviours when things are going well and also when situations are more difficult to control, the Enneagram is a very powerful assessment and intervention tool. We also use the group as our main learning tool giving you a unique insight into others that will transform your professional and personal relationships.

You will learn invaluable information and strategies about how you can better manage, supervise, influence and relate to each of the other spaces. For example, how managing an Eight is very different to managing a Three. How to lead a team of Fives and Sixes. How selling to a Four is not the same as selling to a One.

The course is taught through short input from Peter McNab; experiential exercises to allow participants to really explore the nine spaces; small and large group discussion.

Where possible, this allows exploration of the different perspectives of each of the nine types.

The Enneagram In Organisations Part Two

Some organisations find that The Enneagram At Work Part One is enough for their particular context; others decide to develop the understanding further with Part Two.

Having already experienced the benefits of using the information learned from the Enneagram Part One you will understand how, by developing these skills to a deeper level, this will help you understand your colleagues and customers even more.

When you know your own space and begin to understand other spaces, you can then begin to examine depths and complexities of this dynamic and exciting model.

In the second workshop we usually explore:

The arrows of each space

The Enneagram shows us what happens to each of the Enneatypes when they are moving towards integration and relaxation, and equally, what happens when they move towards disintegration and stress.

The “Instinctive Variants”
There are three Instinctive Variants: Self-Preservation, One-To-One, and Social, which reflect our main life concerns.

However, for each of the Enneatypes, they take on subtle differences. By understanding how your preferred instinctive variant affects your behaviours, you can begin to notice how the lesser ones also affect your life.

Type- Alikes

One of the challenges some people face when they first encounter the Enneagram is that they identify with more than one space. When we begin to explore the area of type-alikes, we start to understand why this happens. We will take this opportunity to find out exactly which of the Enneatypes are considered type-alikes and to understand why by exploring The Harmonics and The Hornevians. 

Type–alikes are most noticeable in our social style and our coping strategies.

This will give you an extremely thorough understanding of the basics of the Enneagram, which you may continue to build upon.

excellenceforall has been working with the Enneagram since 1996, continuously developing and researching this amazing model. We are constantly updating our information and the courses. We believe that learning is fun and this is reflected in the content and process of the course.

For more information please feel free to contact us.