Working With Healthcare Providers
I'm a
psychotherapist and have co-developed an Enneagram workshop for Nurses, Licensed
Professional Counselors and Social Workers. Do you have any thoughts or pointers on
presenting to healthcare providers?We also have our eye on the business community,
as working to change the existing paradigm is important to both of us.
As a psychotherapist, you won't run into a problem that some
colleagues of mine have encountered, being told "The Enneagram won't work for
us because we run into clinical issues you wouldn't
understand."
I've found professionals
in the fields you've mentioned to be very enthusiastic about the Enneagram as a diagnostic
tool as well as for personal growth.
I have been a bit sneaky, though, by starting off with an
exercise that simultaneously honors their experience and demonstrates more is
possible. With one group of social workers who counsel mentally ill
patients I created a case study from a chapter in Chloe Madanes' Behind the One-Way
Mirror, set them off in subgroups to come up with a treatment plan, and compared their
suggestions to what actually worked. This had nothing overtly to do with the
Enneagram, but it was familiar territory where they could also learn. Meanwhile I
was gathering data about their possible Enneagram styles for later use (especially
necessary with people I've just met). Other than that, the only unique design
component has been the content (e.g., as above, using case situations relevant to
their work). The same has been true for physicians, by the way, though I've only worked
with physicians in administrative positions (e.g., CEOs of healthcare organizations).
Regardless of the target audience I always design an early
exercise that involves self-disclosure (and reinforces the safety of disclosing)
–
making it clear their primary learning will be from observing each other. I
don't
simply talk about it, I have them "do" it. With a group of retirees interested
in relationships, for example, I asked them to review their lives and tell the
group about someone they'd been particularly attracted to and someone they'd particularly
disliked. I arrayed their responses around a circle on the blackboard before
introducing the Enneagram, then asked each one to talk about their choices. Consequently,
I had their own data to refer to in "teaching" the Enneagram. Later,
when we did an exercise on
projection, we went back
to their "dislikes" so they could begin to own those parts in themselves.
I do work with one-time "stranger" groups, but I much
prefer ongoing workshops with homework assignments, and in organizations I prefer
intact work groups (more opportunities to apply what
they're learning). My primary objective is to move them beyond personality typing
and toward a path of transformation, so
I always emphasize observing "how" their patterns work vs. analyzing
"why."
What has worked for me with
an eye to business
is to market a business need, such as "leadership potential" or "more
effective teamwork" and to use the Enneagram in that work, vs. trying to sell myself
as an Enneagram teacher or consultant. Also, I
highly recommend hooking up with someone doing systemic change
consultations. If you don't, you may have difficulty selling what you do
except as a deficit model (i.e., working with people in danger of being
ousted if they don't "shape up"), and/or you could become enormously
frustrated at system barriers to changes in individuals or teams. It's
also great if you can start at the top, so there's a common language and the senior people are modelling the value and
effectiveness of the Enneagram.
A particular consultation with Corporate Change Systems
involved "re-aligning a mental health services provider around its core processes,
including structural changes, work and process design, changes in information and human
resource systems, and management and leadership style" (I did the last part, using
the Enneagram).
If
I were marketing anew to business right now, I'd use a
learning organization focus (the
organizational equivalent of transformation). In their book
How Organizations Learn,
DiBella and Nevis define the "learning organization" as "having the
capability to adapt to changes in its environment and to respond to lessons of experience
by altering organizational behavior." This is very consistent (and drawn from the
same theoretical background) as my focus on
mutuality
in relationships (the equivalent of "learning pairs").
DiBella, by the way, is co-developer of the Healthcare Learning Inventory.
Their research demonstrated high overlap between generic
learning factors and those specific to health care. The most significant change in
labeling involved "Climate of Openness," which health care clients changed to
"Trusting Relationships" ("…considered it to be the single most important factor
that leads to learning. When you trust your colleagues, you can be open about explaining
not only your successes but also your failures ... take risks to learn … errors are
more apt to be reported, detected, and corrected…").
They identified three important additional factors:
Learning Confidence,
"…defined as 'experience in learning from successes,
mistakes, and specific events; experience in trying new things; belief that all groups can
learn.' … Given the major changes that have occurred in health care over the last
fifty years, it is hard to ignore the validity of this factor."
Shared Vision "…is critical to the health care industry because of its
historical focus on mission and service to community and humankind ... Given the changes
that are occurring within the health care industry now, learning on a team level occurs
because values and vision are shared within the team."
Learning Enjoyment, "... defined as 'celebrating learning achievements and creating
an atmosphere where humor and fun are part of the process of acquiring new knowledge.'
Failures and mistakes are life-and-death matters in health care, and unless some humor and
lightness can be brought to the sharing of such occurrences, there is apt to be little
sharing of the lessons learned from such events."
