The
Enneagram in Our World Today
I'm a high school student in Toronto,
writing a feature article about the Enneagram. I've just visited
your Enneagram pages as well as your Out of the Box Coaching pages. I'd
appreciate if you're willing to be interviewed by me through email. The
focus of my article will be about the application of Enneagram in our world
today:
What's so
special about the Enneagram that you decided to use it in your work?
I've used a number of personality tools and models with
business executives, such as the Center
for Creative Leadership's Benchmarks, and most of these are useful for
measuring an individual's current behavior. Many times it's sufficient to help
someone improve their performance if they get clear
and descriptive feedback because they've either never received feedback, or the feedback
they've received has left them feeling defensive and with relatively little insight into
what exactly needs changing (e.g., "You're arrogant"). But when I wanted
to help individual leaders look beyond their immediate behaviors, my only recourse was to
adapt some practices from clinical psychology. The MBTI is more useful than some
measures because it has a developmental element.
However, I became frustrated over the years at how difficult it
was for even the most well-meaning clients to engage in long-lasting, deep-seated change.
I longed for a frame of reference I could use in business settings to
help executives change in more basic ways. When I discovered the Enneagram, I used it
first to work on
myself. My personal experience was so powerful
I knew I'd found the right tool to help my clients.
In Robert Hargrove's
Masterful Coaching he writes about three levels of change:
Single-Loop Learning: Learning new skills
and capabilities through incremental improvement (e.g., "I'll learn how to be
less defensive when s/he attacks me").
Double-Loop Learning: Fundamentally reshaping
the underlying patterns of our thinking and behavior so we're capable of doing
different things (e.g., "She's a worrier and I'm an adventurer, so we're probably
polarized in our communication: the more she worries, the more I push for risks, and vice
versa;" or "He's a
One, so when his anger shows up, his own fear of falling
short of perfection has probably been triggered; how can I use that understanding to
change how I react?")
Triple-Loop Learning: Transforming who we are
by creating a shift in our context or point of view about ourselves (e.g.,
shifting to "What's the pay-off for me in keeping this dysfunctional dynamic
going?" or "I usually start out seeing the other person/myself as the bad guy;
how does this help maintain the status quo instead of helping us change how we
interact?")
As Hargrove suggests, transformation occurs when we're
internally committed to goals that match our personal aspirations and provide appropriate
challenge, and when we seek valid information (without defensiveness): then we can make
free and informed choices. While all three levels of learning are useful and
important, transformation of an interpersonal dynamic requires triple-loop learning. I believe
the Enneagram is the best available vehicle to bring
about
triple-loop learning.
What do most companies think about analyzing their workers' personality style with the
Enneagram? How have their opinions changed through the years you've been working as
a coach?
I haven't approached my clients with the suggestion that we
"analyze their personality styles." It's important in working with
business people to understand the demands of their environment and to speak their
language. Here's the way I frame it in my marketing literature:
Excellence in leadership is the root source of competitive
advantage. It's the reason your company has been a success so far. And it's the one
"edge" your competitors can't copy. Yet full leadership potential does not
always arise naturally. Even fine performers reach top leadership positions only to find
that strengths contributing to their success now need to be enhanced or even supplanted as
they face changing roles and changing competitive needs. Leadership
coaching:
-
Clarifies your company's values and beliefs about good leadership
-
Profiles the leadership competencies that will continue to make your
company thrive
-
Creates energy and excitement about your company's leadership vision
-
Sets the expectation that top people will model these "future
skills"
-
Provides a leadership "template" for recruiting, hiring,
and promoting
-
Ensures that even high-performing executives will fine-tune their
capabilities
-
Enhances teamwork through better understanding of self and others
-
Assures readiness of high-potential candidates for key leadership
positions
-
Gives all employees a clear picture of their path to promotion and
success
-
Prepares executives for new or expanded roles
-
Salvages key contributors who have somehow gone "off-track"
So rather than marketing
the Enneagram, I market
leadership potential and use the Enneagram as a tool to aid in the
process. I always introduce the Enneagram in terms of its practicality: describing my
own experience and giving anonymous examples of how other clients have
benefited. By using the Enneagram in this way I've never had a client question the
process of analyzing and interpreting their own and others' behavior. People are eager to
learn more about themselves and what makes other people tick, so they can
reduce their frustrations and make their work more fulfilling.
Do you think I can interview some of these companies?
Because my work is very personal and highly confidential, that
would not be possible. However, I can share the results from work with an
executive client I coached. She'd been described as
"driven without knowing what drives her," someone who "wants to do
the right thing but comes off as inflexible and intolerant, runs out of
patience, judges people, and loses her temper using a tone of voice that leaves people
feeling hurt, blamed, and sometimes degraded." In follow-up interviews six months after
the coaching process:
(From her boss): "She's been totally transformed.
She's 180
degrees from where she was before. She empowers her people now, so that even the
ones who weren't used to being responsible before have grown. She took over a
project for me and her organizational skills were top-notch. The whole process was
flawless."
(From peers): "She has great attitude, a willingness to talk
things over." "She openly and routinely discusses business decisions that can
affect us." "She's easy to talk to and non-defensive."
"She's very open to feedback."
(From subordinates): "We enjoy the freedom to make decisions we
didn't make before. She's interested in our opinions, shows clear appreciation for
our efforts, and looks out for our interests." "She's very supportive when
there are glitches, very willing to sit down and talk, and to help." "Her
biggest plus is her sense of humor; she's great to work with because she'll give and
take and joke." "She's absolutely one of the best people I've ever worked
for."
How would you predict the future development of the
Enneagram in the business field? Is it going to change companies' dynamics?
There are other
coaches and consultants who use the Enneagram at a level of
organizational change, but I can only
comment from my own experience. As I indicated before, long-term change is difficult. But if leaders are committed to doing the work required and if they
engage their teams in the same effort, it's possible to create an environment where
people are open to feedback without defensiveness. As the organizational theorist Chris Argyris
suggested,
in self-renewing and evolving systems people seek valid information
so they can make free and informed choices, and they're committed these choices
as well as to ongoing monitoring (continuing feedback) of their implementation. This
creates an environment of high personal responsibility, joint accountability (mutuality),
and an orientation toward growth. An
organization (or a
relationship)
is not likely to fail when participants openly and frequently test and confirm (or disconfirm)
their
assumptions.
I can report about one organization
with an
Eight CEO where we created
a reasonably open
environment through a combination of individual coaching and team
workshops (over a period of several years). His company is not without problems, but
they have a continuing commitment to understand and discuss how their relationships help or hinder their
business success.
In
another situation I coached the
Six VP of Operations in a large
corporation who changed his
part of the organization from "heavy-handed" management (very militaristic) to a
more collaborative environment, through a combination of personal coaching and
wide-scale training. Unfortunately a new President was brought in who subscribed to the old
methods, so all of our efforts for the better part of three years went down the drain
within weeks. The good news is that what goes around comes around: several
years later that President was replaced with someone whose values were more compatible with my
client's.
