What is the Enneagram? The Enneagram is a personality type system that helps individuals better understand themselves and those they interact with. There are nine distinct personality types and each one has unique thought patterns, feelings, and behaviors stemming from that person’s overarching view of the world. The Enneagram helps your employees to be self-aware, which makes them knowledgeable about their own faults and weaknesses:
- Type 1, The Reformer: The perfectionist that fears making mistakes.
- Type 2, The Helper: The people-pleaser that habitually ignores his or her own emotional and physical needs.
- Type 3, The Achiever: The approval-seeker driven by a need to prove him or herself.
- Type 4, The Individualist: The creative that often struggles with belonging.
- Type 5, The Investigator: The observational intellectual with a tendency to isolate him or herself.
- Type 6, The Loyalist: The troubleshooter that can sometimes see problems where there are none.
- Type 7, The Enthusiast: The lover of life that can easily become bored and tends to avoid pain.
- Type 8, The Challenger: The powerhouse that can sometimes come across as confrontational and intimidating.
- Type 9, The Peacemaker: The conflict-avoider with a tendency toward passive-aggressive behavior.
By bringing the Enneagram into the workplace, you open up opportunities for employees to better understand one another, and you provide those in management positions with the tools they need to lead successfully. Here are five ways the Enneagram can improve relationships between employees.
1. Improves Communication
The Enneagram not only says that each type sees the world differently but takes it a step further to explain why we each see things differently. When your employees better understand themselves, the people they work with, and the people they work under, communication improves throughout the workplace. This understanding can prevent frustrating conflict and help your employees compassionately communicate with one another.
2. Helps Resolve Conflicts
The Enneagram helps your employees to be more emotionally aware, giving them words for things they always felt and perhaps didn’t know how to express. This takes your employees a step beyond misunderstandings and poor communication. Instead, your employees become better listeners, with the tools they need to hear differing opinions and respond constructively to them.
3. Develops Effective Leadership Styles
The leaders in your business can benefit from the Enneagram in several ways. By becoming self-aware, they understand their own strengths and weaknesses. And, by understanding the personality types of those they work with, they can develop a leadership style that those under them will respond to. They will also be able to encourage those employees in the ways they need and help them work on the things that hold them back.
4. Broadens Perspectives
An understanding of the nine types helps your employees and management team to be more open-minded, not just with each other, but with new ideas and changes in the workplace. It helps them see outside of themselves and consider the good of coworkers, managers, and the business as a whole.
5. Values Self-Care
One of the most integral aspects of a healthy employee is a balance between responsibilities and personal needs. The Enneagram can help your employees understand the challenges they face in this aspect, which helps them better care for themselves and find that balance. This is vital because healthy employees make up a healthy business, and a healthy business produces a great bottom line. When your employees know that your business cares about their physical and mental wellbeing in addition to their performance, you are also more likely to recruit great candidates for your team and retain them.
The Enneagram can improve relationships between employees by revealing the reasons why they think, feel, and behave in certain ways. By thinking about employee relationships in a different but strategic way, you can open doors to understanding and constructive conversation within your business.
Caledon Virtual can help you bring even more out-of-the-box strategies to your business. If you’re interested in approaching marketing in the same innovative ways you do with your employees, contact us to schedule a consultation today.
