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Do you experience any of these problems yourself or in your organization?Difficult colleagues? Loss of employees to other organizations? Team members who are at cross-purposes because of different goals? Lack of trust among team members? People not taking responsibility for actions? Being asked to perform a job for which you are not suited without a specific job description? Lack of energy and motivation because of stress and conflict at work? High rates of absenteeism or presenteeism (people who are present but not engaged in their work)? Difficulty attracting people to work in your organization? Lack of management skills because of a promotion to a new position? |
Exceptional personal leadership is an above average capacity to understand yourself and others. This gives you an advantage in solving common workplace problems by developing empathy and an appreciation of others’ points of view. Not only that, but it will save you and your organization time and money.
These are the HARD FACTS about soft skills:
- There is a proven association between absenteeism and unpleasant working conditions
- 53% of the Alberta workforce reports being “very stressed” at work
- Employees with high work/life conflict missed an average of 13.2 days compared to 5.9 days for those with low conflict
- Just 17% of Canadians are highly engaged in their work (recent survey by Towers Perrin HR Services)
- In Canada, loss of productivity, wage replacement, disabilities and absenteeism costs $30 billion a year
Through our seminars and training you can improve personal relationships and achieve bottom-line results
- Discover innate leadership strengths
- Reduce conflict and stress
- Motivate others with your vision and goals
- Attract and retain valuable employees
- Create productive and efficient teams
- Improve your communication skills
- Enhance your personal and professional growth
- Increase emotional intelligence
- Break through personality dynamics and create harmonious working relationships so you can increase work productivity and profits, reduce costs and improve customer relations
Why is the Enneagram so effective?Because it is the oldest, simplest and most powerful way of understanding human dynamics and change in use today. |
Simply put - the reason the Enneagram is so useful and practical is because it is not a personality typology; it is an explanation of character fixations. By describing a deeper layer of human nature, it gives you a real understanding of yourself and others.
Personality characteristics can change over time. For example, a “grumpy” person can learn to become more pleasant, a “shy” person can become more outgoing. Character fixation, however remains constant over one’s lifetime and is the bedrock upon which personality is built.
Therefore the Enneagram of Character Fixations is much more meaningful and has many more concrete applications than any personality typology.
Here’s what this means – the Enneagram describes the “focus of attention” of each of nine types of individuals:
Type One: Focus on mistakes
Type Two: Focus on others’ needs
Type Three: Focus on completing tasks
Type Four: Focus on being special
Type Five: Focus on intrusions by others
Type Six: Focus on what could go wrong
Type Seven: Focus on multiple plans
Type Eight: Focus on how to maintain control
Type Nine: Focus on others’ agendas and how to stay peaceful and connected
When you understand how you limit your perception and how others’ see the world you can expand your way of thinking and understand others’ points of view.
Not only that - the Enneagram enables you to recognize why people do the things they do because it gives you an x-ray of the nine core motivations that drive people’s behaviour. It provides you with the ability to adapt to other people’s styles; encourage their highest potential and work closely together with others.
Are you disillusioned with personality profiling? |
Have you ever hired a consultant and spent hours learning a personality typology; then thrown it in a desk drawer, never to be used again? Often this is the case, because:
• The written report of your type and others on your team has many inaccuracies which do not match your perception of yourself and others.
• The personalities are described in abstract terms which make little sense after the training session is over.
• There may be too many types to remember.
The Enneagram is fun to learn and easy to Remember. |
It captures your imagination by describing types you already know! You have likely referred to someone as the boss or the princess or the absent-minded professor. You are picking up easily recognized Enneagram traits.
- There are only nine Enneagram types. Patterns of speech and behaviour enable you to easily determine someone else’s type.
- Instead of abstract labels, the type is described by a concrete underlying need; for example, the need to be successful (link to Benefits of the Enneagram)
- We interview panels of each of the types. You have the opportunity to tell your colleagues in a safe environment just what makes you tick and how they can get along better with you. As well, you hear first-hand how they see the world.
While you are learning the Enneagram you will:
- Be entertained
- Understand why you and others think, feel and act they way they do
- Realize why your perception of the world differs fundamentally from another’s
- Understand how you can maintain positive energy all day
- Learn ways to communicate and work together more effectively
An ancient philosophy and modern tool for understanding human nature |
I mentioned that the Enneagram is the oldest way of understanding human behaviour. Hundreds of years of observations of human nature can’t be wrong! Homer (circa 750 B. C. E.) wrote about the nine themes in the Odyssey and Chaucer wrote about the types in the Miller’s Tale.
Now the Enneagram is used in corporations such as Sony, Oracle, the Bank of Thailand, Nu-Ear, Wachovia, Sucromiles (a multinational chemical company in Columbia) for organizational effectiveness, including leadership development, team building, communication and conflict resolution. As well, the Enneagram has been taught at several universities – Stanford, Loyola and here at the University of Calgary (by us).
Tom’s Personal Story – Senior Partner of The Inner Works Inc.
As the owner and founder of a 35-person architectural firm I was at a breaking point. In utter frustration I had given in to years of animosity and handed the reins of power to my long-term partner, beginning my transition out of my firm. Gradually, over a period of several years, rivalry had been building between us. My junior partner, whom I had trained as an architect had been undermining me at every turn. Since he was 15 years younger than me, you could attribute his animosity to a young guy separating from his mentor and gunning for the top position. However, there was more to our relationship breakdown. It was the negative aspects of each of our Enneagram types that were creating the discord. If I had known then what I know now about the Enneagram; I could have prevented this fiasco. I would have been able to see my part in the friction between us and use the Enneagram as a tool to understand myself and my partner to defuse the conflict between us. Years earlier, when my partner was an employee, there were red flags that should have warned me what was ahead. He was taking credit for others’ work, lying to clients and undermining the team. All causes for termination. Simply put, he had an insatiable need to succeed that drove him to walk over others, particularly myself, in his quest for power and recognition. Worst of all, I was allowing all of this to happen. I was acting as a doormat and brushing these problems under the rug. I had such a need to be peaceful that I didn’t want to confront him about any of his actions. He and I were both acting out of the lower expressions of our Enneagram type – the way we all act when we are under pressure and unaware of our own motives. Fortunately, at this time I acquired a coach to help me deal with this very tense situation. As well, I took extensive training in communication and learned to deal with people who use hostile humour and continuous putdowns to demoralize others. Luckily, the situation was resolved before anyone was sued and I reasserted my right to run my own firm. Soon after we were bought out by an engineering conglomerate and I left the architectural profession. That was seven years ago. Since then I have become a Certified Enneagram Teacher and have been teaching and coaching with the Enneagram since 1997. When I look back on 35 years running my own architectural firm, I realize that my office employed all the Enneagram types. Type One – The Need to be Perfect Type Two – The Need to be Helpful Type Three – The Need to Succeed Type Four – The Need to be Special Type Five – The Need to be Detached Type Six – The Need to be Safe Type Seven – The Need to be Excited Type Eight – The Need to Control Type Nine – The Need to be Peaceful So there it is – the story of the nine types in action. Ineffective “Flavor-of-the-Month” Management TrainingWhen I was the CEO of my firm we hired many organizational consultants to help us with generic team building and communication work. We also had the staff complete well-known personality inventories that described their behaviour. What was lacking in all this faddish training was an understanding of the basic underlying needs and core motivations that drive behaviour. In reflecting on my days as an architect and leader, I know that if everyone on my staff had an understanding of the Enneagram people would have taken more responsibility for their own actions. There would have been more understanding and collaboration among all members of the team. We would have respected each others’ motives and our positives and negatives. If we could have perceived the world from each others’ perspectives we would have been able to deal with the inevitable conflicts of Enneagram style. The bottom-line is that I would have run a much more effective and profitable business. However, I’ll sum up with a quote from Melvyn Bragg, author of The Adventure of English: 500 AD to 2000, The Biography of a Language. |
“[Hindsight] …pays no respect to the way life is really lived - forwards, generally blindly, full of accidents, fortunes and misfortunes, patternless and often adrift.” |
In order to help you avoid some of the mistakes I made, an important question to ask yourself is:
What Enneagram style are you and what are your blind spots?
Read our “Nine Enneagram Types ” section as a beginning. But don’t stop there. In order to identify yourself accurately and truly understand all of the nine types, come to a seminar or workshop and hear people speak for themselves. You will be fascinated by hearing people’s stories of their lives and how they perceive the world. Check out our “Seminars and Workshops” for the next date you can attend.
| In the meantime email us now (info@innerworks.ca) for your free report on “7 Ways to Use the Enneagram at Work to Prevent Employee Turnover.” |
Phone: (403) 220-0270 Email: info@innerworks.ca
© 2006 Inner Works Inc.