Teambuilding and the Enneagram
By Mario Sikora
Copyright 2006 Mario Sikora. All Rights Reserved.
A popular pastime among Enneagram aficionados is assigning personality
types to public figures and fictional characters. Those who use the Enneagram in
business do the same thing with organizations, saying that this company is a
Type Nine company or that company is a Type Two company, etc. While this
exercise may be academically interesting, it offers limited practical value.
Organizations, especially large corporations or government agencies, are
extremely complex and personality type begins to lose significance once you get
beyond a certain degree of complexity.
The value of understanding personality type is in understanding intrapersonal
dynamics and interpersonal relationships. That is, there is value in knowing that I
am an Eight and that, because I behave in “Eight-ish” ways, I have certain
strengths and weaknesses and there are specific patterns of seeing the world
that I must modify in order to grow. There is also value in knowing that my
coworker is a Nine, because it tells me that there will be specific ways in which we
may clash and specific ways in which we are similar and that there are specific
modifications we can make to improve our relationship.
Identifying the “personality type” of a company is of less value, however.
Let’s take Microsoft as an example. Microsoft’s culture looks Eight-ish—the
company is extremely aggressive and seeks to dominate its markets with a
hunger that is well beyond what is typically seen in the business world. But so
what? What can one do with the observation that Microsoft is “Eight-ish” beyond
the simple fact of knowing it?
In a practical sense--not much. If you are a competitor, you already know that
you must compete aggressively with them; if you are a collaborator, you will
adhere to all the same partnering agreements you would adhere to anyway. If you
are a customer, you will base your purchasing decisions on the usual factors:
price, convenience, quality, brand loyalty, etc.
On an individual level, it may help to know the “type” of your company so you
can understand how your tendencies may be out of sync with the larger
organizational culture. It may also help to know how company-wide values rooted
in Ennea-type supports negative behaviors. If, for example, the type of your
company is Type Nine, people should watch for company-wide tendencies to be
passive aggressive, avoid conflict, become complacent, etc.
However, once you get beyond a certain size (say a couple of hundred people)
organizational culture is far more complicated than the characteristics of specific
personality type. An organization that size must be broken into pieces in order to
be manageable, and it is in these pieces—the departments and teams of a
company—that Ennea-type comes into play. The manageable issues relating to
group and interpersonal dynamics rarely occur on a company-wide level; they
usually play out on the individual or departmental levels (even corporate strategy
is set by a team within the organization). Understanding these dynamics in the
light of the Enneagram can be extremely valuable for an organization.
Here’s how:
Our personality is the mechanism we use for interacting with our environment,
meeting our needs, and satisfying our values. This mechanism forms at the
individual level, of course, but it also forms at the team or department level. For
example, a sales department has very specific needs: identify customers and sell
product, co-ordinate with internal departments (marketing, engineering, etc.) and
get them to perform in ways that help the sales department sell product. The
individuals on the sales team will each have a distinct personality type and there
will probably be a diversity of types represented on the team. At the same time, a
sales department will typically settle in on a “personality type” that is the most
effective way to satisfy the team’s primary needs.
This group personality type is referred to as “modal personality,” which is
based on the idea that there tends to be a personality structure that is collectively
shared by people in a given society even though the individuals in that society
may have very different personalities.
Thus, even though the individuals may have distinct personalities, the group
will act in ways consistent with the modal. (Many sales departments take on a
Seven-ish modal personality even if there are few Sevens on the team because
the strategy of Type Seven, Striving to be Excited(1), tends to be the most
effective in selling: Show excitement and enthusiasm for the product and the
buyer will be more inclined to buy your product. Without this excitement to catch
the customer’s initial interest, quality, service, price, etc. don’t really matter.)
Using this concept, it is possible to improve a team’s performance using the
same principles that one would use to improve an individual’s performance.
A recent intervention I conducted will help illustrate this process.
The group of 10 people at the meeting comprised the Graphic Design and
Publications (GD&P) department of Bahr Electronics, an original equipment
manufacturer of consumer electronics. They were highly intelligent and talented
writers, artists, and editors, some of whom were relatively new to the team and
some of whom had been in their roles for decades. They were responsible for
taking highly technical raw data and translating it into product manuals that were
useful to a layperson. They had to work very closely with Bahr’s engineering,
sales, and marketing departments as well as the resellers of Bahr’s products; all
of whom had different expectations of the manuals—the engineers wanted
technical accuracy, the sales and marketing people wanted speed, and the
resellers wanted ease of use. In addition to these demands, the team had been
hearing rumors that they were thought of as “dysfunctional” by senior
management, their workload increased when personnel lost through attrition were
being replaced, and they started to fear that their jobs might be outsourced.
Needless to say, tensions were high.
After spending the morning discussing the Enneagram and describing the
personality types of the individuals on the team, we turned our focus to the team
as a whole. I asked the group to start describing itself to me as if it was a person:
What is its self-image? How do others in the organization view it? What
challenges does it face? What are its strengths and weaknesses? etc. Magic
Marker in hand, I scribbled on sheets of flip chart paper and prodded for
explanation and elaboration when appropriate. For the most part, however, I let
them engage in a group gripe session. When they were finished, we spread out
the sheets and started looking for a theme.
The theme turned out to be easy to spot.
During the discussion, members of the group used phrases such as:
“We’re misunderstood.”
“People see us as broken.”
“People don’t appreciate the amount of work we do and the quality of our
product compared to our competitors.’”
“We fear being obsolete.”
“We are an internal-facing function in an external-facing world.”
“Nobody wants us in their department because we are a cost rather than a
source of revenue,” and so on.
On the positive side, the group talked about their creativity, their emphasis on
quality, and the vision they brought to their work.
The negative, however, overwhelmingly outweighed the positive in both how
they saw their relationship to the larger organization and how they felt the rest of
the company saw them.
It was clear to me that the modal personality of the team was Type Four,
Striving to be Unique, and a stressed Type Four at that. They saw it as well—we
had talked about Type Four that morning and I compared their description of
themselves to the PowerPoint slides I had presented when talking about the Four.
The similarities were impossible to miss.
Our focus turned to identifying ways that the team could be more effective. At
the most fundamental level, what every team wants is the same thing that every
individual wants: to reduce the ways in which we feel bad and increase the ways
in which we feel good. This is accomplished by aligning our way of being with the
demands of our environment, either by changing our environment or changing
ourselves. In other words, we become happier when we strive to reduce the ways
in which we are maladaptive and increase the ways in which we are adaptive.
The team’s first step was to identify patterns in which it was thinking and
behaving like a stressed or maladaptive Four—the self-pity, the withdrawing, the
negativity, the resentment toward other departments. Then we looked at what
qualities comprise the more adaptive side of the Four—the creativity, vision,
focus on quality, perceptiveness, etc. They agreed to begin replacing the
unproductive language they use—that they were somehow “broken,” that they
were misunderstood and unappreciated, etc.—with more productive language.
When they found themselves discussing the negative they would remind each
other, for example, that while they may be misunderstood, it is their responsibility
to help the people in other departments understand their processes and
procedures, appreciate the quality they brought to their work, and see the value
they added to the company.
They mapped out specific action items they could take to help the company
see the adaptive side of the Four rather than the maladaptive side.
After we addressed the “Four” issues, we began to look at the connecting
points on the Enneagram—points Two and One.
At the individual level, Type Four has a very specific relationship with the
strategies at these points. The strategy at Point One is Striving to be Perfect.
Fours see themselves as deeply imperfect, and they tend to take some comfort in
their imperfection. At the same time, they place very high demands on others to
act “correctly”—to understand and appreciate the Four; to act in ways the Four
wants them to act; and to follow procedures and adhere to ethical or aesthetic
standards that the Four thinks are appropriate.
The strategy at Point Two is Striving to be Connected. While Fours are
capable of showing great empathy and understanding of others, they can fall into
the trap of seeking to connect with people who will focus on the Four’s needs
rather than engaging in a mutually beneficial relationship. They also tend to
withdraw under stress, becoming isolated disengaged.
The GD&P team had the (unrealistic) expectation that the rest of the
organization should take the initiative to seek to understand them and their needs
(one person had earlier commented that it was actually “immoral” for people to do
otherwise) rather than understanding that it was their own responsibility to help
the other people in the organization understand them.
They listed a few simple actions they could take to reach outward and present
the team in a more positive light, emphasizing their accomplishments in a ways
that were appropriate. For example, the team decided on a theme for the weekly
report that went their boss and the rest of their division: “How We Made Today
Better Than Yesterday; How We Are Making Tomorrow Better than Today.”
Rather than seeing the weekly report as an unfortunate piece of bureaucratic
drudgery, they decided to see it as an opportunity to highlight the quality and
value of their creations.
Over the course of a few hours, the team went from depressed, self-pitying,
afraid, and defeated to engaged, confident, and inspired. A couple of key factors
made this transformation possible—factors that apply to individual change as
well: First, the act of focusing on the “personality type” of the team rather than on
the individuals on the team allowed them to detach from the critique and minimize
defensiveness; no one person was to blame, but everyone had the opportunity to
help make things better. Second, by staying within the structure of Ennea-type
they were able to frame the change in language that was palatable to them. That
is, rather than saying, for example, “Stop your whining and start doing your jobs”
(language that might work for an Eight-ish team), the focus was on creativity,
vision, quality—the values that matter to a Four.
This same process of working with team personality type can also be used to
manage interdepartmental conflict.
I recently worked with the engineering and marketing teams of an organization
that were in conflict with each other. Conflict between these two groups is an
almost-universal phenomenon because they tend to have conflicting goals.
Marketing teams are responsible for finding out what the customer wants and
promising to deliver it to them; engineering teams are responsible for designing
the product to sometimes-unrealistic specifications. In addition to this natural
tension, the marketing team had a Type Three modal personality while the
engineering team had a Type Five modal personality (another common
phenomenon). The groups had the values common for their type—speed of
execution and image for the marketing team (get it done fast and impress the
customer) and attention to detail and function for the engineers (we have to
design this exactly right so it will do everything it needs to) for the engineers.
By understanding the ways that Fives and Threes tend to interact and that they
should consider the “type” of the other team, these teams made great progress.
(While we’re on the topic, the table below lists common modal personality types of
various departments. Note the word “common;” this list is by no means universal.)
Table: Common Departmental Personality Types(2)
Department Ennea-Type
Sales Seven—Striving to be Excited
Marketing Three—Striving to be Outstanding
Engineering Five or Nine—Striving to be Detached or Peaceful
Finance One—Striving to be Perfect
Human Resources Two—Striving to be Connected
Operations Eight—Striving to be Powerful
Quality Six—Striving to be Secure
There are many approaches to teambuilding, most of which have little long-
term affect on the team. Ropes courses and “trust-building exercises” may be
good for building camaraderie, but such camaraderie disappears when the
realities of the workplace settle back into place. More theoretical approaches
such as communication- and conflict management-skill building are important, but
the truth is that we generally already know the fundamentals of communication
and conflict management long before we show up in the professional world—be
polite, listen to what the other person is saying before you talk, share, don’t
interrupt, etc. The standard discussion about the stages of a team (forming,
storming, norming, performing) may be an interesting descriptor of dynamics, but
quickly becomes irrelevant if something more critical is not understood:
Teams work effectively when they are made up of talented people who share a
set of agreed-upon values and are inspired by an objective they deem worthy of
their time and energy, and they must be working within a set of effective systems
and processes. No amount of “teambuilding” will add an ounce of value if any of
those components are missing.
Any initiative to build better teams must focus on acquiring and utilizing talent
(“getting the right people on the bus,” to use Jim Collins’ famous phrase),
designing effective systems, setting worthy objectives, and creating an alignment
of values. The first two are functions of leadership that “teambuilding” cannot help
accomplish. The second two are teambuilding activities that can be dramatically
enhanced through an understanding of Ennea-type and how it works at a group
level.
(The author can be reached at Mario@mariosikora.com.)
Notes:
(1) I have written about the concept of the “strategies” at the heart of
personality type a number of times, most recently in the article “The Notes and
the Melody, Part II", which can be found on this website at www.mariosikora.com.
The strategies are discussed in depth in the book “Awareness to Action,” which I
co-authored with Robert Tallon (Scranton Press 2006).
(2)It is also possible to map instinctual bias to groups as well. Typical sales
departments will have an “attracting and bonding” bias, marketing departments
will have an “orienting to the group” bias, finance will have a “nesting and
nurturing” bias.
By Mario Sikora
Copyright 2006 Mario Sikora. All Rights Reserved.
A popular pastime among Enneagram aficionados is assigning personality
types to public figures and fictional characters. Those who use the Enneagram in
business do the same thing with organizations, saying that this company is a
Type Nine company or that company is a Type Two company, etc. While this
exercise may be academically interesting, it offers limited practical value.
Organizations, especially large corporations or government agencies, are
extremely complex and personality type begins to lose significance once you get
beyond a certain degree of complexity.
The value of understanding personality type is in understanding intrapersonal
dynamics and interpersonal relationships. That is, there is value in knowing that I
am an Eight and that, because I behave in “Eight-ish” ways, I have certain
strengths and weaknesses and there are specific patterns of seeing the world
that I must modify in order to grow. There is also value in knowing that my
coworker is a Nine, because it tells me that there will be specific ways in which we
may clash and specific ways in which we are similar and that there are specific
modifications we can make to improve our relationship.
Identifying the “personality type” of a company is of less value, however.
Let’s take Microsoft as an example. Microsoft’s culture looks Eight-ish—the
company is extremely aggressive and seeks to dominate its markets with a
hunger that is well beyond what is typically seen in the business world. But so
what? What can one do with the observation that Microsoft is “Eight-ish” beyond
the simple fact of knowing it?
In a practical sense--not much. If you are a competitor, you already know that
you must compete aggressively with them; if you are a collaborator, you will
adhere to all the same partnering agreements you would adhere to anyway. If you
are a customer, you will base your purchasing decisions on the usual factors:
price, convenience, quality, brand loyalty, etc.
On an individual level, it may help to know the “type” of your company so you
can understand how your tendencies may be out of sync with the larger
organizational culture. It may also help to know how company-wide values rooted
in Ennea-type supports negative behaviors. If, for example, the type of your
company is Type Nine, people should watch for company-wide tendencies to be
passive aggressive, avoid conflict, become complacent, etc.
However, once you get beyond a certain size (say a couple of hundred people)
organizational culture is far more complicated than the characteristics of specific
personality type. An organization that size must be broken into pieces in order to
be manageable, and it is in these pieces—the departments and teams of a
company—that Ennea-type comes into play. The manageable issues relating to
group and interpersonal dynamics rarely occur on a company-wide level; they
usually play out on the individual or departmental levels (even corporate strategy
is set by a team within the organization). Understanding these dynamics in the
light of the Enneagram can be extremely valuable for an organization.
Here’s how:
Our personality is the mechanism we use for interacting with our environment,
meeting our needs, and satisfying our values. This mechanism forms at the
individual level, of course, but it also forms at the team or department level. For
example, a sales department has very specific needs: identify customers and sell
product, co-ordinate with internal departments (marketing, engineering, etc.) and
get them to perform in ways that help the sales department sell product. The
individuals on the sales team will each have a distinct personality type and there
will probably be a diversity of types represented on the team. At the same time, a
sales department will typically settle in on a “personality type” that is the most
effective way to satisfy the team’s primary needs.
This group personality type is referred to as “modal personality,” which is
based on the idea that there tends to be a personality structure that is collectively
shared by people in a given society even though the individuals in that society
may have very different personalities.
Thus, even though the individuals may have distinct personalities, the group
will act in ways consistent with the modal. (Many sales departments take on a
Seven-ish modal personality even if there are few Sevens on the team because
the strategy of Type Seven, Striving to be Excited(1), tends to be the most
effective in selling: Show excitement and enthusiasm for the product and the
buyer will be more inclined to buy your product. Without this excitement to catch
the customer’s initial interest, quality, service, price, etc. don’t really matter.)
Using this concept, it is possible to improve a team’s performance using the
same principles that one would use to improve an individual’s performance.
A recent intervention I conducted will help illustrate this process.
The group of 10 people at the meeting comprised the Graphic Design and
Publications (GD&P) department of Bahr Electronics, an original equipment
manufacturer of consumer electronics. They were highly intelligent and talented
writers, artists, and editors, some of whom were relatively new to the team and
some of whom had been in their roles for decades. They were responsible for
taking highly technical raw data and translating it into product manuals that were
useful to a layperson. They had to work very closely with Bahr’s engineering,
sales, and marketing departments as well as the resellers of Bahr’s products; all
of whom had different expectations of the manuals—the engineers wanted
technical accuracy, the sales and marketing people wanted speed, and the
resellers wanted ease of use. In addition to these demands, the team had been
hearing rumors that they were thought of as “dysfunctional” by senior
management, their workload increased when personnel lost through attrition were
being replaced, and they started to fear that their jobs might be outsourced.
Needless to say, tensions were high.
After spending the morning discussing the Enneagram and describing the
personality types of the individuals on the team, we turned our focus to the team
as a whole. I asked the group to start describing itself to me as if it was a person:
What is its self-image? How do others in the organization view it? What
challenges does it face? What are its strengths and weaknesses? etc. Magic
Marker in hand, I scribbled on sheets of flip chart paper and prodded for
explanation and elaboration when appropriate. For the most part, however, I let
them engage in a group gripe session. When they were finished, we spread out
the sheets and started looking for a theme.
The theme turned out to be easy to spot.
During the discussion, members of the group used phrases such as:
“We’re misunderstood.”
“People see us as broken.”
“People don’t appreciate the amount of work we do and the quality of our
product compared to our competitors.’”
“We fear being obsolete.”
“We are an internal-facing function in an external-facing world.”
“Nobody wants us in their department because we are a cost rather than a
source of revenue,” and so on.
On the positive side, the group talked about their creativity, their emphasis on
quality, and the vision they brought to their work.
The negative, however, overwhelmingly outweighed the positive in both how
they saw their relationship to the larger organization and how they felt the rest of
the company saw them.
It was clear to me that the modal personality of the team was Type Four,
Striving to be Unique, and a stressed Type Four at that. They saw it as well—we
had talked about Type Four that morning and I compared their description of
themselves to the PowerPoint slides I had presented when talking about the Four.
The similarities were impossible to miss.
Our focus turned to identifying ways that the team could be more effective. At
the most fundamental level, what every team wants is the same thing that every
individual wants: to reduce the ways in which we feel bad and increase the ways
in which we feel good. This is accomplished by aligning our way of being with the
demands of our environment, either by changing our environment or changing
ourselves. In other words, we become happier when we strive to reduce the ways
in which we are maladaptive and increase the ways in which we are adaptive.
The team’s first step was to identify patterns in which it was thinking and
behaving like a stressed or maladaptive Four—the self-pity, the withdrawing, the
negativity, the resentment toward other departments. Then we looked at what
qualities comprise the more adaptive side of the Four—the creativity, vision,
focus on quality, perceptiveness, etc. They agreed to begin replacing the
unproductive language they use—that they were somehow “broken,” that they
were misunderstood and unappreciated, etc.—with more productive language.
When they found themselves discussing the negative they would remind each
other, for example, that while they may be misunderstood, it is their responsibility
to help the people in other departments understand their processes and
procedures, appreciate the quality they brought to their work, and see the value
they added to the company.
They mapped out specific action items they could take to help the company
see the adaptive side of the Four rather than the maladaptive side.
After we addressed the “Four” issues, we began to look at the connecting
points on the Enneagram—points Two and One.
At the individual level, Type Four has a very specific relationship with the
strategies at these points. The strategy at Point One is Striving to be Perfect.
Fours see themselves as deeply imperfect, and they tend to take some comfort in
their imperfection. At the same time, they place very high demands on others to
act “correctly”—to understand and appreciate the Four; to act in ways the Four
wants them to act; and to follow procedures and adhere to ethical or aesthetic
standards that the Four thinks are appropriate.
The strategy at Point Two is Striving to be Connected. While Fours are
capable of showing great empathy and understanding of others, they can fall into
the trap of seeking to connect with people who will focus on the Four’s needs
rather than engaging in a mutually beneficial relationship. They also tend to
withdraw under stress, becoming isolated disengaged.
The GD&P team had the (unrealistic) expectation that the rest of the
organization should take the initiative to seek to understand them and their needs
(one person had earlier commented that it was actually “immoral” for people to do
otherwise) rather than understanding that it was their own responsibility to help
the other people in the organization understand them.
They listed a few simple actions they could take to reach outward and present
the team in a more positive light, emphasizing their accomplishments in a ways
that were appropriate. For example, the team decided on a theme for the weekly
report that went their boss and the rest of their division: “How We Made Today
Better Than Yesterday; How We Are Making Tomorrow Better than Today.”
Rather than seeing the weekly report as an unfortunate piece of bureaucratic
drudgery, they decided to see it as an opportunity to highlight the quality and
value of their creations.
Over the course of a few hours, the team went from depressed, self-pitying,
afraid, and defeated to engaged, confident, and inspired. A couple of key factors
made this transformation possible—factors that apply to individual change as
well: First, the act of focusing on the “personality type” of the team rather than on
the individuals on the team allowed them to detach from the critique and minimize
defensiveness; no one person was to blame, but everyone had the opportunity to
help make things better. Second, by staying within the structure of Ennea-type
they were able to frame the change in language that was palatable to them. That
is, rather than saying, for example, “Stop your whining and start doing your jobs”
(language that might work for an Eight-ish team), the focus was on creativity,
vision, quality—the values that matter to a Four.
This same process of working with team personality type can also be used to
manage interdepartmental conflict.
I recently worked with the engineering and marketing teams of an organization
that were in conflict with each other. Conflict between these two groups is an
almost-universal phenomenon because they tend to have conflicting goals.
Marketing teams are responsible for finding out what the customer wants and
promising to deliver it to them; engineering teams are responsible for designing
the product to sometimes-unrealistic specifications. In addition to this natural
tension, the marketing team had a Type Three modal personality while the
engineering team had a Type Five modal personality (another common
phenomenon). The groups had the values common for their type—speed of
execution and image for the marketing team (get it done fast and impress the
customer) and attention to detail and function for the engineers (we have to
design this exactly right so it will do everything it needs to) for the engineers.
By understanding the ways that Fives and Threes tend to interact and that they
should consider the “type” of the other team, these teams made great progress.
(While we’re on the topic, the table below lists common modal personality types of
various departments. Note the word “common;” this list is by no means universal.)
Table: Common Departmental Personality Types(2)
Department Ennea-Type
Sales Seven—Striving to be Excited
Marketing Three—Striving to be Outstanding
Engineering Five or Nine—Striving to be Detached or Peaceful
Finance One—Striving to be Perfect
Human Resources Two—Striving to be Connected
Operations Eight—Striving to be Powerful
Quality Six—Striving to be Secure
There are many approaches to teambuilding, most of which have little long-
term affect on the team. Ropes courses and “trust-building exercises” may be
good for building camaraderie, but such camaraderie disappears when the
realities of the workplace settle back into place. More theoretical approaches
such as communication- and conflict management-skill building are important, but
the truth is that we generally already know the fundamentals of communication
and conflict management long before we show up in the professional world—be
polite, listen to what the other person is saying before you talk, share, don’t
interrupt, etc. The standard discussion about the stages of a team (forming,
storming, norming, performing) may be an interesting descriptor of dynamics, but
quickly becomes irrelevant if something more critical is not understood:
Teams work effectively when they are made up of talented people who share a
set of agreed-upon values and are inspired by an objective they deem worthy of
their time and energy, and they must be working within a set of effective systems
and processes. No amount of “teambuilding” will add an ounce of value if any of
those components are missing.
Any initiative to build better teams must focus on acquiring and utilizing talent
(“getting the right people on the bus,” to use Jim Collins’ famous phrase),
designing effective systems, setting worthy objectives, and creating an alignment
of values. The first two are functions of leadership that “teambuilding” cannot help
accomplish. The second two are teambuilding activities that can be dramatically
enhanced through an understanding of Ennea-type and how it works at a group
level.
(The author can be reached at Mario@mariosikora.com.)
Notes:
(1) I have written about the concept of the “strategies” at the heart of
personality type a number of times, most recently in the article “The Notes and
the Melody, Part II", which can be found on this website at www.mariosikora.com.
The strategies are discussed in depth in the book “Awareness to Action,” which I
co-authored with Robert Tallon (Scranton Press 2006).
(2)It is also possible to map instinctual bias to groups as well. Typical sales
departments will have an “attracting and bonding” bias, marketing departments
will have an “orienting to the group” bias, finance will have a “nesting and
nurturing” bias.
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