Why Enneagram?
Meyers-Briggs, DISC, and even the newer Working Genius are all great personality profile tests to help you discover how you best produce work and interact with the world around us.
These are great tools.
The Enneagram is just another tool. You do not find your identity as a human in any of these test results. You are not the sum of a test, you are uniquely designed and created for a specific purpose.
Where the Enneagram begins to separate itself from the rest, and where I gain so much insight, is from the CORE of the individual. If we strip away all of the “what can you do for me?” type of questions and get down to “what gets you out of bed in the morning?”, we begin to recognize the unique perspective we bring to all of our relationships, including the relationship with your self.
It’s not about winning or losing like a lot of other profile tests, the Enneagram helps us distinguish between a healthy or unhealthy version of ourselves. This information acts as a sort of guardrail so that we can more easily correct the course we may find ourselves on.
I recently heard comedian Zoltan Kaszas comment about millennials and being self-aware. Hilarious, but he’s right. What good is it to be this self-aware and do nothing with that information? For me and those I speak with, the Enneagram is a great tool to help us put all of this awareness into actionable change by pointing us back to the CORE of who we really are.
As a leader, it’s beneficial to know where those we are leading coming from. Is the text, call, email, slack, etc, that I just received coming from a place of health or a place of stress? If I know you well enough to know that it's coming from a place of stress, then I know that it’s not your truest self that you're presenting to me. Thus, I will give you more grace, and I'll be more empathetic. (Lots more on empathy in upcoming Culture pieces.)
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to take the Enneagram test here.*
*WARNING: The test will only narrow down from the 9 different types to 3. From there, you need to dive into each CORE to see which one most closely reflects who you really are.
You can see me discuss this further this Tuesday (January 10, 2023) on The Ridgeline Leadership Podcast.