As a newly formed executive team with urgent needs to deliver, understanding each other was important to accelerating the formation of a team. I am a skeptic when it comes to personality profiles so I was wary of yet more pseudo science, having done many different personality profiles with teams in the past. I found Enneagram to be different. It provided insight that helped me better understand my own tendencies and the tendencies of my first team. I found that, when forming this team, the profiles helped in two key ways. First, they confirmed the early behaviors and approaches I had observed in my peers. Second, they allowed me to better understand and predict my peers’ reactions in the future.
Understanding my peers’ reactions was particularly valuable when working with one of my peers that I struggled to engage with. His Enneagram profile was the polar opposite of mine. While I strove for controlling perfection and thought deeply about others, he was more comfortable letting things play out and was very individualistic. By understanding him via Enneagram, I was able to approach him in a manner that was more aligned with the way he thought and better understand his behaviors, which previously were completely foreign to me. This allowed us to work together to deliver key outcomes for the company, whereas we previously were almost entirely incompatible. Even in cases where we were strongly at odds and argued heavily, the perspective Enneagram gave me allowed me to put the disagreements in perspective.
This kind of impact helped our first team come together far more quickly than it would have otherwise.