What Is Your Enneagram Number?

The Enneagram is one of the many tools that we use to get to know our clients and to help our clients get to a deeper understanding of who they are. We introduce the Enneagram, what it is and why we use it, in this week’s post.

Introduction

When we start working with new clients, our aim is to get to know them. We like to meet with the owner or CEO and then each member of the leadership team to get a handle on who they are. Why? It’s one of our core values to meet clients where they’re at. Part of meeting clients where they’re at is getting to know them, what they like and dislike, what is important to them, what their goals, hopes, and dreams are. In turn, this helps our clients get clear on who they are as individuals, who they are as a team or organization, and who they’re there to serve (their ideal customer).

To help drive this process of getting to know business leaders and the leadership team, we use one or more personality assessments. One of our favorites is the Enneagram.

The Enneagram is a model of personality, a typology of nine related personality types. The following chart is one of the best summaries of the nine Enneagram types that we’ve found, which comes directly from the Enneagram Wikipedia page (which, in turn, comes from the book Understanding the Enneagram: The Practical Guide to Personality Types by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson.)

Minus a detailed explanation of the chart, which is beyond the scope of this piece, you can still get a sense of each type’s characteristics, both positive and negative. For example, type Nines, known as Peacemakers, are individuals that value and aspire to love and peace-of-mind—able to see and reconcile multiple perspectives—but given to daydreaming and conflict avoidance when things get too stressful. As you examine the chart, do you see characteristics that match your own personality?

Personality Isn’t Static

One of the reasons that we use the Enneagram in our work with clients is that it takes into account changes in personality when one experiences stress and disintegration versus security and integration. You can see this reflected in the last two columns of the chart above. When someone with a Nine type experiences stress, they may feel and act like someone with a Six type. In contrast, a Nine may feel and act more like a Three when they feel more secure.

This dynamic view of personality is helpful when working with business leaders. Owning and leading a business is often stressful, and being able to take a look at how your feelings and behaviors might change under that kind of stress (or in the absence of that stress) is very powerful. Many of the business leaders that we have worked with change how they interact with their leadership teams or in one-on-one meetings based on the feedback that the Enneagram presents. In this way, the Enneagram provides more than just head-knowledge, it opens up a kind of self-knowledge that is more heartfelt and takes into account more of what makes the whole person tick.

At Syte, we’ve benefitted individually, in our family life, and at work from taking and sharing our Enneagram assessments internally. And we whole-heartedly recommend that you do the same. Here are some of the online tools that we’ve used with some commentary related to each:

• Ian Morgan Cron has a very thorough Enneagram assessment that comes in at two different price points­—60 and 120 dollars. These provide extensive multi-page reports that include information on your Enneagram type in various contexts (personal relationships, teams, a coaching relationship, etc.) Cron also records an Enneagram podcast called Typology that features people of widely differing types discussing things like relationships, self-awareness, and leadership.
• For a free assessment, we’ve used the Enneagram assessment at the Eclectic Energies website. Don’t let the name or dated look of the website throw you off! This assessment is very accurate, and the information you get back, though not as extensive as Cron’s, is still quite thorough.
• Lastly, for detailed descriptions of each of the nine Enneagram types, we recommend referring to the Enneagram Institute’s website. The descriptions are written in a straight-forward manner and cover many of the same domains that Cron does in his reports (relationships, family, work, etc.).

We will write more about the Enneagram in the future. Please reach out to let us know what your Enneagram type is. If you would like help distributing the assessment to your team or interpreting your assessment results in order to put that knowledge into action, you can contact us, here. We’d love to get to know you and your team.