7 | Improving Communication using the Enneagram
In this episode, I continue our exploration of the four ways you can use the Enneagram at work to build trust within your team. We cover how to build stronger relationships to reduce friction and inefficiencies and how to be more effective communicators. I also share practical advice on how to be a more effective communicator using Enneagram insights.
I show how the Enneagram can nurture “containers for growth” that improve understanding, reduce conflict, and build relationships. Understanding the unconscious behaviors, thoughts, and patterns we have towards work, helps us be more empathic, compassionate, and understanding with each other. And ultimately, that is what improves team performance.
Episode Contents:
(The first and second ways I use the Enneagram with teams are covered in the previous episode)
3. Building relationships using the Enneagram (1:52)
The three centers (2:14)
Instinctual preferences (3:24)
Social interaction styles (5:09)
Conflict styles (7:42)
4. Improving communication using the Enneagram (9:52)
Understanding the motivation of each type (11:24)
Applying the Enneagram in professional settings (14:15)
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Sample Integrative Enneagram’s team reports (note, I can offer a discount when you run the report through me and get access to additional resources that will help your team integrate the information)
New to the Enneagram? Check out my guide to getting started with the Enneagram here.
Have a favorite podcast player? Here are direct episode links to:
Transcript
(This transcript was generated with the help of AI - please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.)
Welcome to episode number six. This is part two of how I use the Enneagram to help teams. I'm Michelle Kay Anderson, and I'm excited to bring you this two part series on the four ways that I use the Enneagram to help improve performance at work.
If you're struggling to create a foundation of trust, established psychological safety, or to communicate effectively, this episode is for you.
If you are wondering how to take the Enneagram teaching deeper to improve workplace dynamics, or if you're curious about the work that I do with teams, keep listening.
In the previous episode, we discussed both cultivating your unique leadership style and identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your team style and the risks that this creates for the project execution.
And this episode, we're going to continue to explore in detail how I use the Enneagram to both help build relationships and improve communication.
You're gonna wanna pull up the show notes for this episode so that you can follow along. Check out uplevelingwork.com/7 to see the specific patterns that I discuss and to learn more.
Let's pick up where we left off...
3 - Building relationships
The third way I use the Enneagram to help teams reach their potential is to build relationships. What I’ve found is that you can reduce conflict by increasing the understanding that we have of each other.
There are 4 specific patterns that the Enneagram can measure on your team to help you identify friction or inefficiencies that are there.
One of the patterns that are identified in your report is the centers of expression - which are preferences in how you express yourself or how you relate to the world.
Teams who rely on the action center are more focused on tasks. So teams ask questions like “What is the goal?” and “How can we get started?” They tend to get it done, jump in, and focus on results.
The thinking center on a team is associated more with the process or how. Teams who operate from the thinking center more are asking questions like “What’s the best way to approach this?” You analyze, think it through, and tend to stay more calm.
The feeling center is more focused on people or relationships. When you rely more on this center, teams are asking more “How do people feel about what’s happening?” You check in more, you listen really well, and you take care of each other.
And whether you overly or underuse one of these centers can also create certain patterns you can fixate in - ways that you might over-rely on data or maybe jump into action before you’ve gathered enough data.
The second pattern we can look at in the data is the instinctual preferences that are present on your team.
We have three basic instinctual drives that are essential for human experience. Think of these as primal, body-based forces that are necessary for our survival. They are separate from personality and are behind our life strategies. They are often unconscious and running in the background, yet they are powerfully directing a fundamental way of being in the world.
One of the three becomes dominant and is more easily accessed (and therefore more easily used) than the others. Some people have two that are very close, but one is always more sleepy than the others. And which instinctual preference is most sleepy on your team can color how you show up in the world and what makes you feel safe and what some of your work preferences are.
Three Instinctual preferences are:
SELF-PRESERVATION: safety, finding a stable structure, having enough resources, feeling comfort
SOCIAL: healthy relationship dynamics, belonging to the group, my relationship to the group, my position within groups, group norms and rules, creating a shared purpose
ONE-TO-ONE: (Sometimes called the sexual instinct.) This is less about sex and more about intimacy and relationship dynamics - these folks are focused on creating strong relationships, feeling connected and aligned, creating intense experiences, and thinking about their impact and legacy.
The next pattern we have are social interaction styles. These 3 styles tend to answer the question: How do we go about trying to meet our needs? How are we naturally trying to get what we want? The team social interaction style is indicating your typical stance or approach to engaging with the world. And it can also give you clues to where your team might be energized or how your team shows up in everyday circumstances. This gets reported as a stack of your highest, mid, and lowest.
The three social interaction styles are:
Assertive: People with an assertive social style “move against” the world in an independent, energetic way, going out of their way to get what they want and need. They find challenges energizing and like to get to the point and get things done. Their response to resistance is often to push harder, rather than to slow down or reflect. Enneagram types 8, 3, and 7 are the assertive social styles.
Compliant: People with a compliant style “move towards” the world, going along with established norms, rules, or ways of doing things. They are dutiful and cooperative in their efforts to get what they want and need. They want to do what is expected of them, within boundaries and limits, and appreciate clear expectations from others. Enneagram types 1, 2, and 6 are the compliant social styles.
Withdrawn: People with a withdrawn social style are said to “move away” from the world because they tend to look inward and become contemplative in their efforts to get what they want. They may need time and space to process and share their ideas and prefer to disengage and deeply consider issues before responding. Enneagram types 4, 5, and 9 are the withdrawn social styles.
It should be noted that we use all of these social styles, but our personality tends to resort or default to one of them unconsciously. You can see how friction or inefficiencies could result just in this difference of social styles and ways that we try to get what we want. Exploring this as a team can really help.
The team reports these as a stack - you can see which one ranks the highest or lowest on your team. And it shows this compared to your leader with bar charts so you can start to examine power dynamics and how the leader’s style may be similar or different from the team style and what that means for your team in how you show up and interact with each other.
Sample team interaction style bar chart comparing the team’s style to that of the leader to help you see things more clearly. This is taken from the Integrative Enneagram team report.
The final pattern that we look at as we are trying to understand each other and build relationships and trust in the team is the conflict styles. Conflict styles describe how we tend to respond when we don’t get what we want. The team conflict style represents the conflict response of the team overall, and it indicates the team’s likely focus of attention during periods of conflict or when they do not get what they want.
While we use all of these conflict styles, one tends to be used more than the others. One may be more acceptable than the others on your team. The 3 conflict styles are:
Avoidant (or Positive Outlook or Escapist): This style focuses on making the conflict go away or escaping the impact. People with this style tend to disengage themself from the situation, taking a positive outlook and moving on quickly. Enneagram types 2, 7, and 9 are the avoidant conflict styles.
Methodical (or Competency): This emphasizes the need to put personal feelings aside and focus on addressing the situation or challenge in an efficient, effective way. Enneagram types 1, 3, and 5 are the methodical conflict styles.
Reactive: Someone with a reactive style is not necessarily aggressive but tends to react strongly and passionately and demand or provoke equally passionate responses from others involved in the situation. Enneagram types 4, 6, and 8 are the more reactive conflict styles.
So this is the third way I use the Enneagram to help teams reach their potential. We reduce conflict by increasing the understanding we have of each other and building relationships.
The 4th way I tend to use the Enneagram to help teams is to help them be more effective in how they communicate.
4 - Improving communication
When we run the individual Enneagram reports, you get a lot of information about your style and how you tend to communicate. And this can draw your attention to some unconscious patterns or ways you tend to show up in conversation that may or may not be helping you.
I use an iceberg analogy to talk about the different elements of personality - that there are behaviors or thought and feeling patterns that are visible on the surface, but there are these other elements that are invisible and live in your subconscious that are driving those visible patterns. Things like mental fixations or emotional patterns, your sense of self and core beliefs about the world, or your default coping strategy for getting what you want that is driven by some unconscious fears.
Once you understand what are called psychodynaimcs of type and how your ego creates filters on reality based in a worldview you’ve adopted, you can see more clearly how you contribute to each situation, and open up to different ways of interpreting what is happening. That’s a key stance for resilient and visionary leaders: being open to learning and entertaining the possibility that I might be wrong about something.
Each Enneagram type is drive by a different motivation and communication and trust will break down when we interpret the actions of others through our own type filters.
I’ll walk you through the motivation of each type now. I always start with Type 8 because it is the first in the body center as then I work my way clockwise around the circle of the Enneagram symbol.
Conscious leaders are ones who know when they are operating from that constricted ego defensiveness, and when they are able to be more intentional and present because they are staying open and curious and can let their defenses down.
Communication is so much easier when you see things clearly!
And as you work with the patterns of type - you can understand where others are coming from and how they might see things differently. Which helps you not take things so personally when they do come up in conversation.
It also helps you to name things more clearly and have more efficient conversations because you can get to the heart of the matter. One of the things I teach my clients is the 3 layers to a conversation - most people stay on the surface of what happened, but when you know that the feelings about what happened are really what create these points of friction in relationships, you can talk about that instead of circling around the same set of facts or interpretation of what happened over and over again. Or playing the blame game where you are trying to figure out who is responsible for the mistake. And what happens when you play this game is that shame is the companion that obscures your vision and prevents you from seeing things clearly.
Your individual report that comes with the test has feedback tips for each of the types. So you can adjust your style to help your message land. See, conscious leaders aren’t just intentional about what they say, they are very aware that how they deliver it - the context - is more important than the content.
And this information can be used in sales conversations too. Knowing what might be an unconscious need or motivation for a client or what their sensitivities are can help you be more intentional about how you pitch or engage with clients. Working with the Enneagram can really develop your intuition around people in a way that isn’t manipulative - it is an opening up to learning about why people do the things that they do and what helps them feel safe or get excited.
Gosh - what I wouldn’t do to have this information early in my career when I was working at Amazon in account management and business development doing negotiations. Negotiations and “getting to yes” feels very different when you have this intuitive understanding of these unconscious drivers. You can speak to something that is more real and true for people and find better compromises that help them genuinely meet their needs in a way that feels like a win-win because there is depth and real authentic connection.
When you think about being a more effective communicator, a lot of times you go to tactics of articulating and posture and ‘commanding the room’ - but the cool thing about working with the Enneagram types is that there is this whole other layer to communication that is happening at an unconscious level. And if you are blind to your own patterns and the ways that your ego is trying to protect you by limiting what you see, then you can’t own your contribution to a situation. You can’t see clearly why things are the way they are, or how to get out of this mess, or even how to get to a better feeling state.
But when you have the self-awareness and emotional intelligence to understand yourself and the others on your team or your clients or even your family members, communicating when tough things come up feels less like a high-stakes game where I feel like I have to win or be seen or heard. Instead, it is an opportunity to connect, get better data, and even heal. To find ways to meet the real underlying needs in a way where we, hopefully, both get what we want. But even if it isn’t possible for both of us to get what we want, we are understanding what those tradeoffs are and making the best decision we can for the team with compassion and empathy for all the parties involved.
And that, my friend, is magic. When a team can engage in communication at this level, they are fully invested in each other. And when we are fully invested in each other, we can move with lightning speed to get the result that we want and need as a team.
(If you find that you are in conflict and feel like you need more insight or support, I have a free ebook on dealing with conflict that may help you get some perspective and prepare for a conversation. Send me a note if you’d like more support.)
How to get started
Here’s how it works:
Each person on the team takes the iEQ9 test. When they finish the test, they get a 42-page report that details everything you need to know about your type. This allows people to start to work with the system immediately without having to understand all of the other types. It is a very targeted reference document that you will return to again and again.
Then I do a debrief with each person to make sure that this lands for them, makes sense, and to answer any questions and make sure that their type resonates with their lived experience. The iEQ9 has a 95% accuracy rating, which is better than any other test on the market. That’s in part because it measures your type from lots of different dimensions. This is the only test that I’m using professionally right now - mainly because it is just an efficient way to get to the data quickly. And because it allows us to run the team report.
After everyone has taken the test and received the report, and we’ve had a conversation to make sure their type fits for them, then we run the team report. And what the team report does is it will overlay all of your information and compare your team style with your leader’s style. And all of the illustrations and bar charts will help you better visualize the data. It makes it feel more visceral and real.
And then we tend to do a team workshop to explore the results virtually or in-person. Or I work with the manager to understand them more deeply to start to work with the dynamics on the team and manage the team more effectively.
This works for a variety of businesses ….
I’ve been able to help entrepreneurs who are building out their team for the first time understand their own unconscious styles and articulate their needs more clearly. But also understand how the people they are hiring look at the world a little differently or show up for work in a different way, and that those differences aren’t necessarily problems once you can name them and understand them.
I’ve worked with new managers who are increasing the scope of their responsibility - like doubling the size of their team, and taking on increasingly bigger responsibilities. Being able to measure the Enneagram type of each person on the team provides invaluable insight into what work might they best be suited for. How can I understand them better when conflict or friction tends to show up? How can I phrase what I need to say in a way that they are likely to understand me the first time to avoid unnecessary friction and misunderstandings?
But also - How do I develop my own leadership style? How do I learn to trust myself more? A lot of the work that I’m doing with women who are in management positions is an upleveling of their self-worth and feeling safe enough to let down some of those ego defenses.
Because it is not that the ego is bad in and of itself - it’s just that some places it isn’t safe to let down your defenses and you want to be able to discern when it is safe and when it isn’t. And when that defensiveness is getting in your way and when it is serving you.
Okay! Hopefully, that gives you a sense of all the different ways you can start to use the Enneagram at work. Now, I don’t do all of this all at once! Usually, there is one particular thing that a manager or team will come to me with where they need the most help, and we’ll start working very deeply in that one area.
If you are interested in working with me or getting this data for your team, use the contact form to let me know what is going on with your team and what you are most interested in working on. Working with the Enneagram has been transformative for the teams that I work with. I cannot wait to get this in the hands of as many leaders as possible.
Till next time!
Have you subscribed to the podcast?
Don’t miss a single episode. Choose your favorite podcast app below, then hit “Subscribe” or “Follow” to receive new episodes right when they are released.
(If you have another favorite app not listed, just search for “Upleveling Work” or “Michelle Kay Anderson” and it’ll come up.)
