We don’t all come from one mould. We have different motivations, desires and fears that drive our persona. As a business owner, have you had moments where you’ve had “people problems”?
🤔 Maybe you’ve found yourself with an employee not performing or delivering at the pace you want. Or maybe it was an issue with team members not collaborating or lacking alignment when you’ve got an important project to execute.
🤔 Have you been baffled why teams don’t get on and people don’t respond as you want them to?
📌 I see business owners who are really frustrated by these tensions and team dynamics. They just want to grow their business and leverage their strengths to focus on the product or service they deliver. The “people element” can feel like a painful and frustrating thorn in their sides.
They realise they can’t build their business on their own – although at times it feels tempting to do so – and they see that they need to build a high performance, highly engaged team to help them achieve the growth and impact they want.
Yet, despite their efforts, these challenging team behaviours and dynamics just keep popping back up. When they first come to me, their frustration is evident and they say they know that there has to be another, easier way but they haven’t found it yet!
🔶 The good news is that there is an easier way indeed – and that’s the Enneagram, a highly effective, impactful and enjoyable tool created for the successful leader of the 21st Century.
I have not always been a fan of personality tools as I feel that they can box you and give you labels, which can limit your thinking and your actions. With the Enneagram, you get exactly the opposite: it helps you see how YOU are boxing YOURSELF. Its results lead to huge realisations and show what’s under the surface of the superficial patterns of behaviour, so you can understand WHY you do what you do. All of that in a quick and enjoyable way.
🔔 You see, these “people challenges” stem from us not understanding “how people tick”.
We don’t all come from one mould. We have different motivations, desires and fears that drive our personality, our thinking and our behaviours. When we slow down and tune into these elements then we not only start to understand ourselves, but also the people around us and why we are experiencing the challenging team dynamics.
The Enneagram helps you uncover blindspots, develop growth paths, leverage strengths, and increase levels of trust and communication. Of course, as you gain this greater level of understanding of yourself and others, the results you REALLY want – greater levels of collaboration, leveraging strengths, innovation, higher margins and profits – appear.
🌳 I like to compare ourselves with an acorn. You see the acorn has a hard shell that limits it, but inside it has the potential to become an oak tree. Some acorns become oak trees and others don’t. To become an oak tree, the acorn needs to create the right conditions, break through this shell and unlock that potential. We are the same. We have a hard shell of fears, motivations, triggers that can keep us playing a small game. By using the Enneagram, we dive deep into our conscious and unconscious patterns, understand them and eventually break open the limiting shell, so that we can unleash our “oak tree potential”.
When we learn how to break out of our restrictive shell, the transformation that we can experience on a personal and team level is quite incredible, and even enjoyable and exhilarating.
🤔 So how do we create this desired transformation and the high performance team that will enable us to explosively grow our business?
The starting point is to understand yourself as a person and a leader and tune into the impact you are having on your team. As the leader, your thinking and behaviour ripples out and impacts your team. By leveraging the Enneagram, you will deeply understand yourself, your triggers, fears, reactions and behaviour. Once you do, you can see which are working for you and how to leverage them to your advantage, and which ones work against you.
It’s important to realise that our behaviour affects the team. So let me ask you – is it possible that you may be unintentionally shutting the team down and causing the problems? I know this can be a painful thought, but it can also be a wonderfully liberating one when we realise that we can take ownership of our behaviour and create the solution.
Once you’ve used the Enneagram to reflect on your own personality and drivers, you can roll out this incredible tool to your team, so they increase their individual level of self awareness. They will start to have their own lightbulb moments about the impact they have and gather a deeper understanding of their triggers and drivers. Then through discussion, you can build deep levels of understanding and trust between team members, and realise why there have been tensions. Finally, the elephants in the room trott out and there’s a focus on solutions.
💪🏽 Most importantly, the Enneagram helps you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team and how to leverage and address them.
You might be thinking that this sounds time consuming or that spending money on your team might not be the wisest investment. I hear you – you have products to build, services to deliver or platforms to develop. But let me give you a different perspective; if you have a high performing, highly engaged and collaborative team who can play to their strengths and minimise their weaknesses, then your levels of efficiency, creativity and speed of execution will increase and all of your products and services will come on line quicker and cheaper than you had anticipated.
📌 So reflect for a moment – how would it feel to know that by adding the Enneagram to your tool kit, you would become a more empowering leader who has a team of high performers that enable you to to MULTIPLY the bottom line of your business, in an effective, efficient and enjoyable way?
👉🏽 If you are ready to have an initial conversation and explore how the Enneagram can supercharge your leadership, help you build a highly effective team, and achieve explosive results, send me a DM and we can book a exploratory call (not a sales call).
To your success, leveraging your strengths and building a high performance team!
