As a CEO, general manager or executive you are more than ever expected to coach your employees to enhance their productivity and effectiveness. Integrating the insights of the Enneagram with other effective coaching methodologies and techniques enables you to coach others to achieve deeper and long-lasting results. Coaching is rapidly becoming the premier method for developing leaders and key employees within organizations.
The Enneagram helps you at every level to understand that there are nine different points of view, nine distinct sets of values, nine different communication styles, nine ways of solving problems—and so forth—and that they are all equally useful and valid. All of the nine different styles have something necessary to contribute to a thriving, balanced work environment.
By gaining a deeper insight in these personality styles through your own coaching process, you can step into the mind and language of your stakeholders, colleagues, employees and your enemies, which may often be very different from our own. Only then is real communication possible, and are you able to deal more compassionately with conflicts, ineffective work habits, office politics, and different management styles, among other important work issues.
Furthermore, the Enneagram helps you to see our own personality dynamics more clearly. Once you’re aware of the importance of personality styles, even through setbacks and misunderstandings, you’ll understand that your style will not be equally effective with everyone. Thus, one of the most useful lessons of executive coaching with the Enneagram is how to move from a management style in which others are expected to adapt themselves to your way of thinking and values to a more flexible management style in which you act from an awareness of the strengths and potential pitfalls of others. By doing so, you help others become more effective themselves—and as a result, harmony, productivity, and satisfaction are likely to increase.
Even if you understand that different people need to be managed differently, without an adequate idea of what those differences actually are, it is difficult to manage people more effectively. Once style differences are taken into account, however, solutions grow out of insights about the nature of each style, its habitual reactions, and its motivations. When style is taken into account, communication becomes exponentially more effective and people can recognize and make the most of human diversity. This way executive coaching with the Enneagram can help you work at the highest level of your capacities.
