What Happens When You Bring the Enneagram Into Your Workplace
You have heard the Enneagram could be useful for your team. Maybe you have been typed yourself and found it helpful. Maybe a colleague mentioned it. Maybe you are an HR leader or people manager looking for a development tool that goes deeper than DISC or another behavioral assessment.
But you are not sure what it actually looks like. What the team would experience. Whether it would feel too personal for a work setting. Whether people would take it seriously.
Here is what actually happens when an organization brings the Enneagram in, from intake to workshop to what shifts after.
It Starts Before the Workshop
The work does not begin when everyone sits down in a room together. It begins well before that.
I start with a conversation about what is going on with the team. What are the pain points? Is it communication? Conflict? A recent change in leadership? A merger or reorganization? A team that works well but wants to go deeper? The answer shapes everything about how the workshop is designed.
From there, I do individual typing sessions with each team member. These are one-on-one conversations, not quizzes. Each person goes through the same process I use with my private clients: I ask questions designed to get underneath behavior and into motivation. By the time the group workshop happens, I know each person's type and I have a clear picture of the dynamics likely playing out on the team.
This is what makes it different from a generic personality workshop. I am not presenting the Enneagram in the abstract. I am bringing it into the specific reality of this team, with these people, facing these challenges.
Read more: How to Find Your Enneagram Type (Without Taking a Quiz)
What the Workshop Itself Looks Like
The workshop is not a lecture. It is a facilitated conversation.
I walk the team through each of the nine types, centering everything on motivation and fear. I use exploratory questions: "Imagine someone whose core motivation is being prepared and whose core fear is being caught off guard. What might that look like in a team meeting? In an email? In a disagreement?"
This approach does something important. It creates curiosity instead of defensiveness. Nobody is being labeled or called out. People are exploring human patterns, and in the process, they start recognizing themselves and each other.
Because I already know each person's type from the individual sessions, I can weave real dynamics into the conversation. When someone says, "That sounds exactly like me," it opens the door for the whole team to get honest. Walls come down. People start seeing their colleagues' behaviors as patterns with real reasons behind them, not as personality flaws.
When people understand the motivation behind someone's behavior, judgment turns into curiosity. That shift changes everything about how a team works together.
Read more: The Truth About Conflict: Insights for a Fulfilling Life
What Changes After
The shifts tend to be practical and immediate.
People use less triggering language with each other. Not because they are performing or censoring themselves, but because they understand why certain words land differently for different types. They develop a shared vocabulary for what is happening when tension rises. Instead of "you are being difficult," they can say, "I think we are bumping into each other's patterns here." That one shift alone can cut a thirty-minute argument down to a five-minute conversation.
Work gets more efficient. Miscommunication is expensive. Every time someone misreads an email, takes something personally that was not personal, or avoids a conversation they need to have, it costs the team time. When people understand each other's communication styles and stress responses, the cycle of misunderstanding gets shorter.
And the bonding is different from what happens at a team dinner or an offsite. When you understand someone's core fear, what they are actually afraid of underneath the professional surface, and you see them showing up despite that fear, you develop a respect that is hard to build any other way.
The bonding that comes from this work is not surface-level. It comes from understanding what someone is actually carrying, and respecting how they show up despite it.
When Energy Leadership Fits In
Some teams benefit from combining the Enneagram with another framework I use called Energy Leadership.
The Enneagram answers who you are and why. Energy Leadership answers where you are operating from right now.
In an Energy Leadership workshop, I teach the team to recognize what lens they are using in any given moment, whether they are reacting from stress, engaging from partnership, or creating from vision. Some teams do the Energy Leadership Index assessment individually, and then we look at the patterns across the team anonymously. That gives the group a picture of not just who they are, but how they are collectively showing up.
It is essentially a separate experience that complements the Enneagram work. Some organizations do one. Some do both. It depends on what the team needs.
Read more: Leading Through the Technological Revolution: What's Really at Stake
How to Know If Your Team Is Ready
Not every team is ready for this work, and that is okay.
The teams that benefit most are ones where there is a baseline of trust and willingness. People do not have to be excited. They can be skeptical. But they need to be open to looking at themselves with some honesty.
Teams in active crisis, where trust has completely broken down, sometimes need a different kind of intervention first. The Enneagram is powerful, but it works best when people are willing to be curious rather than combative.
The teams I work with most often are ones that are functional but stuck. They work well enough, but there is friction they cannot quite name. Or they are going through a transition, a new leader, a restructure, a growth phase, and they want to do it with more awareness than less.
If you are exploring this for your team, the next step is a conversation. I want to understand what you are dealing with before I recommend anything.
You can learn more about my [training and development offerings] my [speaking and workshop page].
To start the conversation, [reach out through the contact page]. We will talk through what is happening and build something that fits.
Frequently Asked Questions
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It depends on the depth and the team's specific goals. It can be a half day, a full day, or a series of sessions. Some teams start with a single workshop and then come back for deeper work.
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No. The individual typing sessions I do before the workshop take care of that. Everyone arrives knowing their type and ready to engage.
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Yes. The Enneagram is widely used in corporate leadership development. The way I facilitate keeps it professional, practical, and focused on work dynamics while still going deep enough to be meaningful.
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Pricing depends on team size and scope. It is a high-touch, customized process, so I do not use a one-size-fits-all pricing model. Contact me to discuss what your team needs and I will put together an approach that fits.
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Yes. I work with both in-person and remote teams. The individual typing sessions are always virtual. The group workshop can be either.