The Enneagram is a personality profiling tool that looks at the core drivers and motivations of a person.  By doing so, we can understand the basic fears and desires of people in our working team so that we can best understand how to communicate with them.  It provides an extremely powerful tool when recruiting teams as we can highlight healthy people that can support our vision and mission, rather than more unhealthy people who may have difficulty in fitting into a dynamic group.

There is no right or wrong with Enneagram - and yes, we all have components of every Enneagram number in us!  However, there will be one dominant type that best describes who we are.  This is our Basic Personality Type. 

The Enneagram in a Working Environment
Employers are constantly being expected to provide a positive, safe and happy working environment that is conducive to creating a profitable business.  However, it is increasingly observed that people are often working in an area that can be defined as their “disintegration” rather than working on purpose, or in their “Integration”. 

For example, someone who is a type 8, the Leader, and is a mechanic, will find that he is not happy in this role because he is working in his disintegration – that of an Investigator (or type 5).  But once he learns his craft and moves into a leadership role, he may find that he is on purpose in his work. 

Being “on purpose” in work is what makes people want to come to work.  Organisations that have this insight and knowledge can therefore recruit and place people into the “right” positions for them. 

Enneagram Types
The Enneagram is made up of nine Basic Personality Types as follows:

Hudson and Riso define the personality types at a high level as follows:

• Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.
• Type Two is demonstrative, generous, people-pleasing, and possessive.
• Type Three is adaptive, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.
• Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.
• Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.
• Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.
• Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, distractible, and scattered.
• Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, wilful, and confrontational.
• Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, agreeable, and complacent.

Determining Enneagram Types
Don Riso and Russ Hudson from the Enneagram Institute (www.enneagraminstitute.com), the modern day “fathers” of the Enneagram, believe that “everyone emerges from childhood with one of the nine types dominating their personality, with inborn temperament and other pre-natal factors being the main determinants of our type.”

Several more points can be made about the basic type itself.

• People do not change from one basic personality type to another.
• The descriptions of the personality types are universal and apply equally to males and females, since no type is inherently masculine or feminine.
• Not everything in the description of your basic type will apply to you all the time because you fluctuate constantly among the healthy, average, and unhealthy traits that make up your personality type.
• The Enneagram uses numbers to designate each of the types because numbers are value neutral— they imply the whole range of attitudes and behaviors of each type without specifying anything either positive or negative. Unlike the labels used in psychiatry, numbers provide an unbiased, shorthand way of indicating a lot about a person without being pejorative.
• The numerical ranking of the types is not significant. A larger number is no better than a smaller number; it is not better to be a Nine than a Two because nine is a bigger number.
• No type is inherently better or worse than any other. While all the personality types have unique assets and liabilities, some types are often more desirable than others in any given culture or group.

(Extracted from www.enneagraminstitute.com – © Don Riso and Russ Hudson)