The Enneagram is a personality profiling tool that consists of nine basic personality types. Ennea means "nine" and gram means "figure" or "point." The Enneagram helps you to understand yourself and others better so you can maximize your performance, improve relationships, and move toward whole-person health. It has roots in the psychological and spiritual world, but is now being used by businesses worldwide.

In the past, the Enneagram was primarily a tool for psychological and spiritual growth, but now it's being used in the workplace. Here are five ways the Enneagram is benefitting the workplace.

Greater employee self-awareness helps everyone
The Enneagram is a self-awareness tool that helps you understand yourself better, but the value doesn’t end at yourself. That’s because self-awareness tools become team building tools when you apply your individual insights to working with others. And when teams improve, the whole organization improves.

You can’t ignore the whole person
The Enneagram teaches there are three centers of intelligence, which are core modes of living—thinking, feeling, and responding. Business is a whole-person enterprise, and the Enneagram helps us to utilize our whole persons—thinking, feeling, and responding—which are critical parts that shouldn’t be left out.

Successful businesses are using it
When you see successful businesses utilizing a tool that you're not, you've got to wonder what they know that you don't. Successful businesses are using the Enneagram to improve their organizations. In the book, "Tribe of Mentors," Drew Houston, the co-founder of Dropbox, wrote: "Over the last few years, I've found myself looking at all my important relationships through the Enneagram lens...I wish I had discovered it much earlier."

Today’s employees want growth and development
According to Gallup, today’s employees want to grow and develop. In fact, two of the important drivers of employee engagement is the sense that employees have opportunities to grow and that there are leaders who discuss their growth with them. If they don’t have these things, today’s workers are more comfortable finding a different workplace that does. But the Enneagram offers incredible opportunities for growth.

The Enneagram shows you something that other assessments don’t

I'm certified in the CliftonStrengths® assessment and use it to help people to identify areas of talent. But the Enneagram shows you something critically different. It shows your core motivational drive. You can be great at using your talents, but they may be taking you in the wrong direction.

_{CliftonStrengths® and StrengthsFinder® are trademarks of Gallup, Inc.}

While both tools are personality tools, they reveal different things. The CliftonStrengths® assessment (previously called StrengthsFinder®), reveals areas of talent. The goal is to identify your talents, turn them into strengths, and aim your strengths toward your goals.

The Enneagram is a personality profiling system of nine basic personality types that reveal your core motivational drive, behaviors, and so forth. The goal is to identify your core drive, understand why you do what you do, and take growth steps to maximize healthy living and working.

Think of CliftonStrengths® as talents and the Enneagram as drive. There's great value in understanding yourself from both realms because once you do, they can work together and not against you. 

_{CliftonStrengths® and StrengthsFinder® are trademarks of Gallup, Inc.}

The Enneagram reveals a lot of things about you. Of course, not everything will be true, but in our experience, many of the insights that people develop from the tool are very helpful. The Enneagram reveals your:

• core motivational drive, which is why you do what you do;
• go-to-response to life and relationships;
• strengths and shortfalls for your drive;
• emotional life;
• conflict style;
• talk style;
• workplace value;
• role on teams;
• opportunities for whole-self living and working

As you can see, the Enneagram can reveal a lot about you.

As the instructor of the Enneagram courses, Chris Heinz' professional life is centered around helping people grow, helping teams become healthier, and helping organizations to become more engaged. In order to do this, he's earned certifications in multiple personality assessments including the Enneagram and CliftonStrengths®. He's a Certified ®iEnneagram Practitioner through Motions of the Soul and Gallup Certified Strengths Coach. In addition, he's also a Professional Certified Coach. Chris leads more than 30 professional development workshops a year in various organizations and publishes original content around the topics mentioned above.

_{CliftonStrengths® and StrengthsFinder® are trademarks of Gallup, Inc.}