The Enneagram: A Secret Weapon for Bonding Your Admissions Staff
By Aaron Basko, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services, University of Lynchburg
As someone who has led admissions teams at five institutions, I am always looking for new ways to combat turnover by building strong teams and cultivating staff morale. So when a colleague from Mount Vernon Nazarene University introduced me to the Enneagram, I paid close attention.
“It really helped me to understand my president — his motivations and how he views the world,” my colleague explained. “It made it a lot easier for me to support him and anticipate what he needs.”
As a huge fan of personality tests, I’ve become Myers-Briggs certified and worked with both Keirsey’s Temperaments and Clifton Strengths. The thought of the Enneagram immediately intrigued me but I wondered if it was just the newest fad. Turns out, it’s anything but.
The concepts behind the Enneagram go back several thousand years, stretching back at least to the geometry of Pythagoras, and likely through Sufi and Judaic mystic traditions. George Gurdjieff introduced it to the West in 1915 and Catholic priests began to use it for individual counseling and self-awareness.
The Enneagram has since spilled over to other faith-based organizations, including a number of colleges and universities, who offer it to their students. The Enneagram has also found its way into industry, including among executives at Motorola, Boeing, Toyota, AT&T, Adobe, and Marriott. Even the CIA has used the Enneagram to profile international leaders.
So how does this ancient, seemingly mystical concept work? How can you use it to help your team achieve peak performance?
Unlike most of the other personality tools, which typically focus on accentuating a person’s natural ways of doing things, the Enneagram reveals what is out of balance in a person’s life. The Enneagram indicates our motives — the why behind the personality we display. “Enneagram” comes from the word for “nine” and “figure,” These personalities represent nine ways that we learn to confront the world when we are young, as well as our primary strategy for trying to meet our own needs for acceptance and security.
The Enneagram usually shows us what we don’t want to see about ourselves. As one of my associate directors said, “It is like it has been spying on me and can see into my soul!” Author Ian Morgan Cron suggests, however, that this insight is not a negative. “The Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box,” he writes in The Road Back to You. “It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it.”
An Introduction to the Types
Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and one of the earliest Enneagram experts in the U.S., described each type as having a deep need they were trying to fulfill:
One needs to be perfect.
Two needs to be needed.
Threes need to succeed.
Fours need to be special.
Fives need to perceive.
Sixes need to feel secure.
Sevens need to escape pain.
Eights need to be against.
Nines need to avoid.
Do you see yourself in any of these descriptions? If so, researching that Enneagram type may be a good place for you to start understanding the system. Be careful with the instinct to determine the types of the people around you — instead, invite them to begin learning about the Enneagram and discovering their types themselves.
When I first began to invite my admissions team to try out the Enneagram, they were not sold. Many of them had taken other assessments, which they found interesting but not terribly impactful on their work. They humored me as the boss, but their hopes for the assessment were not high.
Later that week, however, their tunes completely changed. Several of them slipped into my office saying, “This all makes sense!” They proceeded to tell me some variation of “all my life I felt a certain way, but I couldn’t put it into words. Now I see why I reacted in certain ways and how that caused me to behave towards other people.”
Imagine how valuable it is to have staff recognize their own weaknesses and want to adjust them rather than having to be coached to do so. For example, one of my counselors was a solid recruiter, but struggled to find success in managing specialty projects. We tried her in several roles and nothing seemed to click.
She tested as an Enneagram 9 (the need to avoid). We both recognized that she was likely to struggle to have the energy for those kinds of projects, but she was great at responding to whatever was needed in the moment. She shifted to a financial aid position and performed excellently in that role.
Building a Team with the Enneagram
As everyone on our team shared their Enneagram assessment results, we experienced a collective surprise. The blend of types in our office was profoundly lopsided — we had a strong overrepresentation of type one (the need to be perfect). The people with this type all worked well together and had roughly the same expectations for the work environment, while the small number of people with very different types were the ones typically on the “outside.”
The ones realized they were all speaking the same language. It also became obvious to them why those with other types drove them crazy. For example, our team had one lone eight (the need to be against). He could change the tension level in the room just by entering it and had a way of offending everyone with his bluntness. Once the rest of the team saw that this style was not a personal attack, but instead a readiness to fight against what was wrong in the world, we learned to redirect his energy to some of the big battles we faced. His energy, strength, and willingness to confront helped us break down a lot of barriers and surpass our enrollment goals.
Understanding the differences in team members’ motivations helped us become more patient with each other and go the extra mile to work together. As the team became familiar with the types, they started to recognize them in people from across campus, and to better understand why some of those people felt like “allies” while others seemed to always bring conflict.
Each type also has what is called a “type dynamic" as well. For example, a three (the need to achieve) under a lot of stress will act more like a nine (the need to avoid), letting important things go without a fight, or becoming lethargic and falling asleep to life. A three who feels confident and secure will start to act like a well adjusted six, enjoying loyal friendships and making time for the simple pleasures of life.
Understanding these dynamics can be just as valuable to your team members as knowing their type, especially during stressful times like mid-travel season or the run up to May 1. People can learn to recognize the signs of stress and burnout in themselves before they take them out on others, or before they give up on the environment and leave.
An Easy, Inexpensive Investment in Your People
Introducing the Enneagram to your team is highly accessible. In our case, I purchased individual tests for each of my team members for about $15, presented a brief introduction of my understanding of the concepts at a staff meeting, then asked everyone to take the assessment. Once they had reviewed their results, we invited anyone who was comfortable to tell us where on the diagram they fell, then spent part of the next two staff meetings discussing it. Soon enough, we would naturally reference the Enneagram in conversations, conflicts, and collaborations.
Using the Enneagram with my admissions team was the best $200 I have ever spent on professional development. It not only improved our team dynamic, it gave something of value to each of my staff members individually that is theirs to keep whether they stay in admissions for three years or 30.
I have recently moved on to a new institution. Two of my former staff members soon followed me, and as we sat in a meeting recently discussing the challenges of staff dynamics, one of them caught my eye.
With a huge smile, he said, “We need to all take the Enneagram!”
