The Enneagram at Work: Unlocking the Power of Type to Lead and Succeed

By Jim McPartlin and Anna Akbari

Use the power of the Enneagram to become a more effective, capable leader

The Enneagram at Work is the first book to harness the insight of the Enneagram to transform leadership in today’s workplace. A veteran of the high-profile hospitality industry with two decades of experience working with the Enneagram, author Jim McPartlin has seen firsthand the way self-awareness can radically transform leadership, strengthen teams, and spark creative solutions. From giving and accepting criticism to fostering strong mentorships and managing conflict, The Enneagram at Work will give you invaluable tools for growing and thriving in your career.

For the longtime Enneagram fan or those who are just learning to identify their type, The Enneagram at Work helps readers explore the full breadth of their type, becoming aware of their blindspots in the workplace and leaning into their strengths more fully. Each chapter includes actionable exercises and practices so that readers can move from learning to doing and apply their insights in the real world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250777232

Jim McPartlin

Jim McPartlin is a renowned hospitality consultant with over three decades of leadership experience across the luxury hotel industry. Most recently employed as the Vice President of Leadership Development at Forbes Travel Guide, Jim is also a recognized authority on using the Enneagram as a means of understanding interpersonal workplace relationships. Over the past 20 years, Jim has taught hundreds of courses on the Enneagram and emotional intelligence and has delivered keynote speeches and seminars on this topic across the globe. He actively works as a professional coach with clients ranging from American Express, Chanel, Geico, and XL Construction.

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INTRODUCTION

In 2003, after ten years with Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, it felt like a chapter had come to a close, and I was ready for a change. So when I was offered the general manager position at the W San Francisco, I took it.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts was the hot hotel company at the time, and W Hotels was their rock-star brand. It was a plum position, and I was excited to dive in. It was also a bit daunting: I was afforded a great deal of respect in my previous position, but this new job required me to reestablish my authority. I was the manager, but the team I inherited was operating at a high level, and their technical skill sets surpassed mine. I’m also not a huge guy, and the majority of the team towered over me. It was intimidating.

On my first day, Marcus and Michael, two senior team members, walked into my office for our scheduled meeting. My office was quite large, complete with a conference table and a desk with two visitor chairs. As Marcus and Michael walked into the room, I gestured to the chairs in front of my desk. A look passed between them, and, smiling slightly, they sat down at the conference table and stared back at me. The nonverbal messaging was clear: you come to us; we’re not coming to you. I held the more senior title, but they had longevity and strength in numbers on their side. The power struggle had begun.

Regardless of your industry or position, we’ve all had our authority challenged. It can be disorienting and downright scary: no one wants to look weak. I immediately recognized what was happening and made a deliberate, instantaneous choice to openly acknowledge it. Gentlemen, this is a fine example of positional power that you’re demonstrating. However, I’m not playing. Get over here and sit down. They both looked at me in surprise, then at one another, and ultimately picked up and moved. The wry smiles were now replaced with thoughtful looks and a more respectful demeanor. The dynamic shifted. Now they were nervous. To be clear: I was nervous, too! But you can’t lead with that sort of passive vulnerability. I needed to set the tone from day one and operate from a place of strength. So I nodded and said, Thank you. Now let’s get started. By the end of the meeting, we were all talking easily, but it was clear I was their boss.

Over fifteen years later, I’m still in touch with both of these men and count them as close friends. We’ve often laughed about that encounter, and both of them confirmed that I gained their immediate respect that morning. How? In that brief yet significant moment, I quickly scanned my three intelligence centers and asked myself: How do I feel? What do I think? What can I do? In a matter of seconds, I was able to guide myself away from an emotional reaction and instead combine logic with swift action—and it paid off. That single exchange laid the foundation for my relationship with the team and the authority I commanded in that company, and it continues to color the respect I’m afforded by those individuals. It wasn’t natural ability that led to that outcome. Rather, it took years of developing self-awareness, as well as a set of replicable tools for putting that awareness to work.

Having led revenue-generating teams for the greater part of my career, I know that in order to get where you want to go, you must first and foremost connect with people on an emotional level—a quality often referred to as emotional intelligence. This was a lesson learned during the nearly thirty years of my career that I spent working for the most important names in the hospitality industry: George Kalogridis of Walt Disney World Resort, Bill Kimpton of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, Barry Sternlicht of the W Hotels, Ian Schrager, André Balazs, Jonathan Tisch. I’ve also hosted people in my hotels like Bill Marriott, Anna Wintour, Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie, to name just a few. But across my entire career, the asset that has distinguished me the most is my ability to broker in what I believe is the greatest, most underrated leadership currency: self-awareness.

THE ENNEAGRAM: THE BEST LEADERSHIP TOOL YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEEDED

This book takes the training methodology I’ve developed over the last few decades and condenses it into a format applicable across industries. It’s a book about leadership, mentorship, and the practical mechanics of building the ultimate team—with the help of the Enneagram. Leaders are sometimes naturally born, but for the rest of us, it takes time, discipline, and self-awareness to grow from being a manager to someone who can guide and inspire a team. I’ve worked for incredible leaders over the years, taken several standout managers who worked for me under my wing, and am proud to say I’ve led some truly remarkable teams. I believe the Enneagram was the tool that helped me unlock the power of my own leadership potential, and gave me the road map for guiding others to do the same.

Beginning with a one-day class back in 1993, the Enneagram showed me nine specific worldviews—and forever changed the way I view myself and those I lead. These worldviews are not a box in which to put an individual; rather, they’re a way to gain insight into yourself and the people around you. Each of those nine worldviews are associated with patterns of behavior. And here’s the thing: we like our patterns and our patterns like us. We’re attached to our behavior patterns. They’re comfortable and familiar, even when they don’t serve us or those around us. What I learned by cultivating my own self-awareness through this centuries-old tool and in mentoring those around me, was that trying to change our patterns is enormously difficult. However, through a systematic understanding of who you are, what motivates you, and how you relate to those around you, you can evolve and grow. This takes time and only comes with experience and focus, but too often, we don’t know where to begin. For many, this book will serve as that starting point.

This book offers an instructive, fun, inspirational guide meant to support anyone who is seeking to reach their potential as both a leader and a human. One of the first lessons learned is that you’re fine just as you are. My sense is everyone is paying their taxes and getting to work on time. In other words, you’re functioning as an adult. This book is not another New Age self-help gimmick that promises a quick fix for all the problems in your life. Rather, it helps you understand all that you’ve ever been, all that you are, and how to tap into your future potential—if you’re willing to do the work.

Self-awareness tools like the Enneagram are currently experiencing a surge of popularity and are heavily relied upon by companies to encourage their employees and optimize work relationships. That being said, I don’t see this as a book strictly devoted to the Enneagram, just as my teachings have already resonated well beyond the hospitality industry. As with my curriculum and talks, the Enneagram serves as a useful entry point for the type of advice I want to give in service to creating greater awareness of self and others. This book will help you recognize your own skills and understand how best to utilize them in order to achieve optimal performance and success as a leader. In the end, I hope that through the stories, insights, and action-oriented tools I provide, readers will celebrate their own leadership talents, conquer any fear currently holding them back, and step into a future of possibility.

MY PATH FROM EMPLOYEE TO SELF-AWARE LEADER

For over twenty years now, I’ve been certified as a teacher in the Enneagram, a self-insight model that has had a profound effect on my life and in the way that I manage my teams. During this time, my passion for understanding emotional connection from a leadership standpoint has developed into a career.

Until recently, I worked for Forbes Travel Guide as vice president of leadership development. When I first came to Forbes, I was hired as an executive trainer, traveling around the world to teach the staff at luxury hotels, restaurants, and spas what it takes to receive a coveted four- or five-star rating from us. I covered everything from making a bed properly to the appropriate way to greet a guest. Regardless of the task we were focusing on, what I was really teaching was how everyone from managers to CEOs could get the best efforts from their teams.

In hospitality, leaders typically work with many disparate groups with different backgrounds and skill sets, all of whom must come together to create a seamless experience for guests. They are called to work harmoniously with other groups, not to mention with the members of their own teams, and no amount of oversight alone can create that result. It must be inspired by the employees themselves. To accomplish this, leadership needs a deep understanding and emotional connection to their teams, as well as to their own strengths and weaknesses. In an effort to address this need, I pulled from what I learned in my decades of experience in hospitality, coupled with the tools of self-awareness and insight developed from the Enneagram, to form a unique leadership curriculum.

Over time, it was an enormous success. I’ve been hired to teach seminars at companies across the hospitality industry and have spoken at conferences and other events around the world. I became an anomaly: someone generating income for Forbes, even though I am not specifically in sales. As a result, the company not only promoted me, but created an entirely new position to encompass my role.

Word of my curriculum and talks continued to grow, and I eventually created an independent business, with Forbes’s blessing, as a coach and consultant. My largest client is a construction company based in Northern California with annual revenue of approximately $800 million. I’m on a retainer with them, and in the last five years, have taught more than five hundred of their employees classes in different models of self-awareness and communication, while also acting as a coach to the Chief Operating Officer and leading off-site retreats for the executive team. Additionally, I’ve led corporate off-sites and given seminars for a talent agency in Beverly Hills, various hotel companies, a large real estate firm based in New York, an international private club concept, various start-up enterprises, and I even coach individuals, as well. (The swag at Chanel was the best!)

WHAT TO EXPECT

With each chapter building upon the previous ones, I’ll coach you toward a working knowledge of the Enneagram and its practical, workplace applications, by demonstrating how it has facilitated my own thirty-year career path and leadership growth. While I started in hospitality, and many of my initial clients naturally came from that world, I quickly realized the broad applicability of this system and now use it to work with teams across many sectors. Every industry can benefit greatly from the Enneagram because it serves to connect to a better understanding of yourself and those around you. It is an individual- and team-based tool that can be leveraged across organizational divisions, roles, and life.

1. The Enneagram: An Overview

Leadership requires self-awareness. In this first chapter, I explore both our collective love of change and our individual resistance to actually changing. How do we overcome it? Why is it crucial to success in both business and life? I also introduce readers to the fundamentals of the Enneagram and lay out its applicable uses within business and leadership. While I offer resources for readers to do a full assessment and dive deeper into this framework, I also lay out my unique process for real-time, on-the-go assessment of yourself and those you work with. By answering a few simple questions, you can reveal what’s beneath the surface of behavior and transform your ability to lead.

2. Cultivating Self-Awareness: Overcoming Blind Spots and Radiating a Higher Expression of Your Type

In chapter 2, I address the role of self-awareness in building core leadership skills. You’ll learn to recognize the higher and lower expression of your own type and the types of others. I’ll also address how you can become an expert in your own self-awareness by incorporating some easy-to-understand exercises into your daily routine.

3. Getting Your Hands Dirty: Core Principles for Upping Your Leadership Street Cred

In this chapter, I begin to flesh out the basic principles around day-to-day managing versus inspiring leadership. Can you manage and still be a leader? Can and should you aspire to both? The answers are yes and yes! I lay out my five Enneagram-inspired leadership principles, and, using examples from my own career (some with hilarious outcomes), I endeavor to showcase a path for growth, regardless of your type or starting point.

4. Think, Feel, and Take Action: Integrating the Three Centers of Intelligence

This chapter covers the three centers of intelligence, of which we are all possessed: logic, emotions, and action. You’ll discover that although you have a Head Brain, you actually have intelligence in your body and feelings, too. You most likely rely on one or two of them a bit more than the others, and this chapter outlines how growth comes from recognizing this triad and learning to restore a sense of balance among them.

5. Self-Aware Feedback: The Missing Piece

Here I address how implementing self-awareness into the feedback process can benefit both the giver and receiver and lay out a four-step communication model. I also distinguish your personality from your core and teach you how to coax them to play nicely. From style to content, there’s an accessible finesse to effective feedback, and this chapter arms every reader with the ability to positively absorb any feedback and deliver it with grace.

6. Triumphant Failure: Pushing Beyond Your Patterns

What’s it like to fail, but fail well? In this chapter, I explore how self-awareness can transform a belly flop into a rocket launch. I’ll challenge you to rethink everything you thought you knew about failure and reframe both your past and your future through this new lens of self-aware missteps.

7. Stretch, Release, Inspire: Accessing the Higher Side of Type

Individual Enneagram types offer opportunities to settle into your sweet spot and elevate an uncomfortable situation. This chapter lays out the leadership qualities that inspire companies and communities alike and establishes a protocol for cultivating the qualities that come most easily to your individual type. I make the case for what I call ditching the counterfeit, the faux persona we often project to appease the masses and get by, which takes us away from our core. Embracing your core is the bravest, most inspiring choice you can make as a leader and a human, and the Enneagram can help you access it.

8. Mentorship: Calling on Your Wings for Takeoff

This chapter addresses the lost art of mutually beneficial mentorship that’s fueled through thoughtful, self-aware communication and putting in the work to recognize and build on the assets and challenges presented when two unique individuals come together. I share the mentorship that helped lift me to my current position and why our mutual self-awareness was key to making it work, as well as the mentoring relationships I’ve effectively (and not so effectively) developed over the years. I also make the case for self-mentoring as a necessary foundation for being of value to others. By detailing my own triumphs and missteps, strategies and tools, I reflect on how increased self-awareness, fueled by the Enneagram, gives leaders the tools to nurture the next generation of leaders.

9. Managing Conflict: Pattern Behavior Under Stress

Even in the friendliest of settings, conflict is inevitable. It’s both natural and necessary for the success of any organization, but conflict resolution comes a little less naturally to most of us. How do you lead through it? Chapter 9 drills down into the personality and behavioral traits of each Enneagram type that lead to conflict and hinder its resolution. Through a deeper understanding of your type, I outline a replicable path for infusing productivity and zen into even the tensest of contexts.

10. No One Leads Alone: Collaboration Through Mutual Understanding

Which qualities make for good collaboration, which prevent it, and how can you incorporate it into any group or setting? What is the ideal personality mix for group projects and brainstorming? In chapter 10, I lay out the limits and opportunities of collaboration and explain how to effectively harness the power of individual and team dynamics through a deeper understanding of your Enneagram subtype.

11. Finding Your Voice: The Enneagram’s Gifts for Public Speaking

I don’t have to tell you that public speaking is our collective greatest fear, and it isn’t something all leaders enjoy or excel at. Leaders are first and foremost listeners (or should be). But eventually, the wisdom derived from that listening accumulates, and you are compelled—or required—to speak, often very publicly. Chapter 11 explains why all personality types can be standout public speakers, not just at big events to crowds of strangers, but during boardroom presentations to your own team. I explore the concept of fear and address the traits and tactics available to each particular Enneagram type to successfully deliver a showstopping performance.

Learning about the Enneagram forever changed my life. It created not only a path but a different level of engagement and awareness to guide me as I walk down it. If you allow yourself to approach this endeavor with a curious mind, an open heart, and a grounded presence, you’re in for a rewarding adventure. The uses for the Enneagram are immeasurable, touching on everything from what makes you tick to how to truly understand those around you. It teaches compassion, forgiveness, and our interconnectedness in the human experience. It can help with both personal and professional relationships. Once you’re well versed in this system, you’ll gain an edge in the business world, emerging better equipped to size up situations from the perspective of understanding your own patterns of expression and getting a better read on someone else’s, too.

When I first started training in the Enneagram professionally, I was one of a small group of individuals from the business community. At the time, I remember another student being a bit affronted when I said I wanted to use it as a management tool. She felt that self-insight was a deeply personal journey that had no place at work. My reply was, Have you been in the business world recently? What was true then is still true today: companies put out buzz words like culture and synergy, but too often there is not much to practically apply those concepts or directives for meaningful action. Incorporating the Enneagram as a mechanism for supporting and empowering your team transforms both you and the organization, with enduring impact.

Imagine a secret power that gives you insight into how another person views themselves and the world around them—that is the Enneagram. It provides an amazing base of understanding, almost instantly, of how you show up with others, facilitating enhanced conversation, collaboration, and team communion at an accelerated pace. With a little self-reflection, you can begin to see that you’re not alone in your habits of mind, how you feel, and what you do. As a leadership tool, it will help you unleash—in yourself and those you serve—the considerable gifts everyone is given, while providing a path for growth out of behaviors and patterns that don’t serve. And, perhaps most important, it can be really one hell of a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy the ride.

1

THE ENNEAGRAM

An Overview

THE ENNEAGRAM: A BRIEF HISTORY

This may be the first time you are hearing about the Enneagram, but it’s not a new system—in fact, it’s really old! The earliest documentation of the Enneagram goes back as far as twenty-five hundred years.

Ennea, or nine, and gram, or written, come from the Greek. It’s visually represented as a nine-pointed star within a circle and historically has been linked with religious and mystical traditions, including Sufism, Judaism, and Christianity (which framed it in terms of theological virtues and vices).

In the modern era, from 1900 on, much credit can be given to George Gurdjieff, a Greco-Armenian spiritualist who traveled the world searching for the meaning of life, for bringing the Enneagram to light. In the 1960s, Bolivian philosopher Óscar Ichazo built on this work by connecting the Enneagram to specific personality types. Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo then combined the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ichazo with modern psychological terms, outlining each of the nine types. Dr. Naranjo brought the work to Berkeley, California, in the 1970s, and from there it spread throughout the United States and eventually across the