The 9 Types of Leadership

Book excerpt: The 9 Types of Leadership draws on the Enneagram, an amazingly accurate descriptor of personality, to help people in the workplace create more effective relationships, so they can be more productive and happy at the office. In the past few years, mindfulness and other approaches to self-awareness have begun to transform the American workplace. But while it is increasingly widely accepted in the business world that the most direct route to success lies in adopting practices that actively promote leaders’ self-awareness, social skill, and “emotional intelligence,” the best and most efficient path to developing a more conscious workforce often remains unclear. The Enneagram provides this pathway to greater self-awareness and social skillfulness. Like a GPS for social interactions, the Enneagram helps you orient yourself when you get caught up in people problems you don’t know how to work your way out of. By providing extremely detailed and accurate descriptions of nine recognizable personalities, the Enneagram is an unmatched tool for business people to use to decode the mysteries involved in understanding why people do what they do, why we have conflicts with some people but not others, and how we can become aware of our blind spots. Most importantly, it can help leaders to know themselves in a deeper way so they can more effectively lead others and more powerfully model conscious behaviors for their direct reports.