Invest in your self-awareness with the Enneagram
Why Self-Awareness is Your Most Crucial Investment
Whether you are preparing to pitch your first startup, stepping into a management role for the very first time, or steering a massive division as a seasoned executive, leadership ultimately boils down to a single variable: you.
Your team or your company will ultimately become an extension of you—both your strengths and your flaws.
Every milestone in your career demands a new level of skill, but more importantly, it demands a deeper level of self-awareness. The higher you climb, the more your internal world impacts your external reality. Your fears, your habits, and your reactive patterns will directly shape your culture, your strategy, and your team’s performance.
The best investment you can make at any stage of your leadership journey is building an unfiltered understanding of how you operate.
While there are many excellent assessment tools available today, the framework I rely on heavily in my coaching practice is the Enneagram. I've found it resonates deeply with my style and consistently yields profound breakthroughs for my clients.
What Is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is a dynamic personality system that maps out nine distinct psychological archetypes. Unlike standard tests that simply categorize what you do, it focuses entirely on why you do it. It shows you the gifts of your personality, and it also illuminates your underlying motivations, your core fears, and the specific defense mechanisms you automatically use when under pressure.
Why is this important? Our personality types dictate where our attention automatically goes. When stress hits, we fall into habitual patterns of behavior. These blind spots are often where our growth lies and the key to understanding friction and challenging dynamics that we may notice in our lives.
Practical Examples
Here are two concrete examples of fictional leaders at different points of their career. Each expresses as a different type and each of them has blind spots that can be identified which impede them from being as effective and collaborative as they could be.
Kayla, the First-Time Manager: Moving from an individual contributor to a manager requires a massive shift in control. New managers often default to what made them successful in their old role.
Expressing as a Type 5, the Quiet Specialist, Kayla tends to feel secure when she possesses all the knowledge and data. When her new team looks to her for quick decisions, her instinct might be to withdraw into deep analysis, delaying projects while she seeks more information. Revealing this pattern has helped Kayla to see what the balance is between thinking and acting, and when she might be using research as a shield to avoid the vulnerability of making an imperfect call.
Roberto, the Seasoned Leader : At the executive level, Roberto rarely gets unfiltered feedback. Blind spots are amplified by authority, and his teams and those around him may be too intimidated to point them out.
Expressing as a Type 8, an Active Controller, Roberto's core drive is to be strong and protect his domain. Under executive pressure, his automatic response is to push harder, command control, and dominate the room. His team has a tendency to feel bulldozed at times. Revealing this pattern has helped Roberto see how his intensity can be misread as intimidation, and he's had to learn to deliberately soften his approach to invite true collaboration.
The ROI of Knowing Yourself
Investing in your self-awareness isn't about changing who you are; it’s about untangling yourself from the habits that hold you back. When you understand your core drivers, you can:
De-escalate your own stress: You learn to notice the physical and mental signs that you are slipping into a negative behavioral loop, allowing you to pause and act differently.
Lead with authenticity: Whether you are leading a team of three or three thousand, people follow leaders who are grounded, transparent, and acutely aware of their own impact.
Hire for your blind spots: You stop hiring clones of yourself and intentionally recruit people who naturally see what you miss.
Let’s Explore Together
If you are ready to unpack the hidden patterns that drive your decision-making and take you out of alignment, let's talk through how we can use the Enneagram to fuel this exploration and meet your development goals.
For more information on the Enneagram, I encourage you to visit Integrative 9, the provider I use for all of my client's Enneagram assessments.