Enneagram continued...

Executives from companies like Motorola and Marriott have attended workshops on the enneagram system, and it's part of the continuing education program at Silicon Graphics. The CIA has even held enneagram briefings on the behavior of world leaders....

Enneagram adherents believe that what we call our personality is really the sum of our defenses. Our characteristic self-protective mechanisms identify us as one of 9 types.

Supporters insist that the enneagram transforms communication, eliminates turf battles, resolves conflicts and builds trust. Ellen Levin, a San Francisco-based management consultant, lauds the enneagram as "an incredible management tool." As part of her work with the sales and marketing staff of a large magazine, Levin presented the typology over several training sessions. "The vice president of sales was an Eight" - bossy, controlling, combative..." and the people who worked with in were nervous around him," she explains. The seminars helped the boss learn his number and helped the staff learn not to take his behavior personally - it was just his essential Eightness manifesting itself. "It free them to communicate better with him and to focus energy on their jobs instead of on him, " says Levin.

Palmer, Levin and other experts want it clearly understood, however, that you're supposed to use the enneagram to figure out how YOU tick, not to get inside someone else's head. And beware of typing anyone, including yourself, prematurely. Unlike the Myers-Briggs type Indicator, a personality-assessment tool that relies on conclusions drawn from a paper and pencil, multiple-choice test, enneagram typing is a lengthy process. Before you recognize your chief feature, you may have to spend a year attending workshops at which panels of "exemplars" - representatives of the nine types - discuss themselves and their ways of dealing with the world.

Experienced enneagramers like Maryann Hedaa, assistant dean of executive education and professor of management at Columbia Business School, and Dale Knutsen, a software architect at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in CA, respond with enthusiasm to the value of the Enneagram. But if a team member has trouble fitting in or adapting to his or her role, Hedaa thinks the enneagram can play a useful part in one-on-one counseling sessions. Knutsen says the enneagram system helps him decode "what management's, coworkers' and subordinates' concerns are - sometimes ones they're only dimly aware of. But if someone uses it as a way to whip people into shape, it's worse than useless."

Newsweek Article About the Enneagram - By Jean Seligmann, 9.12.98