The Question Most Leaders Struggle With

I completed a deep training last week in the Enneagram for Teams — one that took me back to the origins of the Enneagram and forward into how to apply it to understand team dynamics. What I came away with changed how I think about a problem I’ve been wrestling with for most of my career.

I’ve built, inherited, and led many teams. Some became high performing. Others left me wondering what they needed. The default response — take what the high-performing team is doing and apply it to the struggling one — sometimes worked. Often it didn’t. Because each team has its own nature, its own composition. What works for Team A won’t work for Team B.

The real question is: what is this team made of? If you could get under the hood — understand what actually drives each person, what blinds them, what builds trust between them and what erodes it — you’d know exactly what this team needs. The Enneagram for Teams gives the team itself the tools to do that. It provides the container, the safety, and the mechanisms for those truths to surface.

Under the Hood

Think of it as getting under the hood of your team — an ultrasound that reveals what’s actually driving behavior beneath the surface.

The Enneagram is a personality system drawn from wisdom traditions that go back nearly a thousand years. In the modern era, three people brought it forward: George Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher who reintroduced the Enneagram symbol to the West in the early 20th century; Oscar Ichazo, the Bolivian philosopher who first mapped the nine personality types onto the system at his Arica School in Chile; and Claudio Naranjo, the Chilean psychiatrist who taught it at Berkeley and connected it to modern Western psychology. It is open-source — no single organization owns it.

Unlike assessments that tell you what you are, the Enneagram goes deeper — it reveals why you became that way, gives you tools to work with those patterns, and opens a path to genuine development rather than just self-description.

What it reveals about each person: their core type, what motivates them, what they fear, and their passion — the fixation that drives behavior, often without their awareness. It also reveals how people express themselves: through thinking, feeling, or action (Head, Heart, Body). And their subtype — which explains why two people of the same core type can look completely different in practice, shaped by their instinct: self-preservation, one-on-one, or social.

For a team, this adds up to something most leaders have never had: an ultrasound of what this team is actually made of.

What the Team Walks Away With

When a team goes through this together, something transforms that’s hard to achieve any other way.

The truth about the team surfaces — not as criticism, but as understanding. Why does this person shut down in conflict? Why does that one dominate every room? Why do two people who agree on everything still manage to frustrate each other? The workshop creates a container where these questions get answered honestly, without blame.

What teams walk away with:

1. Alignment that goes deeper than a shared slide deck. When team members understand what actually drives each other — the fears, the fixations, the blind spots — they move together with a clarity that surface-level alignment never produces. And they sustain it, because they understand why misalignment happens in the first place.
2. Trust built on understanding difference. Erratic behavior that would normally erode trust becomes readable. When you know why a colleague withdraws under pressure or pushes back hard on ambiguity, it stops feeling personal.
3. Friction named and resolved. Every team has patterns that keep it stuck. This work surfaces them — and gives the team the language and tools to address them, not just manage around them.
4. Optimized team composition. Understanding the team’s type reveals gaps and strengths invisible in any org chart or performance review.

One more thing this reveals: where the team is in its development. Tuckman’s Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing stages play out differently depending on the team’s type — what Storming looks like for one team can look nothing like Storming for another.

These aren’t team-building outcomes. They’re business outcomes — the conditions that separate high-performing teams from capable ones.

The Founding Partnership

I have studied and practiced the Enneagram for over five years, working with individual leaders through my coaching practice. Last week I completed my accreditation as an Enneagram for Teams practitioner.

To put this into practice, I am offering a founding rate to the first 10 teams — a two-day workshop, in person where possible and highly preferred, designed to surface and transform the dynamics that are holding your team back.

If you’ve ever sat across from your team and felt the gap between what they’re capable of and what they’re actually delivering — I’d love to explore this with you.

Schedule a 30-minute call. Or email me.

Learn more: https://hyperion-leadership.com