The Enneagram widely known as a powerful personality system with nine distinct types. As an engineer, I like to take things apart and put them back together to see how they work. In the process, I often break what I’m examining—whoops! Funny thing about the Enneagram, I can’t break it. No matter how I slice and dice, it elegantly fits back together and works amazingly well. This experience led me on the path to discover new ways to use the Enneagram beyond simply a personality dynamics system. Very little is written about using the Enneagram as a process, a practical way to guide teams through problem solving. Because the Enneagram is so effective when applied this way, I was compelled to write my book Teamwork 9.0 and share this team-effectiveness application with others.
In this video segment of the Impactful Legacy podcast with Mari-Lyn Harris, I share the story of how I couldn’t break the Enneagram which started me on the path of discovering Enneagram validity and Enneagram origin.
Grateful to Mari-Lyn Harris and Heart@Work (www.heartatworkonline.org) for the opportunity to share topics about Teamwork 9.0. Find the entire interview here:
https://evolutionaryteams.com/heartwork-interviews-author-matt-schlegel/
Video Transcript
Mari-Lyn Harris: Tell us a little bit about the Enneagram and how that plays a role in to your work with teams.
Matt Schlegel: As I was studying different things and learning about different leadership techniques, management techniques, of course you stumble across lots of different systems: Myers-Briggs, DISC™. And each one of these systems has a distinct set of pros and cons associated with it. As an engineer, I like to go in, poke holes in it, and try to break it. I could always do that with most of the systems until I stumbled across a system called the Enneagram. Interestingly the more I poked at it, tried to dissect it and rebuild it, the more robust it seemed to me. It just really held up as a system. And so that’s what really took me down the path of learning more about it. Like with many people I started using the Enneagram with my friends and family. It was actually introduced to me at my wife’s church where the reverend there is a big advocate of it. I learned it from him originally and even to this day he still has a wonderful group that I participate in. It’s a great community to learn from each other and explore the Enneagram
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