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Should you use the Enneagram in your hiring process? And if so, how do you go about using it? What's the best way? We're gonna answer that question in today's episode. And I'm also gonna share about a regret that I have around a recent article I was a part of. We're gonna talk about why I regret being a part of it and what that regret has to do with today's topic around using the Enneagram and hiring. So when you're ready, I will see you over on the other side. You're listening to the Enneagram at Work Podcast, a show about understanding people at work, including yourself. I'm your host, Sarah Wallace, and I'm looking forward to diving into this week's episode with you. A few months ago now, I was asked to share a quote or two about specifically about type 1 and type 2 design style preferences. Oh, someone from Apartment Guide had reached out and asked if I would contribute it, contribute to this article they were writing around which design style should you try based on your Enneagram type. And this was to help readers understand how to use interior design to mirror their personality. And there is nothing about this article that is terrible as it's as it's written. It's a very well-written article. The author did a great job with it. It's actually really fun. And she had interviewed several different Enneagram professionals as well as a variety of different interior design professionals. So it was a very robust, thorough, well-written article. I'm not bashing it, but what I am bashing and have some beef with is this concept of these, these kind of surface level uses of the Enneagram. And what prompted this particular topic, I guess, today, was uh an article that came out the day before today that I'm recording this around uh using the Enneagram to help you plan your vacation. It was shared from uh a reputable, very well-known large travel hospitality company. And again, it was also really fun. The Enneagram professional that shared um was was uh you know also shared some interesting insight. Um, however, like the article that I was a part of, uh both of them have such a kind of surface level and really not a useful way to use the Enneagram because when you get into these different descriptors of how to design your house or the type of vacation to go to based on your Enneagram type, I there were several that I related to that that I thought uh in fact, like all of them I could see myself being interested in or being curious about or trying out. And as I, as you know, identify with the type seven, I didn't really feel compelled, extra compelled one way or the other in either of these two situations with the Enneagram type 7 descriptions or suggestions rather. And so it can be really fun. And I I don't want to sound like I'm putting a uh, you know, I'm being a Debbie Downer when it comes to these fun ways to think about using the Enneagram. But the problem is especially for someone who is trying to either, you know, teach the Enneagram in a corporate environment, sell the Enneagram in a corporate environment, whether it's, you know, another Enneagram professional or you're trying to maybe get your boss to invest not just the money, but the time and the resources is into bringing an Enneagram experience to your team. It makes it hard when you get online and then you see these kind of fluff pieces, and you think, oh, the Enneagram is like a horoscope kind of thing, or oh, the Enneagram is like one of those quizzes that you see on Facebook that say, you know, complete this quiz and we'll tell you what Game of Thrones character you're most like, or you know, you know what I'm talking about. And one of my favorite things about the Enneagram is how open and how much flexibility there is. It's a it's an open source framework. No one person, no one organization, no one owns the Enneagram. And so with that comes different ways of teaching it, different ways of thinking about it, different ways of using it. And that is so cool and so beneficial and has all these um positive things. And on the flip side, like so many things in life, when that same open source, that same flexibility can sometimes also cause challenges. And in this case, using it for you know, interior design recommendations, I think knocks down the credibility of the system. And it, you know, my uh mentor that I've talked about before on the show is uh Mario Socorro, who who founds and has founded and let leads Awareness to Action Enneagram. And he describes the Enneagram as a problem resolution framework. And so if everything in your life is going great, then you know, I don't know that it makes a lot of sense to spend time diving deep into this. Uh, this tool called the Enneagram. When it is beneficial, when it is worthwhile, is when there is a situation in your life that, you know, you're you're running up against an obstacle, you're having the same challenge, whether maybe you're running up an obstacle in your career advancement, maybe you're running into uh repeat issues with your relationships, then it makes sense to really self-reflect, to learn the Enneagram, to think about how it applies to you, how it applies to your relationships. Um, and and that work is not always easy, it's not always pretty, that's for sure. Um, but there is a lot of good, there's a lot of gold in that insight and that self-reflection and that that other's awareness, spending the time to learn about your teammates, um, spending the time to learn about the people at home that can't affect how you show up at work. It is difficult though when you have this wide spectrum of using the Enneagram. And I I actually just today was on a call, a planning call for an upcoming Enneagram session with an organization that I've worked with a couple of times in the past, and they're looking to bring it to add in an additional team into the fold here. And they had said at their last session, there was somebody who's on this team that's gonna be um in attendance at this new training. And they said, Oh, he is he is a believer in the Enneagram. He's he said that it changed his life, life, it opened his eyes, it transformed him, it made him think about things he had never thought about before. He uh said it was one of the best trainings he's ever been through with with the Enneagram here. And so it it can be there's like that end of the spectrum where it can be completely life-changing. And then the other end of the spectrum, it are those kind of funny and fun memes, funny and fun articles about the Enneagram, but it can feed into this question that I sometimes get or this skepticism, where people will say, Well, gosh, this just seems like a horoscope kind of thing. Um, and and and it it makes it hard. And so I don't know, you know, we can't can't prevent people from from sharing that. It is, it is what it is, but I don't know that I would be necessarily sharing those articles and and or basing any decisions. I definitely wouldn't be basing my interior design home improvement style off of this article. I definitely wouldn't be planning a vacation for myself or planning uh specific events based off this this travel recommendations because there's so much more that goes into who we are and what our preferences are than just the Enneagram, just our Enneagram type. Um, we'll talk about during Enneagram trainings how this is a starting place. It gives you some specific guidance for getting curious about yourself and others, but there's so much else that goes into who you are as a human being, your socioeconomic status that you grew up with, where you are now with that, um, race, gender, culture, country of origin, um, birth order, past experiences, trauma, traumatic experiences that you might have had, all these different things play into who you are as a person. And so it's really hard to use the Enneagram to predict how you're going to behave, what you're going to like. And we will talk about you can have 10 twos in the same room, but you could have each person behaving, presenting a little bit different, or maybe a lot different, depending on that list of other things that I just mentioned that can play into you know our personality developing. Um, also, the other part of the Enneagram that we have talked about before are those instinctual biases that can influence, you know, are we focused on transmitting? Are we focused on navigating? Are we focused on preserving? Um, and so that can also play a part into how our type presents and what type of design preferences or vacations or whatever it is that our type may like. And so um I bring these articles up because we want to be very careful in different ways that we use the Enneagram because the Enneagram can be incredibly descriptive, it can give us some insight about ourselves. Now, as always, nothing is going to be 100% true 100% of the time, especially in the typing process. Um, we can get hung up on, oh, there's this list of attributes, descriptors, and I don't, you know, oh, there's these three that I don't resonate with. I must not be this type. It is, it's, you know, what do you do most of the time, most of your life? That's something to think about. Um, so not every description about that type is going to be true. Again, those instinctual biases will influence our race, culture, upbringing, all these other things will also influence that, right? Um, but it can give us a starting point for some descriptors, some workplace preferences to describe, you know, our stress triggers, to describe our tendencies based on that initial understanding of our Enneagram type. It can give us some language to use to start to question ourselves, to start to question others. So it can be descriptive. It can also be prescriptive, meaning it gives us some very specific guidance and suggestions for where to focus your growth opportunities. And of course, if we were going to look at the Enneagram diagram, we probably want to be all of those things. We want to be at peace and we want to be powerful. We want to be excited and we want to be perfect. We want to be connected to people and we want to be unique. So it's like all of these things sound sound great to have for the most part. Um, I think most people say, yeah, I'd like that, or I'd like to work on that, or I'm yep, yep, that's uh, yep, I'm I'd like to be good at that. Um, however, the Enneagram shows us that based on your dominant type, there are some specific opportunities for you in and direction and guidance for growth, depending on your type and depending on your instinctual bias as well. So it gives you some guidance. Again, it may not resonate depending on how much work you've already done on yourself, but it can be used to be prescriptive, a starting place for that. So it can be descriptive, it can be prescriptive, but what it cannot be, we cannot allow it to be, is predictive because it just isn't. Not only can we not allow it, we can't allow our companies, ourselves to use it to be predictive. And so that's why, you know, uh low, low stakes, we're talking about, you know, we can't use it to decide how we want to decorate our home, but higher stakes is we can't use it to decide whether or not we're gonna hire somebody. Oh, you know, we our team doesn't have a type five. We actually need to go out and hire a type five. We need somebody to take this test and decide um if they're a five or not. And if they are, let's hire them. And I know most people aren't thinking that that black and white, but there are questions that we'll talk about um when it comes to using the Enneagram and hiring. So the short answer is no, we never want to use it in the hiring process. Um, now there are some assessments out there that are probably more suitable or maybe that you can be that can be used in the hiring process. Um, I know that the Kolby, for example, is something that companies will use in the hiring process to decide is this person a good fit for the team? Is this person a good fit for the role? Um, is this person a good fit for the manager that they'll be reporting to? And that will have, you know, research and science to back up the use for for making those hiring decisions. The Enneagram isn't that kind of tool. And one of the one of the reasons is because it is a self-identification process at the end of the day. Now, there's some of these like Clifton Strength Finder, um, the Colby uh disc. You know, you take a test, very thorough, you get back a result. If any of you are listening to this and have gone through one of our Enneagram and BA workshops, or have gone through another workshop, or have found your type uh through some assessment or quiz, um, you know that it may or may not be accurate in helping you identify your top type. I think it can be helpful in narrowing down some of your top types to help you instead of, okay, you got to learn everything about all nine types of of the Enneagram. Instead, it's, oh, hey, look, based on your initial results, it says that these two, three, maybe four are really close. So start digging into those first and see how those search or resonate. The more you learn about them, the more that you self-reflect. And even though it's a self-identification process, I have found that bouncing some of the descriptions, some of the scenarios, some of the tendencies off of people that you trust and that you know care about you to give you their honest thoughts because sometimes we might identify with the type that we most want to be, but maybe, you know, that's that may not end up that may not end up being our dominant type. So having some outside feedback and also say, hey, you know, I actually really see this in you, or that's, you know, I don't know, I don't know. I would maybe question that a little bit. I don't know that I see that as much as maybe you're thinking. And so you gotta, you know, you gotta trust that that person cares about you. Um, but it it could be worth bouncing that off uh of some people. Um, but the point is that you don't just put in data and then you get a accurate result that you can stand on. You put in some data and you get back a single data point in the typing process, but there are multiple other data points that need to be considered along the that typing journey. And so if we're using the Enneagram in our hiring process and we think, oh, we need a type seven, we need someone to be more fun on the team or whatever, whatever it might be. Um, you might have somebody who initially identifies as a seven, but the more that they learn about the Enneagram, the more that you see in them, it's like, oh, wait, is this person really a seven? And they may end up discovering that actually another type resonates more. Um, and so then you've gone through all that work to find that missing gap on your team, to fill that gap on your team, and that person doesn't even end up being being that type that you quote unquote need. And so that's one issue. And then the second issue is what we kind of opened up this podcast with with talking about, you know, just because you identify with a type, kind of identify with, hey, I want more than anything, it is important for me to feel excited as a type seven, or more than anything, it is important for me to feel connected as a type two. However, those type twos, those type sevens could behave very differently. The way that they act, what they say, what they want could be very different. Being excited could mean very different things if you have 10 sevens in a room. Um, what matters though is that core feeling, that logic, that feeling need that then influences the thinking, that then influences the behavior. That's what the Enneagram, one of the reasons why it's so powerful and so enlightening and insightful is understanding, oh, what is that logic that is driving my thinking and my my behaving, my behavior? Um, what is that logic that is influencing somebody else's thinking and behaviors? But we cannot predict what those behaviors are going to be. We can only kind of take it back, look backwards or or you know, peel the layers back and understand, oh, they were being this way because potentially looking back, okay, they had this feeling to feel excited. So that's why they were doing what they're doing. Um, it doesn't work the other way. It doesn't work, oh, because they want to be excited, they will love this vacation destination. It doesn't work like that. Or because they want to be, they're striving to feel excited and all these things. Um, they're gonna be great in this role, or they're gonna be a great fit for our company. Um, it's not true. It's just it's not true. So we want to be careful. Um, moving forward, um, and I'm not exactly sure how I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna split it up into a couple episodes, though. I do want to talk about this question that comes up often around hiring, and then um kind of a similar question or in the same vein is well, we don't have anybody on our team that's this type, type one, type two, type three, whatever that might be. So moving forward, um, or I don't want to say moving forward, but in the next future couple of future episodes, we're gonna look and talk about what does it mean when you have a gap for a type one? What should you do? What are some things to consider? What might you be missing? Um, when might that actually be okay? When might that actually be a good thing? Um, it's not necessarily always, you know, quote unquote a good thing or the ideal scenario to have an even balance of all types. Some organizations, some departments, some teams, it makes sense that you would be heavy on certain types, you know. Um one example, uh, we had, I was working with a group of physicians. Recently. And the the majority, I would say almost half the group identified as a type one. And almost the other half, almost all identified as a type two. And then there were a couple one-offs with some of the others. And it was like, oh, that makes so much sense. In this situation, I want my physician to be perfect. I also want my pilot to be striving to feel perfect. I want my doctor to be striving to feel perfect and have that type one energy. Absolutely. And it's also great to have somebody who's striving to feel connected and has that great bedside manner in a physician. It makes sense maybe that the supporting staff would be striving to feel connected and, you know, have more of that kind of others focused relationship rapport building. And so it's like, okay, well, it makes sense that there's not a lot of, you know, some of the other types on the team. It makes sense maybe that we don't have a lot of physicians that are identifying with the type six, you know, who maybe struggle with skepticism and uh, you know, what ifs and self-doubt and and and questioning, which we absolutely need those things though, on maybe the legal team, maybe um the compliance team. And again, I'm even getting into some iffy territory here by assuming that certain types would be good in certain departments, right? I'm kind of eating my own words here. Um, so we want to be careful about that. But I'm I'm saying that to say not all teams need to be perfectly balanced. And the goal should not be, gosh, we're really heavy. We need to look for people, you know, with with this type. Maybe, absolutely, maybe you need to bring in some of that energy, but we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about that um for each of the gaps that you might have. So if you're, you know, you don't have any of type one on your team, we're gonna talk more about what what that means, um, what you should do, if anything. Um, so that is to come. I I don't know yet if I'm gonna do nine different episodes or if I'm gonna group some of them. So stay tuned for that. But that's what is to come to kind of piggyback off this. Okay, well, if we shouldn't hire based on the Enneagram type, is there anything that we should be thinking about when it comes to looking at our team map, when it comes to looking what types we do have, what types we don't have, any anything that we should do. Um, so we'll we'll talk more about that, but I wanted to kind of lay the foundation. Uh, short answer, absolutely not. No, we don't want to hire based on someone's Enneagram type, but there are some things that we could consider. So I've heard um, I've heard people say, you know, it's not, we don't want to use the Enneagram until that person gets through the door. Now, when we get them through the door and we want to um introduce them to their team, we maybe we want to give them some professional development right out of the gate. Using the Enneagram and the onboarding process can be phenomenal. It can be incredibly beneficial. Um, there are a couple of teams where we work on a recurring basis when they hire new people. We bring them on, we kind of introduce their teammates via uh the Enneagram type and kind of talk about different relationships at a very high level. So then they can go out and have more personal conversations, but kind of understand, okay, here's my tendencies, here's this person's tendencies. Let's talk about what it might look like if we started a new project. Let's talk about like where we might uh hit some bumps along the road based on what we know about each other. Um, so it's a great conversation starter. And a few months ago, I did this with a group, and I may have mentioned this on the podcast. I can't remember, but I had um a team and they had just hired somebody two weeks before their Enneagram training session. And the person said at the end of the training, and it was just a two-hour training, um, and but they had said, Oh my gosh, this is incredibly helpful. I cannot believe how much time this session saved me. Um, he's like, I feel like it saved me like nine months in trying to get to know my team. And this one, this team specifically was remote. So it makes it even more challenging, right? To get to know your teammates as a new person. And so they had the opportunity to meet everybody in person and go through this with them. Um, and then they also had the opportunity to really kind of deepen their understanding of who they were going to be calling about this project, who they would be communicating with about this, what's their communication tendencies, what's their communication style. And you can keep that conversation going, but it's such a great starting point. So huge fan of using it in the onboarding process once you get that person through the door, but we want to be very careful and really not at all. Like we don't even have to be careful. I would I would say don't even think about using the Enneagram until you get that person through the door, and then we can look at using it for that person and then for the team dynamics. So, with that, if you are new to the Enneagram at Work podcast, thank you so much for being here. Um, I hope that you will join us for the rest of this series. If you're a returning listener, welcome back. I appreciate you being here as always. I hope you will also join us for this series. And um, if you happen to be somebody looking to introduce the Enneagram to your team, your department, maybe bringing two departments together to better communicate and learn. This is a very popular or very common way. Um, I have seen groups use the Enneagram, as they'll bring two different departments together. Um, I'm gonna invite you to check out the options that we have at Enneagram MBA. Um and it's over at EnneagramMBA.com. We have everything from a two-hour option to a two-day option and with you know, different kind of a la carte, pick your pick the topics that are gonna be most meaningful to you. We have a mixture of education and information with exercises and activities to really learn about ourselves as an individual and then learn about our coworkers and the intention of every workshop, regardless of what kind it is or how long it is, is not to walk away as an Enneagram expert or oh, I know the Enneagram better now, but it's oh, I've learned about this tool that can help me learn about myself more, that can help me learn about my teammates more. So it's not about becoming an expert on the Enneagram, it's about becoming an expert in ourselves in our and our workplace relationship. So find start over at Enneagramba.com with those options. And um until then, um I will see you next week um as we get into more about using the Enneagram to fill in your your team gaps and what that might look like.