Enneagram at Work
Welcome to Enneagram at Work, your Saturday leadership download. We're bringing you insights for your weekend so you're ready for Monday.
This is a podcast about understanding people at work and navigating professional relationships. We spend so much of our time at work, why not make it more enjoyable by working on creating more enjoyable relationships with our teammates?
Listen in each week to gain self-awareness, relationship management, leadership development, personal growth insights, and real-life application ideas through the lens of the Enneagram inside educational episodes and interview conversations.
Learn about bringing the Enneagram to your organization or group and view the current workshop menu at: enneagrammba.com
Enneagram at Work
251. Why Communication Breaks Down at Work (Even on Good Teams)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
If you'd like to take what you hear today further, Enneagram MBA offers standalone workshops, retreat experiences, and team-development programs that can be customized around communication, collaboration, and working styles.
If you’d rather lead the experience internally, the DIY Enneagram Workshop Kit includes a slide deck, facilitator guide, sample agendas, icebreakers, and tools to help you bring the conversation to your own team.
*****
Better communication doesn’t always mean more communication.
Teams already have more ways to stay connected than ever: email, messaging platforms, video calls, project-management tools, AI-generated summaries.
But... none of those automatically mean people understand one another better. Sometimes the most useful shift is becoming more aware of the person on the other side of the conversation.
In this episode, we look at five common reasons communication can break down even on good teams:
- Different priorities shape what people hear and pay attention to
- Communication style can easily be confused with intention
- Teams often have unspoken expectations they assume everyone shares
- People respond to stress, tension, and disagreement differently
- We make assumptions about what is driving someone else’s behavior before we actually know
Using examples from real workshop feedback, we explore how the Enneagram can help teams move from assumption to curiosity and better understand what may be underneath a coworker’s communication style, questions, pace, or reactions.
You’ll also hear three questions you can bring into your next team meeting:
- What helps you receive information clearly?
- What is one communication habit you have that others might misunderstand?
- What is one thing we could do differently to make communication easier across our team?
The goal isn’t to get everyone communicating the same way. It’s to build enough awareness and shared language that people can better understand one another and work through differences with less friction.
****
NEW RESOURCE: Download the free Enneagram Workshop Planning Kit for ideas, sample agendas, planning questions, and practical resources to help you design the right experience for your team.
.png)