The 9 Types of Leadership: Mastering the Art of People in the 21st Century Workplace

408 Pages·2017·1.9 MB·English

by  Chestnut

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

The Nine Types of Leadership:
Mastering the Art of People in the 21st Century Workplace © 2017 by Beatrice Chestnut All Rights
Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-68261-148-7
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-149-4

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without
the written permission of the author and publisher.

Cover Design by Quincy Alivio Interior Design and Composition by Greg Johnson/Textbook Perfect

Post Hill Press
posthillpress.com

Printed in the United States of America
Dedication

This book is dedicated to the leaders who share their stories of personal
and professional development in this book, and to leaders everywhere
doing the work of becoming more conscious. They are our greatest
hope for positive change and a brighter future.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Leading in the 21st Century: The Power of
Understanding Your Personality
Chapter 2: Getting to Know the Enneagram System of Personality
Types
Chapter 3: Becoming a Better Leader—and Leading More Effective
Organizations: How to Use the Enneagram for Personal and
Professional Growth
Chapter 4: The Type One Leadership Style: Doing the Right Thing Is
the Right Thing
Chapter 5: The Type Two Leadership Style: The Power of Pleasing
People
Chapter 6: The Type Three Leadership Style: The Compulsively
Productive Professional, or Getting to the Goal and Looking Good
Doing It
Chapter 7: The Type Four Leadership Style: The Power of Authentic
Self-Expression
Chapter 8: The Type Five Leadership Style: The Knowledgeable
Observer, or the Quiet Authority
Chapter 9: The Type Six Leadership Style: The Skeptical, Vigilant
Troubleshooter
Chapter 10: The Type Seven Leadership Style: The Innovative,
Optimistic Visionary, or Focusing on the Future (and Feeling
Festive)
Chapter 11: The Type Eight Leadership Style: The Powerful,
Decisive Activator or Moving Things Forward from a Position of
Strength
Chapter 12: The Type Nine Leadership Style: Leading from
Consensus, Modeling Inclusion, and Defusing Conflict—or the
Consensus-Building Mediator
Chapter 13: What Next? The Enneagram as a Business Tool—How
to Put It into Action in Your Organization
Endnotes
Bibliography
Recommended Resources
About the Author
I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WOULD LIKE TO THANK
ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED TO MAKE THIS
BOOK A REALITY. I’M ESPECIALLY GRATEFUL
TO MY AGENT, PETER STEINBERG, FOR HIS
ROLE IN INITIATING THIS PROJECT AND FOR
ALL HE DID TO HELP ME CREATE THIS BOOK
AND GUIDE IT TOWARD PUBLICATION. BIG
THANKS ALSO GO TO LISA LIPSON CANFIELD
FOR BEING MY PERSONAL EDITOR AND
DEDICATED SOUNDING BOARD AND FOR
HELPING ME AT EVERY STEP IN THE WRITING
PROCESS TO MAKE THE BOOK HAPPEN (IN A
TIMELY WAY). I ALSO WANT TO THANK
ANTHONY ZICCARDI AND POST HILL PRESS
FOR TAKING A CHANCE ON ME AND THIS BOOK
AND BILLIE BROWNELL AT POST HILL PRESS
FOR HER WORK IN SHEPHERDING THE BOOK
THROUGH THE PUBLICATION PROCESS. AND
I’M GRATEFUL TO CLAUDIO NARANJO FOR
BEING THE SEMINAL AUTHOR OF THE
SUBSTANCE OF THE ENNEAGRAM
PERSONALITY TYPES AND SUBTYPES AS THEY
ARE PRESENTED IN THIS BOOK.
Many people have supported the work that created the foundation for this
book. Ginger Lapid-Bogda has been a great teacher and friend, and I’m grateful
to her for the enormous contribution she has made to integrating the Enneagram
with business through her books and trainings. My good friend and colleague
Uranio Paes has helped me in ways both tangible and intangible to bring my
work out into the world. I want to thank my organization development friends
and associates who work with the Enneagram for the many ways they helped
with the creation of this book: Valerie Atkin, Deborah Egerton, Julie Jackle, Joni
Minault, Diane Ring, and Jane Tight. And I’m also very grateful to Matt Ahrens,
Claire Barnum, Elizabeth Cotton, Kyle Corsiglia, Marianne Dray, Helen
English, Kathleen Gallagher, Linda Pino, Stacy Price, Lynn Roulo, Vicky
Rybka, Roxanne Strauss, and Barbara Whiteside, for being friends in the
Enneagram work, listening to me talk through ideas, reading early chapter drafts,
and much more.
Finally, I want to thank the leaders who shared their stories with me for
providing practical, relatable, real-world examples of the impact of the
Enneagram in leadership development and business practices—and also for the
incredible work they are doing to bring more empathy and consciousness to the
working world. Their success proves that leaders who invest in “people skills”
are also the most effective leaders.
CHAPTER 1
Leading in the 21st Century
The Power of Understanding Your Personality
“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also
that difficult.”
Warren Bennis—Author, scholar, leadership expert

“To develop leadership is less about learning new skills and more about unlearning habits and
breaking free from limiting mindsets we have already acquired.”
Peter Hawkins, in The Wise Fool’s Guide to Leadership—
Author, leadership professor, management consultant

Have you ever had a manager that you just couldn’t get along with, no matter
how hard you tried? Have you ever suffered through a team meeting feeling
bothered by a coworker for reasons you couldn’t quite put into words, much less
do anything about?
While I was finishing graduate school, I worked in a large restaurant owned by
a woman who created more problems than she solved as she attempted to direct
the day-to-day workings of the business. Whether she was planning menus with
the kitchen staff or interacting with the managers, waiters, and bartenders, she
wreaked havoc everywhere she went. She criticized people unfairly, leveled
accusations at innocent bystanders, and caused unnecessary stress for everyone
through excessive micro-managing and nit-picking. Whenever she left the
building, all of her capable employees heaved a collective sigh of relief, and the
business of the restaurant ran more smoothly and peacefully. The worst part, of
course, was that she had no idea she was having such a negative impact on the
people around her, and her employees who suffered under her “leadership”
believed it would be hopeless to even try to talk to her about it.
Coincidentally, during this period, I was also studying the approach to
improving self-awareness and communication that this book is all about. By
using this model of personality, I was able to recognize why my boss was likely
doing the things she was doing and figure out what I could do to get along with
her. I knew I couldn’t change her, but by identifying specific patterns in her
behavior, I could understand her personality and shift the way I interacted with
her in a way that ultimately transformed our working relationship.
Nearly everyone has experienced some kind of “people problem” at some
point in their work lives—a manager they had trouble with or a direct report they
didn’t know how to get through to or a client they couldn’t fully understand. In
every area of life, this kind of relationship confusion can be frustrating and
problematic, but in the workplace, it causes extra stress because your livelihood
and your everyday happiness are often at stake.
This is compounded by the fact that, in the 21st century organization, every
employee is rightly encouraged to think of themselves as a leader—a designation
that comes with seemingly endless challenges beyond just “doing your job.”
Being a leader in this new work world means dealing with the fast pace of
change, the need to improve communication to foster better collaboration, and
the need to relate to an increasingly diverse workforce. More than ever, leaders
need reliable tools to help them decode and resolve the misunderstandings and
relationship problems that happen all the time, in businesses large and small.
This book, and the remarkable personality framework it presents, is one such
tool. It provides an amazingly useful method for understanding yourself and
others so you can master the art of relating to the people you work with in a way
that will impact both the “bottom line” and your quality of life.

The Problem: The Need for Effective Leadership
that Can Rise Above Ego
In our current era, leaders face more tests of their capacities and resilience than
ever. Business is becoming more global, new technologies are changing the way
work happens at a continually accelerating rate, and existential threats like
terrorism, political gridlock, and the health of the planet hang over everything
we do, charging our lives with anxiety and fear and the pressure to
“keep up.”
In the face of these challenges, we desperately need leaders who can rise
above the narrow focus of their own ego concerns, create bold visions to get
results, and mobilize people to take action in service of ambitious agendas. But
what, exactly, does it mean to “rise above your ego concerns”? And how do we
define “ego”?
Both psychological theory and age-old “wisdom” traditions tell us that we
humans exist in a kind of waking sleep, or limited consciousness. As we grow
up, we “go to sleep to” certain aspects of our lived experience as a way of
protecting ourselves from the inevitable hurts that happen to us from the outside
world. It’s a natural human reflex to protect ourselves, and so, starting in