Page 233 - Using the Enneagram System to Identify and Grow Your Leadership Strengths and Achieve Maximum Success

208 What Type of Leader Are You?

dinary work, and they enjoy the intensity of working collectively
and interdependently to get the job done beyond expectations.
Here is an example of how Marshall, an Eight, works to chal-
lenge his team:

Although Marshall was new to the organization, he picked up
the corporate culture at lightning speed and moved forward
quickly, challenging his team to make increasingly larger
contributions to both the customer and the organization. For
example, at a team meeting, the members were reviewing
their relationships with customers. Two members of the ten-
person team spoke of their frustrations with customers
whom they described as extremely demanding. Marshall
then challenged them to examine their own reactions rather
than to focus on the customers’ behavior, saying, “I know
the expectations of these customers can feel excessive, but
what I need to do and you need to do is to look at our own
reactivity, which can make the situation worse. I get impa-
tient, you get impatient, and the customer feels this. We
need to stop this, and stop it now!”

There are three ways in which Eight leaders’ attraction to clean-
ing up chaos can also have a negative impact on the teams they
lead: (1) their team may be too underorganized; this keeps the
Eight leader stimulated, but the result can be that everything
becomes a crisis; (2) after too long a period of too much under-
organization, things feel out of control, and the Eight leader then
steps in to organize everything, becoming overly controlling of the
structure; and (3) the Eight leader may have everything so well
under control that he or she becomes bored and disengages from
the team by not being very involved or available, or by finding
another job.
Eights also may not solicit sufficient input from their team mem-
bers in situations where doing so would result in better decisions
and encourage team members to take more initiative. Eight lead-