Most teams want to be healthy, collaborative, and high-performing. Yet many teams struggle with misalignment, recurring conflict patterns, or dynamics that feel “off” but may feel hard to address. What I see again and again in my work with teams is this:

Team performance is shaped by the underlying motivations of each individual. These motivations are often unconscious, and always influential.

This is why The Enneagram* is such a powerful tool for teams. It provides a shared language for understanding the underlying, often unconscious motivations that drive behavior. When teams understand each team member's deeper motivations, communication becomes clearer. Assumptions soften. Curiosity expands. Accountability begins with each person taking responsibility for their own work while not overstepping into another person’s lane.

The Enneagram can help teams understand themselves as individuals and as a dynamic system. This is where meaningful, sustainable team health begins.

What is the Enneagram?

If you are new to The Enneagram, it is a model of human psychology and personality theory based on the idea that each person has a unique, innate personality structure, or “essence,” that shapes how they see the world and themselves. The Enneagram symbol is composed of a circle with nine points, each representing one of nine archetypal personality types. Its origin has an ancient history.

These Types are characterized by a unique combination of strengths, weaknesses, unconscious motivations, fears, and triggers that shape their thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Why use the Enneagram to help build healthy, high-performing teams?

The Enneagram is not only a tool for understanding ourselves and others but also a powerful tool for leadership development, self-awareness, and team communication.

The Enneagram can help individuals and team members understand their own and others' motivations and behaviors, leading to more harmonious relationships, better communication, and more effective problem-solving.

Every Type Has a High Side and a Low Side

The Enneagram does not put people into boxes. It reveals the patterns they already rely on and helps them see how to grow beyond them.

Each of the nine types has a high side and a low side. At their best, team members express the strengths of their type. When someone is under strain, they may feel and show a more reactive side, which might look like rigidity, people-pleasing, overcontrolling, withdrawal, or overfunctioning.

The Enneagram Helps Teams in Any Zone

Teams operate in zones, too. I define those as:

• Healthy, high-performing
• Strain and Burnout
• Underperforming
• Turbulence 

The individuals on the team operate from their type structure, which also impacts the team health zone. This can fluctuate based on the strain the team is experiencing. Understanding this helps leaders depersonalize conflict and view patterns more objectively.

Whether a team is thriving, struggling, or somewhere in between, the Enneagram offers meaningful insight.

• Healthy teams can use it to deepen trust and authentic collaboration.
• Strained teams can use it to uncover the emotional and relational tension that sits beneath the surface.
• Underperforming teams use it to diagnose where motivation, fear, or blind spots are limiting momentum.
• Teams in Turbulence can use it to take a fresh look at all the places where they are leaking energy.

The Enneagram is more than a personality tool. It is a map of human development.

A map of where a person or team is today. 

A map of potential (through wings and lines on the Enneagram symbol). 

A map of how a team can evolve together.

Team Level Enneagram Insights Create New Language

When I work with teams, I roll up individual Enneagram assessment results into team-level data using the Team Reports from Integrative Enneagram. This provides a powerful snapshot of the team’s current dynamics, including core strengths, challenges, blind spots, patterns that emerge under stress, and opportunities for development.

This aggregated view gives teams a new way to see and discuss how they work together and opens the door to new conversations about how they want to operate. Feedback becomes less personal and more effective. 

Many teams tell me this is the first time they have had precise language for behaviors they have sensed for years.

Why This Matters for Performance

Healthy, high-performing teams do not emerge from skill building alone. They grow when people understand one another at a deeper level of motivation.

When teams use the Enneagram well, they can become:

• More honest
• More aligned
• More emotionally aware 
• More accountable
• More resilient under pressure

Most of all, they become a team that can grow together, not just work together.

>> If you are curious about what zone your team is currently functioning in, take our new 10-question Team Health Quiz today.