Enneagram For Stronger Working Relationships
Enneagram and Teams: How Enneagram Coaching Builds Stronger Working Relationships
Teams can only thrive when they understand one another. Technical expertise matters, but the real differentiator in high-performing teams is the quality of relationships, communication, and trust. This is where Enneagram and teams coaching becomes transformative.
Over the past few months, I’ve been privileged to work with leadership teams across various sectors, including at Thames Hospice and Beiersdorf for @CoCreate Consultancy and at Hermes Airports who have been using the Enneagram for their leadership team development for the last 6 years.
In my role as an associate with @CoCreate Consultancy, I’m part of a supportive and vibrant community of Enneagram practitioners who shares tools, insights, and reflective space to continually develop the craft of team coaching. We facilitate in pairs, partnering and supporting each other to improve team effectiveness.
Why the Enneagram Creates Deeper Team Conversations
Unlike lighter personality type tools, the Enneagram is a deep profile. It goes far beyond behaviours to help people understand core motivations, fears, defence patterns, triggers, strengths, and blind spots. Because it connects at the level of identity and internal drivers, it opens the door to honest, courageous team conversations that other diagnostics can’t reach. Naturally, facilitating these conversations requires creating a great deal of psychological safety in the room. Strong Enneagram facilitators have done their own inner work, giving them the capacity to hold the strong emotional response of a team challenged to be vulnerable with each other.
When teams explore their Enneagram types together, several things happen:
1. Real understanding replaces assumptions
Teams stop interpreting others’ behaviours through their own lens. Integrating the Enneagram allows team members to build empathy, recognise intent, and reduce miscommunication.
2. Conflict resolution becomes a learning opportunity
Enneagram coaching helps reveal what triggers each type, how they respond under pressure, and how to de-escalate and reconnect. Teams begin to manage conflict with each other, not against each other.
3. Strategy execution becomes more collaborative
Different personality types bring different gifts, strategic thinking, action orientation, emotional intelligence, systems view, creativity, precision, adaptability. Enneagram for teams helps people consciously “play to top strengths” and design roles or processes that maximise collective intelligence.
4. Blind spots become shared
The Enneagram normalises the idea that every type has predictable patterns that can limit effectiveness. This creates psychological safety for teams to challenge one another respectfully and supportively.
What Teams Are Saying About How the Enneagram Helps
Across my recent work helping teams at Thames Hospice, Beiersdorf, and Hermes leadership, a few themes keep emerging:
“I understand my colleagues better than I have in years.”
“We now have the language to talk about conflict openly.”
“We can finally work with our strengths intentionally and stop tripping over the same patterns.”
“This gives us a pathway to deliver our strategy with more cohesion and less friction.”
These insights are the heart of why Mojo Coaching and Leadership brings the Enneagram into team building work. It is not simply a diagnostic for team performance, it is a gateway into empathy and understanding in team dynamics. The Enneagram offers an insight into the unique strengths and challenges of each group, eanbling teams to understand how they lead, relate, challenge, and collaborate.
Being part of the CoCreate associate community gives me access to continuous supervision, shared learning, and a collective wisdom that strengthens every team engagement. High-quality Enneagram practice requires deep work, and that is only sustainable when coaches themselves have the reflective support they need.
Team coaching is a collaborative act, I’m supported by a strong professional community that values rigour, compassion, and reflective practice.
What Happens When You Apply the Enneagram and Teams Start Working Differently
When teams embed Enneagram insights into how they operate, including how they run meetings, make decisions, and resolve conflict, the shift is profound. Better conversations lead to better relationships, and better relationships lead to better performance.
As teams take this work further, something deeper begins to shift. The Enneagram provides a shared framework that strengthens self-awareness and helps people understand what drives their reactions, especially in a team setting. That awareness alone can improve communication, because individuals begin to recognise not only their own patterns, but also what their colleagues need in moments of pressure or uncertainty. The result is stronger teamwork grounded in empathy, clarity, and accountability. When leaders apply the Enneagram’s insights consistently, teams move beyond surface-level collaboration and build relationships that genuinely support high performance.
Ready to use Enneagram Coaching for your Team?
If your organisation is looking to deepen trust, reduce friction, and improve how your team members interact, the Enneagram is a powerful place to start.
Contact us to understand the areas where the Enneagram can help teams to work more effectively.