ATD Blog
Coaching to Motivation
Leverage the Enneagram to help your clients understand the why behind their beliefs and behaviors to achieve better, more sustainable outcomes.
Thu May 15 2025
Coaching. One of the biggest business buzzwords and industries right now. You know it’s big when even artificial intelligence (AI) is getting in on the action.
And why not? Coaching has consistently proven itself as a best practice to increasing self-confidence, work performance and productivity, optimizing relationships and communication skills, decreasing employee turnover, optimizing employee potential, maximizing engagement, and developing employees for success. The global coaching industry currently earns more than USD 15 billion annually and is projected to reach USD 25 billion by 2028.
But what is it? So many people think that it’s a way for organizations to manage out a problem employee, with one last-ditch attempt to turn around and rectify years of neglect and inattention to accountability by management with a six-month coaching engagement. A magic pill, if you will. But that’s not what coaching is. In its purest form and intent, coaching is a private and confidential process that allows a person to come to their own decisions and take actions on them through the facilitation of a coach who is there to listen and empathize with them, help them gain clarity, consider different alternatives that the coachee generates, land on a decision, and remind them of their accountability. Coaches are not there to provide solutions or answers—people are less likely to do something that someone tells them to do, and more likely to take action on something that they came up with on their own; coaches are there to ask powerful, insight-generating questions that ultimately serve to get the solution out of the coachee. And coaching is now an expectation of managers as a situational leadership style to be used when employees are experienced enough to be able to fish on their own, rather than being given the fish.
A recent study on coaching concluded that even though traditional coaching (such as the GROW model) is very effective, it is most effective when coupled with deeper coaching—coaching that gets to the depths of the crux, origins, or motivations behind the client’s world view, helping the client to identify and reverse decades-old unproductive and no-longer true mindsets wired into them at birth and throughout early childhood. When you coach knowing the client’s motivations, you can ensure that a client “does the deeper work” of development that will help them long-term in all aspects of their lives.
Coaches have myriad tools at their disposal to “go deeper” with their clients, and one of the best, in my honest opinion, is the Enneagram. Admittedly, I’m biased toward the Enneagram, given that my PhD dissertation topic was titled, “Using the Enneagram to Help Organizations Attract, Retain, and Motivate Employees” and that my three books (The How and Why: Taking Care of Business With the Enneagram, Nina and the Really, Really Tough Decision, and Explicit Expectations: The Essential Guide & Toolkit of Management Fundamentals) are all centered on the use of the Enneagram to help individuals, teams, and organizations become more effective and achieve their ultimate potential. Once a coach and coachee can understand the client’s core motivation and fears (each of us subscribes to one primary, core motivation for our entire life), it becomes much easier to connect the dots with their manifestations in daily business challenges and relationships—and then come up with strategies on how to resolve them and how to use the other eight energies to be even more aware and effective.
Check out how these may play out:
CORE FEAR | MANIFESTATION |
Type 1: Criticism due to fear of not being good enough | Over-reliance on perfection may make them overly critical, demanding, inflexible, and unrealistic in the workplace. This may show up as difficulty in meeting goals in a timely or fiscally responsible manner. * Meritocracy – earned status vs. popularity or politics * Unwillingness to change – others should change * Seeing the world as black and white – no grey * Too serious – stiff, detached, not fun * Perfectionism – focus on mistakes, 100 percent completion * Needing to be right – personal solution is the only right way; others are inferior, affront |
Type 2: Helping others and making oneself indispensable to them for ultimate fear of being unloved by them | Need to be liked may lead to an inability to say “no” to others and therefore take on too much work that can’t be accomplished. This, in turn, can lead to their burnout and/or their letting others down when the work isn’t accomplished. * Breaking boundaries – uninvited intrusions * Histrionics – inappropriate or overly emotional responses * Playing favorites – attending to a ranked order of people, issues based on perceived importance * Worrying about other people’s problems instead of own * Needing to be liked by others, possibly resulting in anxiety, conformity, self-sacrifice, and insincerity * Tending to take a supporting role by advising, supporting, and/or manipulating (rather than leading from the front) |
Type 3: Being insignificant and useless | Need to achieve can also lead them to take on too much, which can result in their cutting corners to get things done on schedule. This could lead to harming their reputation, which is of extreme importance to them. * Spin and wanting to look good at the cost of omitting less flattering details * Seeming superficial, disingenuous, untrustworthy, and unknowable by trying to be all things to all people * Self-promoting, attention and recognition-seeking * “Individual Contributor Syndrome” – pacesetter; taking on too much * Speed – lack of attention to detail |
Type 4: Dramatic reactions and constant comparisons to the past, to counter fear of being ordinary and without identity | Need to be different and unique, along with their penchant for deep feeling, emotion, and meaning, may frustrate their more traditional co-workers who don’t see the value in “stopping to smell the roses.” They may experience difficulty in connecting with their coworkers and establishing the deep, meaningful relationships that they crave with them. * Rebellion for rebellion’s sake against authority and the status quo * Making it different or more complicated * Aggressive overcompensation due to frustration over being misunderstood * Insistence on being right, leading to defensiveness and hostility against other perspectives * Lack of confidence and decisiveness * Dramatic displays of emotions and exaggeration * Resentment of others’ accomplishments and achievements |
Type 5: Social isolation to prevent being or feeling dependent, exhausted, foolish, without enough resources | Need for data and analysis can lead to analysis paralysis and no action. They may be perceived as avoiding their coworkers, in favor of data, spreadsheets, and computers, and of hoarding information. * “Analysis Paralysis” * Not nurturing relationships * Lack of awareness of surroundings and own impact * Needing to show off intelligence / “know-it-all” * Hoarding information |
Type 6: Being alone and unprepared in a threatening world | Need for comfort and security can lead them to have a reputation as difficult, negative, paranoid, or sometimes even be seen as conspiracy theorists. * Pessimism – focus on problems, complaining, and what could go wrong, rather than solutions * Suspicion and doubt of goodwill, intent, and motives of others * Holding back due to fear of taking risks * Indecisiveness and distrust of decision-making * Combativeness / “Devil’s Advocate” towards change and outsiders * “Dog-With-a-Bone” Syndrome – relentless persistence in getting point across |
Type 7: Non-committal and positive reframing to prevent self from being limited or in pain | Need for novelty, excitement, and openness can lead them to not meet deadlines or be seen as flaky and not serious or committed. * Talking too much and not censoring or thinking through ideas * Failure to follow through * Hyperactivity, impulsiveness, and distractedness * Avoidance of negativity and unpleasantries * Always wanting something else |
Type 8: Bullying others to prevent acknowledging or seeing their own vulnerability and being seen as weak and vulnerable | Need for authority, power, control, debate, challenge, conflict, and protecting their people can lead them to be seen as bullies. * Bullying * Volatility and anger and overwhelming or intimidating others * Needing to be right * Needing to be “the Boss” * Rough around the edges * Impatience and impulsiveness |
Type 9: Passivity in response to turmoil or conflict or feeling being controlled | Need for peace, balance, harmony, and stability can make them seem risk- and change-averse. They may also be perceived as indecisive, based on their ability to see positive characteristics in all options, leading to difficulty in choosing just one. * Holding back due to lack of confidence or fear of being perceived as arrogant * Conflict avoidance * Passive aggression – getting their way through inaction * Fuzzy around agreements and details * Losing temper after letting unresolved conflicts build * “Nice Guy Syndrome” – lacking the “killer instinct” sought in leaders |
Using the insights of the Enneagram can help you be a better coach and feeds into the top five ways to do so:
Gain a better understanding of yourself. Coaching requires an understanding of “self as instrument”—this step is the building block of emotional intelligence. Self-awareness is understanding how you come across to others—and why you behave the way you do—is a crucial component of coaching. You don’t want to shut down your coachee, put them on the defensive, and prevent them from benefiting from coaching.
Gain a better understanding of others. Once you have gained self-awareness, you can then work on understanding that others may not (and, in actuality, DO NOT) experience or perceive the world from your point of view. There is diversity in perspective that you need to tap into and leverage to fully understand the world you live in, as well as provide insights into the business situations and challenges you are experiencing.
Select the proper/most appropriate strategy and approach for each situation. Now that you understand your own default perspectives and can see how others’ perspectives differ from your own, you can choose how to best motivate and engage people by speaking to what’s important to them. You can better connect with your people by speaking their language, showing that you have taken the time to listen and get to know them, and are in tune with their needs and perspectives. This fosters inclusion of diverse perspectives and ensures the most appropriate action forward in any situation.
Listen more, speak less. You must engage in active listening with genuine curiosity (and no judgment) to fully understand where the coachee is coming from, the situation, and the unique perspectives and insights they may have to bring to the situation.
Ask powerful, mostly open-ended questions to help the coachee generate their own insights and action. Ask questions with genuine curiosity, from a place of humility and seeking to understand, and NOT from a place of expertise, judgment, or arrogance. No one knows (or can do) everything all by themselves. Ask follow-up questions to ensure accountability and action on agreed-upon plans.
In today’s constantly changing, challenging, and paradoxical times where AI is becoming optimized to mimic the human touch and empathy that coaching is meant to provide, meaningful coaching is more necessary than ever. Using tools like the Enneagram to help your clients go deeper to gain an understanding and confront the root of their beliefs and mindsets that may be getting in their way and self-sabotaging them is a game-changer to making coaching even more effective and meaningful. What’s preventing you from being the best version of yourself and achieving what you want to achieve?
References
Hebenstreit, R.K. (2021), The How and Why: Taking Care of Business with the Enneagram; https://www.amazon.com/How-Why-Organization-Development-Relationships/dp/1519604076.
Jack, A.I., et al. (2023), “When fixing problems kills personal development: fMRI reveals conflict between Real and Ideal selves.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37600554.
Sikora, M. (2007, August). Overcoming Resistance to Change: Performance Improvement and the Inner Triangle. International Enneagram Association Conference, Redwood City, CA.
Benefits of Coaching, Institute of Coaching; https://instituteofcoaching.org/coaching-overview/coaching-benefits.
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