INTRODUCTION

LEADERSHIP .

I did it again. Just last week, I caught myself in a meeting, my fourth Zoom meeting in one day, and I was in charge. I was blowing through the agenda, already thinking about the next meeting. And I realized I was making a decision based on how I would be perceived. I worried how the decision would be a reflection on me and I worried about how it would then reflect on our academic program. I did want the best for our school; however, I realized I was making a decision that was as much about me as it was about us. I get busy or overwhelmed and my automatic response is to protect myself from failure.

What are the things you do over and over, without meaning to, things that get in the way of your desire to lead well? I know I am not alone. Your struggles will be different than mine, but they are there. Maybe you also want to be seen as valued. Or needed. Or competent. Maybe you want to make sure you will not be betrayed. Make sure you get it right. Make sure you are safe. We all have automatic responses to the demands we face as leaders. And they show up again and again. In meetings you lead. In hallway conversations. As you avoid certain interactions. Can you see yours?

These automatic responses show up when we are busy or overwhelmed. When we are not grounded and intentional, not present in the moment. But being present in the moment takes a lot of work. And did I mention how busy we are?

Educational leadership incorporates the wide range of competencies we seek to develop related to facilitating excellence in teaching and learning and nurturing high quality teaching and learning in our educational systems. It incorporates mentoring and empowering colleagues to strengthen their teaching and learning practices. It seeks to address and improve educational policies, resources, and systems. And it promotes scholarship to improve educational outcomes. In all of these tasks and responsibilities and the many more we can identify, we know that, as leaders, there is a great burden to perform, grow, and improve at every turn.

So much of our focus as educational leaders is on the external demands of leadership. We are responsible for important decisions about important things. We are responsible for other people, and their well-being. We are balancing budgets, supervising staff, and juggling competing expectations. Most of our work as leaders is on influencing and improving the world around us and the people in it.

And yet, despite these external opportunities and demands, I am convinced it is the internal work that is of utmost importance. We long for guidance and support in these and other essential functions, but we must learn the value of looking within. We have to understand our core values and what motivates us. We have to understand how other people affect us as well as how our own internal struggles affect us. What is the story we tell ourselves about how we lead, what works for us, and why we fail?

As educational leaders, we have one essential resource that we must nurture and develop-our sense of self. We must learn that to strengthen our inner identity as a leader we have to turn within. We must learn to lead from the inside out. We often hear about the importance of self-awareness, but we seldom learn the skills to practice it.

The internal journey of self-awareness is key to the change we desire as leaders and the Enneagram can be a helpful tool to guide us in this work. This book introduces the Enneagram as a resource for self-understanding as well as growth and transformation. The Enneagram is an ancient symbol that identifies nine ways people function in the world, often thought of as personality types, and each of the nine is shaped by our capacity for feeling, thinking, and doing.

Learning to wake up to our sense of self, to practice self-observation, requires us to understand the role of feeling, thinking, and doing as three dimensions of leadership. The Enneagram helps us learn to see these characteristics within ourselves and to balance the way they function in our lives. We all have the capacity to feel in connection with others, to think through the relevant information available to us, and to do the work that is required of us as leaders. However, we are each predominantly driven by one of these three dimensions and we have one that requires significant development. Can you begin to see how these three function for you? How they shape your leadership?

This book will guide you on this journey: to learn to see yourself more clearly, to learn about the Enneagram and identify your primary Enneagram type, and to learn how the three dimensions above shape the ways you function as a leader.

BY THE NUMBER

What does it mean to do something by the number? The phrase is an early American military reference to learning how to follow orders. It is comparable to doing something by the book, to doing something in a formulaic, predictable manner.

Do you see the ways your responses as a leader are formulaic and predictable? You may not, but chances are other people see the formulas that shape you and that they can predict some of your behaviors better than you can. You may not want to hear that you are that mechanistic in how you lead. And, of course, we do have the freedom to grow and to change-but first we have to see the patterns that get us in trouble.

We do have the freedom to make choices about how we want to live on a daily basis. Or do we? Theologically, I believe in our free will to make decisions. Psychologically, however, there do seem to be some constraints on our behaviors. If I am awake, self-aware, consciously engaged, then I can freely choose many things in the course of any given day. However, I too often function on autopilot. I operate in a mechanical and even predictable manner. The subconscious and unconscious parts of my identity drive my decisions in ways I do not see or understand. If I can learn to see these things at work, then I can respond differently. First, we have to learn to wake up.

These habitual patterns of our personality shape us in ways that keep us operating by the number. Mechanically. Habitually. Unconsciously. According to the Enneagram, there are nine common patterns shaping how we function. These nine types describe how we commonly operate, how we make our way through life when we are not awake and fully engaged.

We too often operate according to our personality. By the number. According to our dominant Enneagram type. But, we can choose to live consciously, freely, from a more balanced perspective rather than being driven by our personality.

What does it take to live this way? To identify our Enneagram type? To find balance in our life?

It begins by learning to see. Observe your emotional responses that can overwhelm you and learn to identify the feelings that underlie them. Recognize the ways you are stuck in your head rather than having an open mind. Sense the gut reaction that instinctively drives you and learn to act intentionally. To learn to feel, think, and do more freely is to live from your soul. To develop an open heart, open head, and open hands is to live out of the essence of who you are.

It sounds so simple, but learning to see yourself this clearly takes work. It takes time and it takes patience. A Scottish neurologist and Enneagram teacher we will learn about in a later chapter, Maurice Nicoll, is instructive here, "Remember that you do not change by being told what to do. You only change through seeing what you have to do when you realize what your being is like." He continues, "All our theories on improving the world, while we are still asleep, merely intensify the sleep of humanity" (Nicoll 1996).

Are you ready to wake up to the patterns of your personality? To the ways you have fallen asleep to your own patterns of living and leading? The Enneagram will be our guide in this work. It will help us see ourselves more clearly and offer insights to how we might lead in new and different ways.

In this book, we will look at the foundation of the Enneagram, the psychology behind it, and the spirituality that undergirds it. As I have mentioned, each of us subconsciously prioritizes feeling, thinking, and doing differently, and the result is nine patterns that make up the nine Enneagram types. This book details how these patterns work for each type and how to bring these dimensions into balance. My belief is that making sense of the ways thinking, feeling, and doing function for better or worse in your life is central to becoming the leader you are being called to be.

You may already know your Enneagram type, or you may be learning about the Enneagram for the first time. If you do not know your number, there are resources here to help you begin to identify it. If you already know your number, this book will add an additional dimension to what that means for you. For each of us, this book will help us learn how to use the knowledge associated with our Enneagram type to develop more fully as a leader.

The chapters in Unit One introduce the three core dimensions of who we are and how these feeling, thinking, and doing capacities work within us. We will see how learning to live with these in balance is a way to strengthen our capacity for leadership. In learning the structure of the Enneagram, I will introduce the triads and stances and also provide an introduction to each of the nine types. The focus here is more than simply learning our number; it is learning how our number fits in this larger system that...