Team Building through Empathy
Recently, I hosted a two-day team building session for our design team. The goal of the workshop was to develop and practice empathy for each other. Empathy helps us to work better together by allowing us to evaluate situations from someone else’s perspective. Through that lens, we can start conversations from a place of deeper understanding, which enables us to negotiate work more effectively. This benefits both our internal design team and our cross-functional product teams.
Personality Assessment
The way I decided to help our team build empathy was through a well-known personality assessment called The Enneagram. The Enneagram is a tool similar to other reputable personality assessments like StrengthsFinder or the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). I chose The Enneagram because it assesses a person’s motivation, which I find particularly helpful to keep in mind when determining values and roles around work.
The Enneagram is a set of nine distinct personality types, designated by numbers, with each number on the Enneagram representing one type. You may identify with parts of many types but will have one type that resonates most closely with you that is your basic personality type.
The Enneagram with Riso-Hudson Type Names from https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/
Your basic personality type won’t change. It applies equally commonly to males and females, and not every part of it may apply to you all the time, considering that our personalities regularly fluctuate between unhealthy, average, and healthy levels.
Each type has unique strengths and weaknesses, and no type is better than any other. The gift of the Enneagram is to learn more about yourself, so that you can embrace your most authentic self instead of trying to be like someone else or focusing on your shortcomings. The purpose is to build greater self-understanding and deeper empathy for others.
There is an assessment individuals can take to discover their basic personality type. It should be considered a starting point to discovery. Plenty of reading and self-discovery should accompany determining your basic personality type. The assessment can be helpful because it indicates types to look into first or in order of plausibility.
There are highlights of each type:
Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.
Type Two is generous, demonstrative, people-pleasing, and possessive.
Type Three is adaptable, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.
Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.
Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.
Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.
Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, acquisitive, and scattered.
Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.
Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, complacent, and resigned.
(from https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/)
Creating Space for Self Discovery
One of the most important parts of leading a team-building activity involving this much empathy and self-discovery is to create a safe space. I know the phrase “safe space” can have a negative connotation in some circles; what I mean here is to create an environment in which team members are given room to reflect, ask questions, and perhaps engage in vulnerable conversation -- all in an effort to discover more about themselves.
Some keys to creating a safe space include reminding team members that although this is a lighthearted exercise, the results can be deeply meaningful, and thus the exercise should be undertaken with a sense of reverence. Asking team members to refrain from joking on one another can also be helpful. Not everyone is comfortable being vulnerable in a work setting, which, of course, means that colleagues may be sensitive to one another’s responses. It is a good idea to allow time and space at the beginning of the team-building session for questions and concerns to be let out into the open.
Ideally, a strong team will learn how to hold this emotional space for one another, allowing for deeper day-to-day connection and greater team productivity following the team building sessions.
Break up Content Appropriately
It is important to pace the content appropriately for maximum growth and impact. I split the material we were covering on the Enneagram into two sessions. Keep in mind, Enneagram may be a new concept to many in the room, and people don’t often remember ideas whose concepts are unique and unfamiliar. Personality assessments entail a lot of information about how to interpret, process, and apply the results, so time allows them to make the content consumable and memorable.
Session 1 focused on “understanding,” which included learning the Enneagram system through an overview of all 9 types, with team members focusing on themselves, discovering their types, and reflecting on the truths (strengths and weaknesses) of their type. I included time to cover questions like “What is Enneagram? Why are we doing this? What am I going to get out of it?” before we dove into the material to create buy-in and keep the dialogue open. At the end of the first session, we played a quiz game I created to “guess the enneagram type” of characters we know and love from popular media. It made the content more memorable as well as proving a reward for adhering to the reverent nature of the session.
We allowed a week between the first and second sessions to allow the material to sink in and to encourage self-reflection and independent discovery.
Session 2 focused on “empathize,” where we covered Triads of the Enneagram (problem solving intelligence) and Harmonics of the Enneagram (conflict resolving intelligence). There are three groupings, Triads, within the Enneagram which represent sources of intelligence. Each Triad has three numbers which share the same underlying intelligence center. The three Triads (intelligence centers) are the Body (8, 9, 1), the Head (5, 6, 7), and the Heart (2, 3, 4). The intelligence centers explain where we 'go' in the body to develop our emotional response to a given situation: whether we rely on instinct and gut feeling (body/anger), our own thoughts and reasoning (head/fear), or our personal feelings and emotions (heart/shame). Each type inside the Triad will experience this unconscious emotional response in a different way, but the core emotion will be the same throughout the types in each Triad.
There are also three groupings within the Enneagram that explain how we cope with conflict or difficulty called the Harmonic Groups. Each of the three numbers in one Harmonic Group will share the same underlying defense against loss and disappointment. The three Harmonic Groups are the Competency Group (1, 3, 5), the Positive Outlook Group (2, 7, 9), and the Reactive Group (4, 6, 8). I made this section memorable with a breakout discussion where smaller groups of team members could safely discuss their unconscious emotional response and default response in conflict.
Working Better Together
Understanding our default response or approach (our type’s Triad and Harmonic Group) is just as important as knowing where our teammates fall. It is helpful to be on a team in which there are different responses and approaches; that is how we can come to the best decisions together. This variety in team members is how conflict occurs, a natural byproduct of different responses, approaches, and values. Additionally, the variety in team members is also the biggest path to growth by learning how to negotiate and become better at areas that don’t come naturally to us, but we can model and learn about from others.
It is always important to consider a person’s context: their personality, values, motivations, fears, dominant intelligence center, and default response to conflict when you are working with them. Keeping these things in mind helps us understand our team members better and helps us develop and show empathy toward them more readily.
Empathy is the key to moving a good team to a great team. It is the “rumbling,” as author Brené Brown calls it, that takes a team from an early connecting stage to a team that excels together, challenging and motivating one another to become their best selves so the team can be the best possible team.
If you have questions about how to lead this session with your own team or want to bring in a resource to help facilitate a similar session, feel free to reach out to me below, and I will be glad to help you and your team!