Here's the Language for It.
The starting point is a validated Enneagram assessment, completed by each person before we meet. From there, we build a shared vocabulary for how the team makes decisions, what each person looks like under stress, and the conditions under which each person does their best work.
Under two hours. One session. Everyone leaves with a common language.
What This Is, and Why Teams Do It
The Team Read is a 120 minute facilitated session with your team in one room. Everyone completes an Enneagram assessment beforehand and arrives with their own results. In the session each person names how they operate and what they need from the people around them, the group builds a map of the whole team, and everyone leaves with one specific thing they're going to do differently.
Why a team does this: most groups have never had a neutral way to talk about how they differ, so the differences get read as character instead. The person who wants every detail before committing becomes the bottleneck. The person who decides fast and adjusts becomes reckless. Neither read is fair and both are expensive. The Enneagram gives a team language for the difference without handing anyone the villain role.
The assessment is the entry point rather than the event. Results are in hand before we start, so none of the session gets spent explaining what nine type names are. All of it gets spent on what these particular results mean for this particular team.
The cost of not having this language is quiet and never shows up as a line item. It's the fourth meeting where the same two people talk past each other. It's the person who owns the numbers and the person who owns delivery, each sure the other is being difficult, when one needs the full picture before committing and the other decides fast and adjusts on the way. It's the good hire who leaves because nobody could name why they and the person they worked most closely with never clicked.
Who This Is For
-
A team that just formed and is still finding its footing
-
A leadership offsite or annual planning kickoff that needs more than icebreakers
-
A team that works together every day and still doesn't really know how each other operates
-
A team navigating friction that keeps circling back
What the Team Will Be Able to Do
This is what each person can do when they walk out, rather than what they'll have sat through. If anyone asks what the team came away able to do, this is the answer.
Core Session, 120 Minutes
-
Name their own type and the core motivation driving it, using their own assessment results
-
Describe how that pattern showed up in a specific, recent situation at work, using their own example rather than a hypothetical one
-
Place the team on a shared map and identify where communication styles are most likely to grind
-
Commit to one specific, observable behavior change to try in the next two weeks
Ongoing Blocks, 60 Minutes Each
One layer per block. These objectives sit at analyze and evaluate rather than apply, which is why they don't belong in a first session. A group needs trust before it will do this work honestly, and trust builds across weeks better than it does across hours.
-
Distinguish between what they intended and how their behavior reads to teammates under normal working conditions.
-
Recognize their own stress pattern early, before they're mid-spiral, using warning signs specific to their type.
-
Analyze a live team conflict through the types involved, separating what happened from what each person's type made it mean.
-
Build a written working agreement with a teammate that names a concrete trigger and a concrete response.
-
Evaluate the team's norms, meeting structure, feedback habits, decision-making against the team's type mix, and propose one change.
What Changes For The Team
The list above is what each person can do. Here's what changes for the team as a whole:
-
A shared vocabulary for how the team decides, communicates, and handles conflict
-
A visual map of the team's type composition, with friction points flagged
-
One specific, observable behavior change committed to in writing by every person in the room
-
Fewer hours lost to the same misread, decisions that stop stalling on the same two people, and people who can tell how a message is going to land before they send it
What happens after the session. Two weeks out, everyone gets an email that hands them their own commitment back in their own words. Leaders get a 30-day call where we return to the problem you named at intake and check whether it moved. Transfer is where this kind of work usually dies, three weeks after everyone felt great about it, so it's built in rather than sold as an add-on.
Why This Works
The Assessment Comes First.
Nobody walks in cold. Assessment results are completed as pre-work and sit in front of each person from the first exercise, so the session gets spent on what the results mean for this team rather than explaining what nine types are.
Self, Then Others, Then the Team.
The sequence is deliberate. People place their own pattern and one recent example of it before we go anywhere near mapping the room. That's what makes the team-level conversation honest instead of performative.
Nine Types a Team Can Remember.
I'm certified in MBTI and DiSC and have facilitated both. Those tools read a person at work, and there's less separation between who you are on the job and who you are everywhere else than we like to think. The Enneagram gets at how someone is regardless of role, and nine is few enough that a team still has the language a month later.
Where This Came From.
Twenty years of assessment-based work inside teams under pressure sits behind how I run this. Construction is where I built it, on teams where one misread between the person who owns delivery and the person who owns the numbers costs a week of schedule. The work travels because the pattern does, and I've yet to meet an industry where people stopped being people.
Format & Investment
Individual assessment plus one team session, 120 minutes. If the team wants to go further, we keep going in 60-minute blocks inside a meeting you already hold, rather than in one long day.
Core Session
Length
120 minutes
Group Size
Up to 35 recommended
Covers
Individual results, team map, one commitment per person.
Follow-Up
Two-week email resurfacing each person's own commitment.
Ongoing Blocks (optional)
Length
60 minutes each
Group Size
Same team, same room
Covers
One layer per block: stress patterns, live conflict, working agreements.
Follow-Up
Runs inside a recurring meeting you already hold.
Everyone completes their assessment before we meet, which takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes online. Results come back immediately, along with a short guide on how to read your report, so people arrive with the basics already in hand.
Optional add-on: a 1:1 call for anyone who wants to go deeper on their own results, before or after the session, at additional cost.
Investment: Scoped after a conversation, based on team size and how far the team wants to go.
How You'll Know it Worked
Every commitment gets checked for specificity before anyone leaves. "Communicate better" gets pushed back on out loud, in the room, until it's something a teammate would notice you doing.
The team map gets built in front of everyone, and the friction points get named by the people standing in them rather than by me.
Each person can say what they need from the teammate they grind against most, and that teammate was in the room to hear it.
There's no quiz on Enneagram theory, because recall isn't the point. If a team leaves with comprehension and no artifact, the session didn't do its job.
Start Naming the Pattern
Most teams work alongside each other for years without ever learning how the person across the table decides, or what they look like on a bad day. The Enneagram gives you the language for it, and the session gives the team somewhere to put that language.
No sales pressure. No obligation.
Just a straightforward conversation about what's possible.
Confidential • Construction-Focused • Results-Driven
