- Home
- Preface
- Introduction
- Three Zones and Nine Sectors
- Wings and Moves and other functions
- Wings and moves – introduction
- The wings – the neighboring sectors
- Moves across the board
- No better, no worse
- A chosen move
- Life on the axis
- Lost FOURs and false TWOs
- Access all areas
- Longing for the opposite
- Colleagues of the opposite type
- Discerning home base part 2
- Couples
- Colleagues and friends
- Age and the journey
- The path to redemption part 2
- Biblical Journeys
- Prayer
- The Enneagram
- From the Enneagram to the Strategy Board
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Colleagues of the opposite type
Of course you only want to be the best of your ‘wannabe’ type – your opposite. Your attitude toward the negative side of the sectors opposite your own may well be slightly superior: that you know you’re not that, and you’re glad you’re not that.
As a result, you may see no role at all for a colleague who displays the negative side of your ‘opposite’ – but a colleague showing the best side of your opposite may be the most valuable colleague of all.
Colleagues from diametrically opposite sides of the board may never really understand each other, and may work slightly awkwardly around each other, but they can be full of admiration and respect for each other, and they make a superb complementary team.
On the basis that the advice of the opposite is often good advice, you may find that the colleague you understand the least is often the best person to ask for advice in a situation where you cannot see a way forward yourself. That ‘opposite’ colleague may well see a clear way forward straight away.
And if all goes well, the compliment may be returned: you may well have immediate and easy access to exactly the advice that your opposite needs when their usual approach cannot see any way forward.
This ‘complementarity of the opposite’ may be difficult to manage from day to day – but it can be highly productive in the longer term.