- 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 and friends
As for couples, so also for colleagues and friends, and all other relationships: in the infinite variety of human interactions, patterns emerge as individuals using their various strategies meet and interact.
Colleagues of the same type are likely to feel that they are in each other’s way, while colleagues from different zones will find – for better or for worse – that they have different perspectives on the same situations.
Three of the most distinctive ‘colleague relationships’ are parallel to those already described for couples – for the same basic reasons. Colleagues of adjacent types may form a robust long-term working partnership: a distinctive blend of mutual understanding and common purpose with a dash of complementarity. Colleagues at either end of a stress and security path may well find that they have quite a sparky interaction, particularly at first – but it may well develop into a creative, complementary, committed, and mutually admiring relationship. And the relationship between colleagues of opposite types is so distinctive that it already has a section of its own above. Colleagues from 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 can make an excellent complementary team.
Long-term friendships also produce the same distinctive patterns. Two people of the same type may find it very easy to understand each other – but find that they each have relatively little to add to each other’s experience of life. Two people at the opposite ends of a stress and security path may form a friendship that is creative, complementary, committed, and mutually admiring – but which veers unpredictably between closeness and formality. Mutually admiring opposites may have a more classically formal, respectful acquaintanceship. And the strongest intimate bond is once again between two people of neighboring types.
When you add together the adjacent pairs phenomenon in couples and in friendships, you find couples being friends with other couples to make up groups of four where only adjacent types are represented – whether four adjacent types, or only three, or only two – and the dynamics of the several relationships operate according to the expected interactions of those types.