While blog posts are valuable for presenting ideas and helping to create perspective, ultimately one’s journey of excellent followership and personal growth is best served by having concrete opportunities for growing in self-awareness and then making an effort to “self-revelate”—to share with others (your peers & superiors) who you are, what you value, what you have to offer.
Resources for individual reflection and group conversation are one way to facilitate those occasions for self-discovery and self-disclosure.
If you’ve read any of my books or spent time on this site, you’ll know that resourcing is a high priority for me. You can see the previous “New Free Resource” posts, the page of Downloads, the other page of Reads & Links, and even the suggested Bibliographies on various topics in order to witness my dedication to getting you connected with valuable content to guide and support your personal development.
In Embracing Followership: How to Thrive in a Leader-Centric Culture, I put my chapter on “Resources for Personal Development” in the middle of the book, rather than at the end in an appendix (as many authors do) because the process of self-awareness, and facilitating that engagement, is central to my perspective on the pursuit of followership. Getting practical and doing the work of growth and communication is not something that should be relegated to an afterthought in one’s thinking about followership, as if reflection should only be undertaken after being exposed to all the information available, i.e. once we’re so fatigued with imbibing others’ ideas that we don’t have the time or energy left to do the work where it’s most needed: within ourselves and in the groups and organizations that we actually operate within.
I then created an entire book, the companion volume Embracing Followership: A Discussion Guide for Teams & Small Groups, as an additional menu of resources for furthering one’s engagement in following well. The quotations, reflection items, group dialogues, and application suggestions were themselves supplemented by a few activities which have continued to multiply since the book’s release in December 2017 through the growing number of free downloadable resources available on this site.
Okay, after that lengthy preamble on my philosophy of using tools to facilitate our followership, I’ll finally give you the newest addition…
The enneagram is a paradigm for self-awareness that has existed for centuries but seen a significant renaissance in recent decades. It’s one of the tools for personal development that I discuss in Chapter 11; I have found it personally very useful for understanding a number of my challenges and motivations, and how those impact my engagement with the world. I won’t attempt to overview it for you here; you can see my enneagram bibliography for recommended books that will do a fine job of that.
For those of you that are familiar with this tool, and know which of the 9 Types you are, you may—like me—have found it challenging to keep track of all that you’ve learned about yourself. During my own journey, I created a template where I could record insights, phrases, and conclusions that I came across. I now share with you a cleaned up version which I hope will be similarly useful to you.
Enneagram Profile Worksheet (free PDF) is a fairly comprehensive one-page document which you can use as a personal reference tool as you reflect and as you share with others the realities of who you are. It’s not a questionnaire or test to help you figure out your Type number; it’s a platform to capture your self-understanding far beyond simply being a digit from 1 to 9.
In the future, you can expect additional resources on how to make use of your enneagram information in a group context, but for now we’ll begin at the beginning: promoting reflection and self-awareness. As such, this tool fits well as an accompaniment to Study 6 in the Discussion Guide for Teams & Small Groups, which deals with the topic of Growth. It also will be a help to Studies 3, 8, & 11, which deal with the topics of Submission, Honor, and Forgiveness—aspects of our followership which are well-explored by some of the challenges that the enneagram can help to surface in your own life.
This Profile Worksheet may be more than you need right now. Don’t be put off if you come across terms and categories that you’re not yet familiar with in your work of using the enneagram to facilitate your self-awareness. Use what’s useful, and I encourage you to be content with empty blanks for now. You’ll find cross-references to a variety of enneagram books to help point you in the right direction when you’re ready to explore another facet of your Type.
Keep the end goal in mind: not just gathering a lot of terminology or even surfacing fascinating insights. Rather, in the context of excellent followership we’re after understanding ourselves so that we can authentically connect with others (our colleagues & leaders) and make our most excellent contributions to the various group endeavors that we’re a part of.
I hope that this Enneagram Profile Worksheet and many other tools and resources will facilitate your progress toward that aim.
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Be sure to check out the other free resources available from our Downloads page:
Followership Self-Evaluation (intro post)
“If someone gave you…” Activity (explanatory blog post)
Free Sample Study (Study 8: “Honor Thy Colaborer”, with Facilitator’s Notes)
Achieving Satisfying Group Communication (intro post)
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For encouragement and guidance in understanding and applying yourself to following and leading with excellence and helping others to do the same, see:
Embracing Followership: How to Thrive in a Leader-Centric Culture (by Allen Hamlin Jr; Feb 2016), and A Discussion Guide for Teams & Small Groups (Dec 2017).
Links to other posts on this site: Blog Post Index
Embracing Followership 