“But what happens if…?”

“Have we thought about…?”

“Who’s responsible for…?”

“What if this doesn’t work?”

If you work with an Enneagram Type 6, you may be familiar with the questions.

And depending on how those questions are delivered or received, they can sometimes sound like resistance, negativity, or a challenge to the person leading the conversation.

But what if the Type 6 question isn’t really just a question?

In this episode of Enneagram at Work, we're looking underneath a common Type 6 workplace behavior to understand what may actually be happening.

For a Type 6, striving to feel secure can mean looking for potential problems, unanswered questions, missing information, or risks that everyone else seems ready to move past.

In other words:

What sounds like resistance may actually be risk detection.

And that can be incredibly valuable to a team.

Of course, there's another side to it. Question after question without the ability to eventually move forward can slow down a decision or frustrate coworkers. That's why the goal isn't to label questioning as either a strength or a weakness, it's to understand the pattern underneath it and learn to use it more intentionally.

In this episode, we explore how Type 6 questioning can show up at work, why managers may misinterpret it, the value a Type 6 can bring by pressure-testing a plan, and how both Type 6s and their coworkers can translate those questions into more productive conversations.

For the Type 6, try:

“I want to pressure-test one part of this before we move forward.”

For the manager or teammate, try:

“What's the biggest risk you're seeing that you don't think we've accounted for?”

Sometimes a better conversation starts when we stop reacting to the question and get curious about what's underneath it.

Bring the Enneagram to Your Team

Tell us what's going on with your team, and we'll help you determine the right place to start.

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