In our ongoing series of Enneagram type profiles of school leaders, we last visited Type Four, a rarity among education administrators (and in the population generally). Like the Four, Type Fives are a relative small group of people overall, and hard (but not impossible) to find among the ranks of school principals and administrative leaders. Also like the Four, the Ennea-Type Five school leader relishes his or her uniqueness, particularly because the Five longs to be an expert, a fountain of knowledge and information about a specific topic. We therefore call the Type Five the Knowledge Seeker, and at their healthy best, Type Fives can bring their inquisitiveness and keen observatory powers to bear in rich and productive ways within school settings.
Type Fives tend to be intensely intellectual and cerebral. They are naturally compelled to learn and were often high-performing students themselves. Type Fives tend to excel in math and sciences, but can be found in all fields of study. What distinguishes the Type Five is not so much what she is interested in learning, but the enormous focus and absorption she experiences in her learning, almost as if she is compelled to become an expert on a particular topic.
Knowledge is Power (and, sometimes, Pitfall)
And indeed, like all Ennea-types, the Five is driven by a specific deep desire (and its corollary fear), in this case the hunger to intellectually master a field of knowledge so as to stave off his underlying fear of uncertainty and vulnerability. Like other types in the “Thinking Center” of the Enneagram, the Type Five struggles with anxiety. For the Five, knowledge really is power, and the Five will manage the uncertainty of the world by marshalling all his intellectual resources and all the information he can amass to protect himself and others.
Type Fives are drawn to leadership roles in part because they have specific knowledge that they believe can best be utilized in an administrative capacity. This move toward leadership is actually a sign of health for a Five. Average Fives tend to be highly introspective and in the face of stress will quickly withdraw from situations requiring social interactions. They prefer the serene space of their minds.
But in healthier states, Fives move with their arrow of integration toward Type Eight, becoming more commanding, confident, and engaged. In this space, the Type Five school leader can use her considerable analytic skills to process the vast amounts of information necessary for running schools and enhancing student achievement and can devise thoughtful, multi-layered, long -term visions for school improvement. Few can compete with the Five’s capacity to understand complex problems and synthesize information, transforming it into a vivid picture of what a school (and the student learning within it) might become.
Healthy Five school leaders convey that vision to teachers, students, parents, and the community. They organize the complex structures and processes of the school to maximize resources and get results. They love knowledge for its own sake, and their passion for learning can be infectious to others. They have tremendous powers of perception and observation, and at healthy levels can translate those observations into feedback and support that is encouraging, meaningful, and above all useful to teachers and staff members.
But the Type Five school leader faces enormous challenges in staying actively engaged in his leadership role. The Five’s natural tendency, especially in times of uncertainty and stress, is to retreat from interactions with all but a few close, highly-trusted, confidants. This leads to isolation, a lack of visibility within the school community, and great difficulty in communicating his ideas in ways that others can understand.
Fives have a sense of economy about their knowledge, in that they experience social interactions and the sharing of their expertise as a kind of cost, even a burden. The Five tends to react by hoarding his ideas and information as a form of self protection. This reinforces the Five’s sense of being disconnected from others, and his tendency to retreat ever further into the safe haven of his own mind. The relentlessly social nature of the school leader’s role can become an overwhelming challenge to the Type Five.
Practices for Wholeness: Uniting Body and Mind
Perhaps more than any other type, Fives need to regularly reconnect with their bodies. Physical exercise like yoga, martial arts, running, and other activities, when done with mindfulness, can be deeply healing for the Five and help her reconnect to herself as an embodied person.
Type Five school leaders need to be particularly aware of the tendency of their type to withdrawal, and make an active effort to reach out and engage with others. Building a strong leadership team, especially one that includes a handful of trusted advisors who understand the Five’s strengths and weaknesses and who the Five can turn to for advice and a measure of his or her communication effectiveness, is essential.
Above all, the Type Five school leader must guard against his tendency to over think problems and postpone action in favor of more analysis. The stakes in most schools are too high to spend an excessive amount of time parsing out every aspect of a problem and its consequences. The healthy Five school leader can lead schools and solve problems without getting overwhelmed by their complexities. Then, the Knowledge-seeking Five can happily shine as an expert and intellectual who is nevertheless also engaged and highly effective.
Look for additional profiles of other Enneagram Types as school leaders in coming weeks. For a complete list of Enneagram resources, check the Enneagram links on the left-hand side of this page, and visit our Services page to learn about the wide range of CLS workshops available for leadership and professional development. For previous type profiles, click here and scroll to the bottom of the post.
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