A revolution in the strengths movement—beyond MBTI and StrengthsFinder

As I'm eagerly awaiting the release of two of my books in Spring 2022 in Korea (Strengths in Numbers and The Career Within You), I'm appreciating the important role the Korean community has played in them.

The Korean community has long been at the forefront of the strengths-based approach to the enneagram. Korean readers were some of the very first to pick up this book, The Career Within You, as well many other books, such as The Enneagram of Parenting, which focus on the potential each of us possesses based on our greatest strengths and how to nurture that potential.?

Korean teachers and counselors have been quick to innovate on applications of the enneagram to help students have more success leveraging their unique work styles. Teachers and counselors around the world have a lot to learn from what has already been happening in Korea for several decades now.

Together we are a part of a greater strengths movement—the shift towards focusing on individuals’ strengths rather than their weaknesses.?Now in 2022, we are not just creating another phase in the strengths movement; we are creating a revolution.?Two years into a global pandemic, the whole world is waking up to new ways of working. We are opening up to broader possibilities for individuals to forge their own paths—rather than following more rigid paths defined in corporate careers in the last fifty years. On top of this, we are not just focusing on strengths—we are bringing in the power of the enneagram which gives us a map to navigate many more possibilities for human potential than did strengths diagnostics of the past. Let’s take a moment to look back over how we got here…

Starting before 1945, two pioneers who transformed our understanding of people and their work styles were Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. This mother and daughter team interviewed thousands of individuals, evaluated their strengths, and developed a ground-breaking assessment, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).?Every year over 2.5 million individuals take the MBTI assessment, and it has become the most widely used personality questionnaire in history.

Then came Peter Drucker, whom many consider to be the founding father of the Strengths Movement. A management consultant, professor and prolific writer, Drucker’s writings predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century,?including the emergence of the information society, with its emphasis on lifelong learning.?In 1959, Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" and, later in his life, said that he considered knowledge-worker productivity to be the next frontier of management.?

Drucker influenced millions of people around the world to adopt the notion that “management?is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.” From that point forward, leaders, authors, organizational consultants and academics set out to explore exactly how to do that. The strengths movement was born.

In recent years, significant additions to the Strengths Movement have been DiSC, CliftonStrengths, StrengthsFinder 2.0, and Marcus Buckingham.?DiSC—which stands for (D)ominance, (i)nfluence, (S)teadiness and (C)onscientiousness—is an assessment produced by Wiley and stems from work by William Moulton Marston. Almost as huge as MBTI, DiSC is used by over a million people a year.?Donald Clifton, the creator of Gallup StrengthsFinder, and Marcus Buckingham, the author of Now, Discover Your Strengths, have also made weighty contributions to this field. Gallup CliftonStrengths and Gallup StrengthsFinder 2.0 (by Tom Rath) inspire incredible enthusiasm from anyone who has taken the assessments. It seems that most human beings prefer the experience of being acknowledged for their strengths as opposed to feeling pigeon-holed by a “type”.

And yet, there is a new page to turn—one that I believe has to do with unlocking the power of a certain mindfulness framework.?Unlike the other frameworks that were developed essentially from a business psychology context, the enneagram emerged from a wisdom tradition.?

The reality is that because of the territory of what the enneagram maps, it is a much more comprehensive, accurate and robust way to account for each individual’s unique strengths and gifts. The enneagram is an elegant model that shows precisely “why” we each possess the strengths that we do and “how” we can optimize our collaboration potential with each other. The Career Within You does just that. It helps you connect your innate strengths based on your enneagram type to your optimal work in the world.

As luck would have it, Elizabeth Wagele and I wrote The Career Within You in Berkeley, California, just a few blocks from the internationally renowned University of California, Berkeley, which has a large contingent of Korean graduate and undergraduate students. Korean students were influential in the early days of this book’s adoption. Through the University of California, we were also fortunate enough to be assigned an intern. The school matched us with graduate student, Hayob Hwang, who was studying film at the time. While Hayob helped us on the The Career Within You project, she also created video interviews of students and young people, many of which were conducted in Korean, about their career trajectories and their strengths.

Since the writing of this book, my dear friend and hero, Elizabeth Wagele, passed away, which was a great loss to all of us in the international enneagram community. I miss her terribly. I know she and her husband, Gus, looked fondly on those times working with students at the Wagele home and Elizabeth especially felt gratitude for all the support she received from Korean readers over the decades.?

Wagele’s books include?Are You My Type, Am I Yours?, also with Baron (1995),?The Enneagram of?Parenting?(1997),?The Happy?Introvert: A Wild and Crazy Guide for Celebrating Your True Self?(2006),?Finding the Birthday Cake: Helping Children Raise Their?Self-Esteem?(2007),?The?Career?Within You: How To Find The Perfect Job For Your Personality?with Ingrid Stabb (2009),?The Enneagram of Death: Helpful Insights by the 9 Types of People on?Grief,?Fear, and Dying?(2012), and?The Enneagram for Teens: Discover Your?Personality Type?and Celebrate Your True Self?(2014). Wagele’s musical recordings include the CDs?The Beethoven Enneagram?(1999),?Enneagram Variations?(2006) and?Finding the Birthday Cake: Music for Children?(2017).

I personally want to thank Korean readers for consistently being early adopters, for supporting this greater body of Elizabeth Wagele’s work as early as 1995 and for spreading the word to young and old for more than twenty five years. I wish you much success in discovering not only what makes you great, but also helping others do the same. I can’t wait to learn more about the next wave of innovative applications that are coming out of Korea to pave the way for schools, institutions and corporations around the world to continue to put the strengths movement into action.?

Ingrid Stabb

Co-Author, The Career Within You

March 2022