I took the Enneagram personality assessment and was classified as an “Individualist.” I like to be unique and don’t mind differing from what the majority of people in the world or within an organization are doing.
Is there room in the typical corporate organization of 2026 for a person like me?
I wonder if I should even share this personality “diagnosis” since I fear many organizations might summarily rule me out based on it. I sense that most companies don’t want an employee who likes being their own person and tends to be sensitive.
Maximizing Individualism to Improve Management
I feel one of the scourges of modern management is the new boss who takes their cue from business books and blind adherence to policy and convention without using emotional intelligence and independent thought to determine the best approach.
The individualist might wait to see how the personalities, strengths, and weaknesses of the people on their team operate to determine what would work best, for instance, in weekly meetings.
If the team were composed of a mix of highly dominant and less assertive people, the manager might decide to take an approach in which participants submitted information and ideas to the manager ahead of meetings. Then the manager would summarize what each person submitted during the meeting and ask each person one by one to respond to questions about their ideas from the manager and others in the group.
The sensitive, individualistic manager would note the need to do something different from the typical freeform meeting discussion.
It Can Take an Individualist to Treat Others as Individuals
Just as an individualist might be more likely than other personality types to look for an approach to meetings that suits the particular needs of their work group, a person who thinks like an individual might be especially adept at figuring out what works for each person on their team.
Does this team member respond better to frequent handholding and feedback? Do they thrive with micromanagement, while another team member becomes resentful and stalled when faced with too much interference?
Does reaching one employee with humor work best, while another employee connects better with a more serious demeanor?
Some employees are more goal- and task-oriented than others. Perhaps to conform to the company’s performance review process, goals need to be recorded for each employee, but maybe for one employee, this isn’t the right way to judge their value. It may be that they like to come up with new ideas that could not be planned or anticipated in advance in the form of prewritten goals. The “goals” that are written for this person would have to be less specific and structured to accommodate the employee’s improvisational nature.
True Innovation Most Likely Comes from Individualistic People
Innovation requires doing something different from what’s been done before. Who better to achieve that than a person who is not overly concerned with conforming?
Maybe a product or marketing approach has always been done one way, but the individualistic employee sees a new way that some people may not understand, or won’t understand initially, but will be a showstopper in the long run. It’s these out-of-the-box ideas that give an organization the chance to differentiate itself from competitors.
When I was in graduate school, I explained to an advisor that I liked to do things differently from the way they were customarily done. He laughed and appreciated my perspective but noted that in business, deviating from the current norm was not valued.
For example, if a type of magazine were especially popular, there would be a desire to launch many more of the same type of publication. I couldn’t understand that. Why would you want to do what’s already been done?
The individualist sees beyond the risk of being different to the win of offering something truly unique.
Does your organization tend to rule out people with individualistic personality tendencies? If not, how and why do you make room in your company for this kind of person?