Leadership Style of Type Eight

About the leadership style of Eight, as Palmer (1995) points out, Eight CEOs are likely to be direct, assertive, forceful, self-confident.  Also, they tend to like control subordinates and hierarchy system centering on them.  Eight CEOs are powerful and aggressive leaders.  Therefore, Eight CEOs may be highly valued when their companies launch a new business or participate in severe competitions, because these phases tend to need strong and aggressive leaderships in order to lead the subordinates powerfully.

In addition to that, Eight CEOs “prefer to centralize power rather than to delegate” (Palmer, 1995, p.217).  They are more partial to a top-down organizational system, because they can control subordinates more and concentrate power in the top of the organizations compared with a bottom-up organizational system.       

Healthy levels of Eight leaders: Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, or Franklin Roosevelt

Reference:

1 The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

2 The Enneagram in Love and Work: Understanding Your Intimate and Business Relationships

Enneagram Assessment: Type Eight (Challenger, Boss) and my type (Seven)

As Riso and Hudson (1999) explain, the basic fear of type Eight is being harmed or controlled by others.  In fact, my score of type Eight is the second highest, so I sometimes fear being controlled by others and fear that others have strong power over me.  When I was a junior high school student, I was a captain of the basketball team in my school.  In retrospect, I was often seized with a powerful desire to control other team mates at will so that I could protect myself and feel comfortable.  Even now, I sometimes feel the same impulse to control others.  Therefore, the basic fear and desire of type Eight seem to have a strong effect on me. 

As for the type Eight with a Seven wing, the characteristics of this type are charismatic, action-oriented (healthy level), and adventurous risk-takers, talkative, outgoing with great self-confidence (average level).   I’m a type Seven with an Eight wing, so I seem to have these characteristics.   My behavioral pattern is action-oriented and I like taking a risk because challenging new things brings strong stimuli to my life taking a risk.  Nowadays, I’m not so talkative, but I was a very talkative man when I was a kid. 

Next, regarding to the wake-up call for type Eight, “Eights generally do not like working under others, performing instead the risk and adventure of running their own activities” (Riso and Hudson, 1999, p. 297).  When I worked in a business consulting company in Japan, I sometimes felt so.  Interestingly, my working behavior toward my managers (authorities) was obedient, but when I worked with my colleagues or my staffs, I didn’t like them to control me. 

As stated above, I have many elements of the type Eight.                                                                    

Reference:The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types