How Personality Data Shapes Performance, Alignment, and Leadership
- Peter Leonhardt
- Dec 7, 2025
- 8 min read
A Quick Self-Check
See which scenarios you can relate to:
Sunday Sets In
It is Sunday, and the punch of tomorrow hits me right in the chest. The day was good, but now it feels thin, fading, and already gone.
It is Sunday and tomorrow feels like a fresh slate I get to shape. The day was good, and the feeling carries with me into tomorrow.
Badge Reader Reality
The badge reader blinks awake like it has been waiting to take another day from me.
The badge reader blinks awake like an open door to the work I choose to own.
Am I on Fire
I wonder if my fire is fading.
I wonder how much of my fire I can use today.
How Do You Feel Getting to Work?
A Practical Look at Personality, Performance, and Self-Awareness**
The direction of this post is to help you understand yourself better by using personality data as a practical tool. The practice of self-reflection and self-improvement should be a priority for everyone. You perform at your best when you understand how you are built and make sure you are staying within specification. Everyone benefits from you performing at your best, including you.
To begin, let us look at something that sits at the core of how you operate. Your personality.
On my own performance dashboard, the first category I showcase is my Enneagram placement. This was not a branding decision. It was a functional one. It gives people an immediate snapshot of how I am wired so they can understand my operating tendencies, and it keeps me accountable to the patterns I know I need to monitor.
More importantly, it reflects a personal truth.I needed to understand myself before I could improve myself. For years, I noticed gaps in my workflow. Not in the quality of my work, but in how hard it sometimes felt to reach a flow state for certain tasks. I did not know why. I just knew I was pushing harder than necessary, and the result was frustration and a sense of misalignment. At home I also noted inconsistencies in my energy and my ability to focus. These needed to be resolved.
That frustration started a six year journey of self-discovery. I was off the rails in several ways, and one important checkpoint along that path was examining my personality through the Enneagram.
When the Results Click
When I took the test, three things clicked into place immediately:
My top three personality types
The behaviors that signal when I am drifting into unhealthy patterns
The behaviors that energize me when used intentionally and validate that my current state is in alignment with my environment
These insights did not fix anything overnight, but they gave me a map. They showed me my natural preferences, my blind spots, and the conditions where I thrive. They also helped me see something else.If I am this complex, everyone on a team is this complex.
Why This Matters for Leaders
Most leaders underestimate the diversity of human wiring. The Enneagram describes nine personality types, but most people have a blend. Even if you simplify it to a team of ten people each having only one dominant type, you are still looking at almost three and a half billion possible group personality combinations. That level of variability affects how people communicate, what motivates them, how they work, and how they misfire under pressure.
This is not about psychology. It is about precision. Understanding this complexity helps leaders structure expectations and metrics with far less bias built into the process. It also reveals another level of empathy that leaders must have and that teams require in order to create a more harmonious workplace culture.
Working Genius and Enneagram Side by Side
In parallel with the Enneagram, I also explored Patrick Lencioni’s book The Six Types of Working Genius. His framework reinforced a key idea. Every person has a sweet spot where their performance naturally elevates, and every person has areas where they will always feel friction.
My engineering mindset loved the clarity. I could see trends forming between Working Genius patterns and the Enneagram. Two different tools pointing toward the same truth. People perform at their best when they operate from alignment rather than force. Patrick created a professional system that is extremely digestible and friendly for human resources teams.
The Enneagram Goes Deeper
But the Enneagram goes deeper. It does not only tell you what you are good at. It tells you why you behave the way you do. It shows you what your off the rails looks like when you are under stress. It gives you a vocabulary for recognizing and correcting those shifts in real time. These shifts often originate outside the workplace, but they influence you everywhere, especially at work.
Leadership, Capacity, and Reality
I believe in the idea that leaders are only as good as the team they manage. You can delegate tasks to maximize a person’s output by creating resonance with their natural talents, but if they are struggling in a significant way outside of work, that will certainly diminish returns on any system designed to boost performance.
One thing I enjoyed most about management was the opportunity to influence those who helped me steer the ship, and to do so in a way that benefitted them as much as it benefitted the organization. I feel the Enneagram is a practical and accessible tool that can encourage people to get in tune with themselves. When you give people knowledge, you give them options. They can use these insights to work on personal or professional challenges with constructive tools.
My Type and Why It Matters
This brings me back to why my Enneagram result sits on my own dashboard.
I am a Type Seven with strong Type Three and Type Five tendencies. The Enthusiast with Achiever energy. This means I am wired for creativity, excitement, idea generation, and forward motion. It also means I am prone to scattering, overextending, and chasing stimulation when I am avoiding discomfort.
Displaying my type publicly is not about declaring who I am. It is about reminding myself who I need to manage. It keeps me grounded, focused, and honest.It helps me use my strengths without being overtaken by my weaknesses.It shows that self-awareness is not a concept I speak about. It is something I hold myself accountable to every day.
The darker side of Type Seven can be severe. Addictions, depression, and other destructive patterns. Knowing these risks allows me to monitor myself closely and make small corrections when I drift, rather than waiting until I spiral.
The Essential Practice
You do not need a dashboard to do this.You only need to be willing to look at yourself clearly and consistently.
When you understand your operating system, you stop trying to force performance. You start using your strengths intelligently.You build systems that support your weaknesses. You begin to show up as the version of yourself that the world benefits from.
Let us step back for a moment and hear from a professional.
Expert Insight — Dr Mary Rondeau
I interviewed Dr Mary Rondeau, the CEO at The Wholeness Center, an Integrated Mental Health Facility in Fort Collins, Colorado.
I asked her, “Please describe the importance of knowing your Enneagram in the scope of a personal and professional setting.”
Her response was:
“Understanding your Enneagram type is far more than a personality quiz curiosity. This test can become a foundational tool for personal growth and professional effectiveness. In the personal context, knowing your Enneagram type gives you a mirror into your underlying motivations, your habitual patterns, and your automatic pilot responses. For example, you begin to recognize when you are operating out of alignment, reacting instead of responding, chasing stimulation instead of being present, or avoiding discomfort instead of addressing it.
By observing these patterns, you create space for deeper self-awareness. You begin to see not only what you do, but why you do it, and how it affects your relationships, your wellbeing, and your sense of purpose. In the professional setting, this self-knowledge becomes a strategic asset. Whether you lead a team or contribute as a collaborator, you bring your wiring with you. This includes the way you handle stress, make decisions, prioritize tasks, and interact with others.
If you are unaware of your wiring, you risk misalignment. You may excel in idea generation but struggle with follow through. You may bring enthusiasm but avoid difficult conversations. You may thrive on variety but neglect structure. Recognizing your type helps you design work habits, structures, and support mechanisms that use your strengths and reduce your vulnerabilities.
When you show up as a leader or professional who is grounded in self-awareness, you model psychological safety and authenticity. You can say, Here is how I work best, here is where I tend to derail, and here is how we can design our environment so we both succeed. This fosters trust, clarity, and more effective collaboration.
In short, the Enneagram is not about placing yourself in a box. It is a map. It helps you understand your internal engine so you can stay within specification. It supports your personal life, your relationships, and your professional performance. You become someone who shows up deliberately, not unconsciously.”
Conclusion
Every assessment, framework, dashboard, and personality tool you choose to use is aimed at one purpose. Helping you become a healthier and more aligned version of yourself. Whether it is the Enneagram, Working Genius, or any other system that increases self-awareness, the goal is not to add labels or complexity. It is to remove friction that keeps you from performing at your best.
When you understand your wiring, you make decisions that honor your strengths instead of fighting against them. You recognize the early signs of misalignment before they grow into stress or burnout. You build habits and safeguards that help you operate in a sustainable rhythm instead of a reactive one.
This is not only good for you. It is good for everyone around you.
Teams benefit when the people in them understand themselves.Employees thrive when their patterns are acknowledged and supported instead of dismissed or misunderstood.
Improving yourself is not self-indulgent.It is responsible. It protects your energy, sharpens your performance, and creates a work environment where people feel seen, understood, and capable of doing great work.
Take Action
Start Your Own Self Awareness Process.
If you want to begin this work for yourself, you can take the official Enneagram test at the link below. It is the same test I used and the most credible version available. You can also encourage your team to take it and use the combined results as a starting point for meaningful conversation.
With a little research and your results in hand, you can begin shaping a personal playbook. You can do the same for your team by identifying strengths, friction points, communication tendencies, and natural patterns that influence performance.
For a guided approach, you can reach out to Mollify. We offer a package for individuals and teams of up to 10 people. The process includes administering the tests and then a video meeting to discuss the results. Together we will walk through your work environment, your current workflows, and the pressing challenges your team is facing.
We will look at this opportunity from these perspectives:
Resource loading
Team Building
Technical environment
Manufacturing environment
Goal/metric drivers
The goal is to translate personality data into a practical and immediate plan for performance improvement.
Whichever route you choose, the most important step is starting. Self awareness is not a luxury. It is a responsibility to yourself and to the people who count on you. Let this be the moment you choose to move forward with clarity and intention.
Ready to Understand Your Wiring and Improve Performance?
When you know how you’re built, you stop forcing progress and start operating with alignment. If you want a structured process for yourself or your team, we can guide you through it.
Take the official Enneagram assessment, review your results, and then let Mollify help you translate that insight into a practical, performance-driven playbook.
We’ll work with you to:
Identify strengths and friction points
Map communication tendencies
Evaluate team structure and workload alignment
Build a clear plan that supports sustainable performance
Start the process. Get clarity. Lead with intention.
Reach out to schedule your session with Mollify and move your team toward healthier, higher-output performance.
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