"For the past six years the RR technology has been of great value for me in many ways, both personally, and when consulting. I finally ‘get’ people. I wish I had learned these skills earlier in my career."
Michael Roach
Co-founder, America West Airlines
The Sophisticated Manager
How much less stressful would your professional life be if you had a surefire way of predicting how your coworkers would respond when you are having your most important conversations with them? What if you always knew how to set a solution in motion to address your most challenging interactions, rather than contributing to the problem?
At The Sophisticated Manager, we are committed to assisting businesses in dispensing with "one size fits all" approaches to management and team building. We believe companies thrive when coworkers understand psychological diversity. The services we provide replace existing knowledge about why people are the way they are with state of the art information technology about human nature.
If you believe that knowing what really makes people tick has a direct effect upon improving the bottom line, and are open to seeing human behavior completely demystified, allow us to inroduce to you a remarkable way of understanding the people in your business that is easy to learn and very rewarding to practice.
Overview
The Sophisticated Manager is a process that reveals the roots of our individuality and shows us how our core psychological motivations affect our leadership abilities and job performance when we are at our best, worst, and average.
Ongoing studies at Fortune 500 companies have proven that the most important factor that determines why certain individuals become "stars" is not their academic IQ, but their emotional quotient, (EQ). The higher a person’s EQ, the easier it is for them to:
Recognize psychological diversity
Know and manage their own emotions
Disagree constructively
Lead and empower others
As teams continue to replace hierarchies as work units, fostering mutual understanding and compatibility among people has never been more crucial, or more valuable. In today’s business culture, everyone is now called upon to be a manager.
The practices of The Sophisticated Manager are intended for managers who want to master an understanding of human nature from the inside out, and support team members to do the same, which will enable them to work through stressful interactions that interfere with their capacity to work cooperatively.
Those who seriously engage The Sophisticated Manager methodology will see a dramatic increase not only in their EQ, but also in their overall ability to understand and connect positively with fellow workers. Such encouragement will motivate team members to work with, and not against each other to reach their goals, and transform their work environment.
Our Unique Tool
The Enneagram: Nine Archetypal Relational Styles
In order to meet the challenge of instilling an understanding of psychological diversity within organizations, The Sophisticated Manager utilizes a revolutionary information technology called the Enneagram. A dramatic discovery about human character and its basic operations, the Enneagram (pronounced "any-a-gram") draws upon knowledge systems and psychological insights that date back to antiquity. Symbolized by a nine-pointed star within a circle, this remarkable discovery describes nine fundamental character archetypes, and their dynamic interrelationships.
At The Sophisticated Manager, we refer to these character archetypes as relational styles. Taken together, these nine relational styles form a graphic "blueprint" of our psychological infrastructure as individuals. Just as the discovery of the double helix representing the architecture of DNA revolutionized the biological sciences, the discovery of these nine relational styles and the correct view of their attributes are forever changing the way in which we view human nature.
Universal among people everywhere, these nine relational styles are analogous to computer operating systems. In computers, operating systems such as DOS, UNIX, Windows, etc., provide the internal logic and commands that determine how various applications are run. Likewise, our relational styles provide the interface that determines how our individual talents are expressed, and our experiences organized. Our individual relational style is a human operating system, with powerful components that correspond to the deeper workings of our characters, and help us to run the "applications" of our lives.
The following organizations are reported to have used the Enneagram in executive training, team building and/or organizational analysis. The information is gleaned from articles on the subject and/or Enneagram author/consultant published client lists:
Adobe, Alitalia Airlines, Amoco, AT&T, Avon Products, Boeing Corporation, The Central Intelligence Agency, The Coalition of 100 Black Women, The DuPont Company, e-Bay, Genentech, General Mills Corporation, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, KLM Airlines, Kodak, Motorola, Proctor & Gamble, Prudential Insurance, Prudential Insurance (Japan), Reebok Health Clubs, Silicon Graphics (USA), Sony, The Strategic Decisions Group, Toyota, VLSI Technology, Weight Watchers, YMCA
Our Unique Teaching Approach
Based upon more than ten years of R&D, The Sophisticated Manager program introduces the world’s first visually illustrated typology system. Using film clips from Hollywood’s classic period, we have illustrated each of the nine relational styles by creating a profile of 12 traits to describe each one. Now, for the first time, by watching movie characters portrayed by our favorite stars, we can understand the psychological forces that drive others and ourselves.
The Sophisticated Manager conclusively demonstrates the validity of the Enneagram system and its applicability to both individual and team interactions. Through the medium of film clips, each relational style is accurately revealed. In a thoroughly entertaining way, viewers are introduced to a highly informative process of raising their relational intelligence.
Each participant who makes use of our coaching services will receive an accurate assessment of their particular relational style. Once participants are able to locate not only their unique style, but also those of others,’ they will notice a significant increase in their intra and interpersonal skills, which includes predicting possible outcomes of executive and staff pairings — the likely chemistry of an organization based upon the operating systems of its members. To optimize leadership skills from the top down within each organization, executive coaching is highly recommended.
According to a paper entitled, "The Enneagram in Management" given at the First International Enneagram Conference sponsored by Stanford University, corporations are finding the Enneagram effective in nearly all areas of management. The primary benefit is an "increased sophistication in managing people." The twenty-four executives interviewed were very impressed with the "long lasting results" in all areas of the "people" side of business.
