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Business leaders often look back to "aha" moments in their lives for enduring lessons about their success.
For Kara Nortman, who had a long and successful career in technology and venture capital before becoming a women's professional sports owner, that moment arrived when she attended the 2015 Women's World Cup Final in Vancouver.
After watching the U.S. team win, Nortman couldn't find a jersey to buy, or much of any merch, or even information online about women's soccer. And that gap stayed with her as something that suggested an untapped business opportunity. She began researching women's soccer, went on to advise the U.S. women's national team players' union, and ultimately co-founded Angel City Football Club in Los Angeles, the most valuable women's football club in the world, and now majority owned by former Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife Willow Bay.
But looking back, Nortman says none of that would have occurred without her belief in a personality test called the Enneagram. It helped her understand why following her gut on women's sports and changing her career trajectory felt right. "The Enneagram was a huge unlock for me," she said on the latest episode of the CNBC Changemakers podcast, explaining that she identifies as a Type Seven, which she connects with "discovery, creation [and] adventure."
Nortman says over the course of her career as a team leader, she has tried multiple personality assessment tools, including the DiSC model, the Hogan Assessment System, and Myers-Briggs, but she says that they didn't lead to the kind of change in team dynamics she was looking for.
The Enneagram groups people into nine personality types based on their core motivations. Nortman said the framework not only helped her better understand herself, but also what drives others. While some people are motivated by power, others may be driven by creativity, safety or rules, she said.
That perspective shaped the way Nortman — who also co-founded Monarch Collective, an investment firm focused on women's sports — has approached building teams. In addition to Angel City FC, Monarch is an investor in NWSL teams Boston Legacy FC and San Diego Wave, German Bundesliga team FC Viktoria Berlin, and the WNBA's Cleveland Sirens, set to debut in the 2028 season.
Nortman said that she used the Enneagram with Angel City co-founders Natalie Portman and Julie Uhrman to discuss how they communicated and made decisions. When she launched Monarch Collective with Jasmine Robinson, she said, they used the test with each other and began profiling people who joined the firm.
The point isn't just about identifying someone's "type," according to Nortman.
It's understanding how various personalities affect a team and how to help people work well with each other. Nortman said during the podcast that the Enneagram is "a new lens by which to view yourself and the team."
"I think this idea that we all have to be good at everything is not right," she said. Rather, doing great work involves "knowing how to show up in that environment as a member of the team ... helping bring out the best in others," she added.
Earlier this year at a CNBC Changemakers event, Nortman said the Enneagram also helped her better understand her husband, whom she described as a Type Six, motivated by fear — a "danger ranger," she joked, the person who spots a problem in a company's cash flow early or shows up to a Burning Man camp with a first-aid kit and extra water.
"You want him on your team, you want him in your marriage, and sometimes he's a thorn in your side," Nortman said. Recognizing that, she added, helps her respond with more empathy, and understanding her own personality helped her understand her motivations when drawn to risk and building new things.
"It kind of impacted everything, not just a massive career pivot, but my marriage and even the way I show up as a mom," she said. It is a way to understand "what makes you tick," she said, rather than focusing mainly on how others observe your behavior.
The nine-point Enneagram system traces its modern development to Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo, and its introduction to the U.S. in the 1970s to figures who studied with Ichazo including psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo and neuroscientist John Lilly, maybe better known for creating the sensory deprivation isolation tank. More extensive adoption of the Enneagram in the U.S. during the 1980s was supported by Enneagram evangelists including Don Richard Riso and Helen Palmer.
Despite the system's popularity, the scientific evidence remains mixed. A systematic review published by the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 2021 of 104 independent samples found "mixed evidence for reliability and validity." Some studies suggested it could help with personal growth, but researchers found that analyses often did not support nine distinct types.
But Nortman is not alone among business leaders who cite use of the Enneagram as a factor in their success.
Dropbox co-founder and co-CEO Drew Houston, who announced his plan earlier this year to step down from day-to-day management in the future, said an Enneagram description helped him recognize how strengths such as creativity could also lead to conflict avoidance and a lack of structure at the company. "At first I was skeptical, but after reading the description for my type I found it spookily accurate in pinpointing what makes me tick: what motivates me, what my natural strengths are, what my blind spots tend to be, and so on. It's helped me tailor my role and leadership style to my strengths," he told Tim Ferriss for the entrepreneur and angel investor's book "Tribe of Mentors."
"It's even better with a team—all of our senior leaders have typed themselves and we encourage everyone at Dropbox to learn about it. ... Over the last few years, I've found myself looking at all my important relationships through the Enneagram lens."
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke has said Shopify used employees' Enneagram types as a tool for understanding how colleagues might work together. "Enneagram, it has worked very, very well for us. In our internal system, you can actually see the Enneagram with everyone else," he told Ferriss in a 2019 episode of the investor's podcast.
Lütke says it is less important what your personality type is than that you and those around you understand it and how to train it. "And I think this is so fruitful of a discovery, especially early in your career because, again, a lot of the people we hire, the average age at Shopify is 29, I think. So we get to people very early in their career because the thing that we want to accomplish, and this is really the goal of all of the internal programs, is we want to .... find out what kind of areas they have a fixed mindset on, and try to get people to acquire a growth mindset. Think of their intelligence as something that can be trained. Think of their skill as a program and not as something static. ... And once people acquire this growth mindset on at least a number of different traits, usually, they make it very, very far, and they can have 10 years of a career in one year on the work clock."
Nortman's advice is less about fitting into a category and more about understanding what makes people different. "Figure out how to be credible and in a way how to fit in, but really hold onto what makes you different. That is what will change your industry. That is what will change the world," she said during the CNBC Changemakers event earlier this year.
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