Emotional intelligence in leadership is a focus of author, organization development consultant, and executive coach Karl Hebenstreit, PhD. His Enneagram-based framework, coaching, and speaking help leaders align performance, inclusion, and culture. In this interview, he shares his thoughts from his extensive experience in the field.

Karl, thank you for joining us today! To start, could you introduce yourself in your own words—what you do, your background, and what drives the work you’re doing today?

Thank you for having me, Esperanza! I am here to make the world and the world of work a better place, by focusing on increasing its humanity, compassion, and emotional intelligence. I do this through my work as a speaker, author, executive coach, and leadership/team/organization development consultant. Throughout my 30+ year career in human resources and organization development, I have worked in myriad industries and organizations, earned a Master’s Degree in Human Resource Management and a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology, and wrote and published three books: The How and Why: Taking Care of Business with the Enneagram, Nina and the Really, Really Tough Decision (a children’s book available in four languages), and the Axiom Award-winning Explicit Expectations: The Essential Guide & Toolkit of Management Fundamentals. I am motivated and energized by seeing my clients, their teams, and organizations thrive by creating engaged, psychologically safe, inclusive, and innovative cultures, and achieve the goals they’ve set for themselves.

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What shifts have you seen in how organizations understand and prioritize human elements at work?

Up until very recently, I have seen organizations start focusing more intentionally on employee wellness, engagement, creating psychologically safe workplaces that drive inclusivity and innovation, and the democratization of coaching availability to all, including training people managers to become coaches of their teams. I remain hopeful that this trajectory regains momentum as we all work through some incredible socio-political challenges worldwide. I see the pendulum swinging toward prioritization of human elements at work when there is low unemployment and the economy is healthy, and away from this when the economy is weaker and unemployment is higher. You can forecast these swings when you start seeing DEI, wellness, and training and development departments get cut, and when you see hiring in these areas.

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You often use the Enneagram as a key tool in your practice. Can you explain how this model supports emotional intelligence and inclusion in workplace settings?

The Enneagram is an incredibly deep and powerful system that helps increase self-awareness of our own lifelong core motivation, as well as see how the other eight perspectives/energies can be leveraged to gain a more robust and comprehensive worldview. Building understanding and empathy for those with differing core motivators and perspectives, integrating them and their learnings into the expansion of our own worldview, and then acting accordingly with this new knowledge and understanding is the operationalization of Dan Goleman’s formula of self-awareness + empathy + insightful action = EQ. As we start seeing things from multiple perspectives, rather than from just our own default, we find how important it is to tap into the more robust and expansive diverse viewpoints of our colleagues, fostering inclusive workplace settings and yielding far better results.

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What inspired you to focus on psychological safety and inclusion—and how do you approach helping leaders build these into their team cultures?

Remember the famous Maya Angelou quote: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better”? That perfectly describes my journey, evolution, and discovery of the Enneagram. As a corporate Human Resources practitioner, I was introduced to the standard psychological personality assessment systems traditionally used by everyone: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), DiSC, Strengthsfinder, Hogan, etc. And they all serve their purpose to help increase self-awareness about our own and others’ behaviors. This is when we were doing the best we could with what we had/knew.

When I was introduced to the Enneagram during my Ph.D. studies, I then came to know better. The Enneagram delves into the motivation behind the behavior. The WHY behind the HOW. And, as we all learned from Simon Sinek, we should always “Start with Why.” As a system that identifies and describes each individual’s lifetime “why,” the Enneagram helps to create environments of psychological safety and inclusion. Our colleagues truly come to understand our core motivations and why we do what we do AND non-judgmentally integrate those perspectives into the expansion of their own worldviews, creating a truly empathic and inclusive environment where everyone can bring their whole selves to the team, be listened to, heard, seen, and have those perspectives integrated into an innovative and holistic solution.

I find that leaders who use the Enneagram for their own development (through our executive coaching engagements and their own personal work) see its value to themselves, their colleagues, families, and friends, and want to roll it out to their leadership teams to help them become better leaders and human beings, overall. There is a cascade effect that takes place, and I have witnessed long-term ROIs of doubled revenue, year-over-year, for multiple years in a row, as a result of these more inclusive and psychologically safe cultures.

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You’ve received certifications and possibly other recognitions over the course of your career. Could you share a few that stand out, and what those milestones meant to you personally and professionally?

I never planned on going for a Ph.D., and just naturally decided to do so as an evolutionary way to transition into the field of Organization Development from Human Resources. That journey introduced me to the Enneagram and led me to a certificate course in Evidence-Based Coaching, which led to my PCC certification through the International Coaching Federation. I’ve since been certified in the LEGO® Serious Play® system, which uses LEGO in coaching to help leaders work through their blocks (literally and figuratively!).

My certification as an Integrative Enneagram Practitioner and Faculty Member is also a significant and impactful achievement, since I am able to use the iEQ9 assessment in organizations (I’ve worked with over 2,000 people in this capacity) and facilitate new cohorts of practitioners to get certified to help change the world for the better. Each of these new knowledge bases and certifications have built on one another to allow me to maintain a toolkit of resources that can be appropriately applied to any situation, all in service of facilitating the development of leaders, teams, and their organizations—helping them become the best versions of themselves and achieve their aspirational goals.

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Many organizations say they want inclusive workplaces but struggle with follow-through. What are some of the most practical first steps leaders can take to move from intention to implementation?

You are so right. It’s an issue with stickiness and intentionality. How many times have people been excited about a new concept, program, framework, or model, and then “life (or business) gets in the way” and they revert back to their fixated state of doing what they were doing before, putting out fires in tactical, non-strategic ways?

It really requires a certain readiness and focus to pause first, before automatically reacting in these old, ineffective, hardwired, automatic response patterns. It also necessitates integrating these new learnings and models consciously and deliberately into everything we do. That’s why I wrote The How and Why: Taking Care of Business with the Enneagram. It is a way to remind ourselves that the tenets and teachings of the Enneagram can be applied to virtually all organization development challenges we encounter; it’s a tool that can help us understand each situation more clearly and robustly, and provides us with situationally-appropriate solutions.

So, pausing and invoking the Enneagram system and its insights whenever confronted with any organizational challenge—and before taking immediate action—is a really effective way of ensuring we are looking at every possible angle and being maximally inclusive.

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In your consulting work, what’s a transformational moment you’ve witnessed when a team or leader fully embraced emotional intelligence?

Wow, that’s a tall order – and definitely aspirational. As human beings, we can do our own work to self-develop … AND there will always be slip-ups and digressions since we are human. We have to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves grace when we inevitably don’t show up as our best selves in every situation.

With that universal caveat, I have worked with many leaders who have embraced their self-development, focusing on increasing their EQ and leadership effectiveness, AND expanded that to their teams. I have witnessed leaders who took their EQ development to heart, learned and lived the Enneagram, and cascaded it to their leadership teams—some even doing so with multiple role changes, spanning new organizations and new teams.

As I mentioned previously, I have even had the good fortune to be a first-hand witness to a leader and his team learning and practicing the Enneagram together and with their teams, ultimately resulting in the highest engagement scores in their multinational organization, and doubling their revenue year-over-year for three consecutive years. So yes, increasing EQ does correlate positively with a very healthy ROI!

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How does your approach integrate individual development with collective team growth—especially in environments that may be resistant to change?

Time and time again I work with leaders who have been promoted to their roles based on their prior exemplary achievements as individual contributors—a space that has been and continues to be a comfort zone for them. And, when push comes to shove, they’re very comfortable stepping back into those shoes, nimbly navigating the complexities and challenges they have overcome before, faster and better than choosing to delegate, develop, or coach their team members to do so.

My approach is to help them see that this hero/savior behavior prevents development of their team members, increases unhealthy codependence, and can lead to the leader’s stressed-out exhaustion and the team’s disengagement (with the team’s inability to fill in the slack when the leader inevitably succumbs to burnout). Helping them slow down and take the time to coach and develop their team members into areas of their interests, passions, and aspirations, while identifying and leveraging their unique talents and strengths, contributes to collective team growth.

And EQ plays a key role in this, as leaders are encouraged to get to know each of their team members better, celebrate and tap into each of their diverse perspectives, while the leaders manage and engage each team member according to their individual motivational needs and aspirations.

When facing and tackling resistance to change—or readiness for it—it’s important to identify and address the challenges being faced by the leader, team, or organization. Whenever the pain of changing is perceived to be less than the pain of staying the same, there is motivation to do the work to address the challenge and fix the problem. Ultimately, the goal is to help them find a way to tackle and solve the challenges as a team (sometimes with some outside help) and learn to work together to be able to address and resolve future challenges.

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What role do diversity of thought and lived experience play in the kinds of innovation and workplace cohesion you help foster?

Approaching the sensitive—and sometimes politically charged—topic of diversity from the lens of perspective/thought is a very innocuous way to introduce teams to the benefits of empathizing with (and ideally integrating) others’ valuable insights and experiences to ultimately drive innovation, better decision-making, and reduce the chance of groupthink.

When teams start to see and experience psychologically safe environments (where people feel included and have themselves and their ideas seen, heard, honored, and acted upon), true teamwork, better decisions, and innovative solutions happen. This also creates the conditions and foundation for the power of metaphor (from others’ diverse lived experiences) and the exercise of BOTH AND thinking (as opposed to OR thinking) to flourish.

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Looking ahead, what are the biggest opportunities you see for workplaces that truly want to align performance with purpose—and how do you hope your work contributes to that evolution?

Invoking Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” concept, leaders and people managers have a very powerful tool and resource available to them that can help guide, reassure, motivate, and engage their teams and organizations: the power of the organization’s purpose.

Keeping the organization’s mission in mind and using it as the grand arbiter and true north is a simple and elegant way to drive and clarify goals, direction, decisions, prioritization, etc. Starting with why also applies to finding out the “why” of each employee in the organization (which is where the Enneagram can help)—and ensuring that there is a clear connection to the organization’s mission.

The next step is clarity in expectations of each employee (and what each employee expects of their manager), along with how they will perform their roles. Ultimately, the combination of WHY and HOW will produce the optimal WHAT (the products and services of the organization), fully understanding and addressing the true diverse needs of their customers and stakeholders.

I truly hope that I can help make the world a bit of a better, more emotionally intelligent, inclusive, meaningful, and happier place to be in through the Enneagram and my work as an Executive Coach, Author, Speaker, and Leadership/Team/Organization Development Consultant!

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If you were to write your bio in your own words, what would you say? What legacy do you hope to leave? 

Karl is a certified Executive Coach, Leadership/Team/Organization Development Consultant, and international speaker with over 30 years of experience coaching leaders and their teams to work better together and consistently exceed their organizations’ goals. He holds a PhD in Organizational Psychology (his thesis focused on “Using the Enneagram to Help Organizations Attract, Retain, and Motivate Their Employees”) and has authored three books: The How & Why: Taking Care of Business with the Enneagram (now in its 3rd Edition), Nina and the Really, Really Tough Decision (available in English, Spanish, French, and Greek), and, most recently, the 2025 Axiom Award-winning Explicit Expectations: The Essential Guide & Toolkit of Management Fundamentals.

Karl is an International Enneagram Association (IEA) “Accredited Professional with Distinction,” an “IEA Accredited Professional/Provider/Teacher,” and an Integrative9 Practitioner and Faculty Member.

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Link

Connect with Karl via LinkedIn.

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Welcome to Humane HR Talk, where we present insightful interviews with HR industry experts and thought leaders in related fields sharing their strategies, perspectives, and visions for creating more human-centric workplaces. Through these discussions, you’ll gain practical tips and fresh inspiration to transform your HR practices, to foster inclusive, thriving cultures, and to help in your own journey in the evolving world of work.

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