How to Encourage Different Perspectives in Your Leadership Team

Are you as open-minded as you think you are?

Most of us like to think we’re open-minded. Few people would readily admit, “When it comes down to it, I usually stick to my point of view and don’t like being swayed.” Yet being willing to consider another perspective and actually doing so when it challenges our assumptions are two very different things.

It’s a little like describing ourselves as authentic. We can believe we’re being authentic, but whether others experience us that way is another matter. The same is true of open-mindedness. What counts is not what we say about ourselves, but what happens when someone brings a view we don’t share.

Why considering different perspectives takes deliberate effort

We all have familiar ways of making sense of a problem. Some people naturally look for risks and alternative explanations; others are quicker to spot opportunities or decide what needs to happen next. These tendencies can be useful, but they also shape what we notice, what we overlook and which contributions we take seriously.

The Enneagram offers one lens on these differences. Type 6, for example, is often associated with testing assumptions and anticipating what might go wrong, while Type 9 is often associated with seeing multiple sides of a situation. These are tendencies described within the Enneagram framework, not guarantees about how any individual will think or behave. And no type has a monopoly on open-mindedness.

The challenge for leaders is to move beyond their own preferred way of thinking, particularly when they’re under pressure to make a decision. That takes intention. It can also feel uncomfortable, because the perspectives we most need to hear are sometimes the ones we’re quickest to dismiss.

A practical way to get leadership teams thinking differently

Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats offers a well-known approach to deliberately examining a problem through different modes of thinking rather than allowing everyone to argue from their usual position. The underlying idea is simple: make space for perspectives that might otherwise be missing.

You don’t have to use de Bono’s six hats exactly. In one leadership workshop, the team was performing well within its individual functions but struggling to work together as a cohesive leadership group. I gave them a business case to solve, but instead of allowing everyone to approach it from their usual functional perspective, I assigned each person a role that would stretch their thinking. One became the Devil’s Advocate and Challenger; another the Insights Advocate; another the Optimistic Forward Thinker.

The CFO had to advocate for the consumer, while the Operations Director focused on longer-term strategy. This produced different ideas. And, more importantly, it gave people permission to contribute outside their functional remit, ask unfamiliar questions and challenge one another without it feeling like a territorial dispute. For newer leaders who were still cautious about stepping on toes, the assigned role created a legitimate reason to speak up.

The exercise exposed a common problem in leadership teams: people can be excellent at representing their own functions without consistently thinking about what the whole business needs. Changing the lens changed the conversation.

Using Enneagram perspectives to challenge habitual thinking

The Enneagram can be used in a similar way, not by asking people to behave according to a type label, but by using different type perspectives as prompts. A Type 2-inspired relational lens might draw attention to the people and relationships affected by a decision. A Type 8-inspired action lens might challenge a team that has been debating an issue long after it has enough information to act.

Neither perspective is inherently the right answer. Their value is in surfacing questions the team might not otherwise ask. The aim is not to replace one default with another, but to widen the range of thinking available before the team decides.

How to make different perspectives part of better decisions

One-off exercises can be revealing, but the real test is what happens in ordinary meetings. Leaders can build the same discipline into decision-making by asking whose perspective is missing, inviting a deliberate challenge before agreement is reached, or asking someone to argue for an option they initially dismissed. It also helps to distinguish genuine disagreement from disloyalty: people need to know that questioning an idea is part of doing good work together.

None of this means every discussion should take longer or that every perspective deserves equal weight. It means being intentional about considering alternatives before the team commits, rather than discovering too late that everyone was working from the same assumptions.

Three questions worth asking

·       If I invited someone who fundamentally disagrees with me into this conversation, what might they say?

·       Where in my leadership or work am I mistaking familiarity for truth?

·       What perspective am I least willing to consider right now — and what’s 10% of it I can get behind?

Open-minded leadership isn’t about being endlessly agreeable. It’s about being willing to let a different perspective change the quality of your thinking — and making it easier for the people around you to do the same.