ATA Enneagram for LTC Leadership: What It Is, Why It Works, and Who It's For.

The leadership development problem nobody names in LTC.

Every leader on your team has a way they handle pressure. A pattern they reach for when a difficult family meeting hits at 4:45 pm on a Friday, when the survey results come back, or when a manager asks for a hard conversation. Most of the time, that pattern is not chosen. It is automatic. The leader has run it so many times that it now runs them.

The ATA Enneagram names what is driving those patterns. Not the behaviour itself — that is the visible part — but the motivation underneath: a non-conscious need the leader is trying to satisfy when they reach for that move. The framework identifies nine such motivations, each one organized around a different regulating need. This underlying belief says: if I can feel this way, I will be able to handle what is in front of me.

This is the distinction that makes the framework useful in performance conversations. The behaviour you don't like, avoidance, sharpness with families, over-promising, intimidation, and perfectionism, is not the level at which the work happens at. The level the work happens at is what the leader is trying to feel when they default to that behaviour. Address the behaviour without the motivation and you get compliance for a few weeks, then the pattern resurfaces in a different shape. Address the motivation, help the leader find a more skilful way to satisfy it, and the behaviour begins to shift because it no longer has a job to do.

The most useful idea inside the framework is this. Your strategy — the way you habitually go about satisfying that underlying need — is not who you are. It is what you do. And because it is something you do, it is something you can notice, study, and eventually choose differently.

For a leadership team in LTC, that shift is not abstract. It is what makes performance conversations land instead of stalling. It is what makes the hard conversation between two managers possible without the Administrator having to mediate everyone. It is what allows team cohesion to become a structural quality of how the team actually works, rather than something the Administrator holds together through sheer relational effort.

This frame changes everything about the work that follows.

What is the ATA Enneagram?

The ATA Enneagram, short for Awareness to Action Enneagram, is a motivational framework developed by Mario Sikora and María José Munita for use in professional settings. It is a school of Enneagram work, developed specifically for use in organizations and grounded in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and over two decades of practical work with leaders globally.

Three things make it different.

First, it treats personality as a strategy, not an identity. The nine Enneagram patterns are not labels you wear. They are nine different motivations — nine different things a person is non-consciously striving to feel — and the strategies they have built over time to satisfy those motivations. The behaviour you observe in a leader is the visible output. The strategy is the engine. The motivation is the fuel. Naming the strategy is useful. Becoming the strategy is the trap.

Second, it works with two dimensions in parallel: the Three Instinctual Biases (Preserving, Navigating, Transmitting) and the nine Strategies. The Biases describe what a leader values and prioritizes. The Strategies describe how they go about satisfying those values. Most other Enneagram approaches focus mainly on the nine, thus the ennea, and treat the biases as a secondary subtype. ATA gives both equal weight, producing 27 distinct combinations and a much more precise read on how a leader actually shows up. In leadership work, the biases are often introduced first. Three patterns are quicker to recognize than nine, and two leaders with the same Strategy can lead very differently when their biases differ. In LTC, the Bias often explains team dynamics better than the Strategy alone can.

Third, it is descriptive, not prescriptive. ATA does not tell a leader what they should do. It describes what is there: what the leader is trying to satisfy when they reach for their habitual pattern, particularly under pressure, and how that motivation shapes their attention, decisions, and behaviour. From that description, the leader and the practitioner can decide together what to work on. This is why the work is sequenced diagnostic-first. ATA practitioners do not start with action plans. They start with evidence: what is this leader trying to feel, how is that organising their behaviour under pressure, what is the cost of that pattern to the team, and what would shift it? The work then moves through the cycle the framework is named for: awareness, authenticity, action, in that order, not the reverse.

How ATA differs from the Enneagram, you may already know

If you have encountered the Enneagram before, through an online test, a book, or a workshop, you likely met one of the more popular approaches, which were built primarily for personal growth audiences. Those approaches do important work, but the orientation is different.

For an Administrator who needs to make staffing, development, and performance decisions on the basis of who is actually on the team, the ATA frame is the one that produces usable data. The output is not "your Director of Care is a Type One." The output is a clear, evidence-backed account of what that leader is trying to satisfy when pressure rises, what their stress pattern looks like in practice, and where the team is silently paying for it.

Why ATA works in Long-Term Care specifically

LTC is not a generic workplace. It is a regulated, relational, emotionally weighted environment where the cost of a leader's blind spot is not abstract. It shows up in incident reports, grievance files, and turnover.

A few reasons the ATA frame fits LTC the way most frameworks don't.

The work is relational by structure. LTC leadership is not just task management. It is families in distress, residents with complex needs, unionised staff, regulators on cycle, and a leadership team that has to hold all of it at once. The motivations driving how leaders behave under that load are not theoretical. They are operational.

Stress reveals strategy, and LTC operates at high resting stress. The ATA frame is built around what people are trying to satisfy when pressure rises: the shift from preferred pattern to stress pattern. In LTC, that shift is not occasional. It is the working condition. A frame that takes stress seriously is a frame that fits the environment.

Behaviour change is the bottleneck, and behaviour does not change by being asked to. Most leaders in LTC already have surface insight. They know what their patterns look like. They know which conversations they avoid, which staff member is using their energy disproportionately. What they don't always have access to is the motivation underneath — what the avoidance is doing for them, what the over-extending is letting them feel. ATA's diagnostic-first sequencing is designed for exactly that gap. The behaviour begins to shift when the leader can see what they were really after, and find a more skilful way to get it.

Defensibility matters. Administrators frequently need to make a case to a board, a CAO, or a council for continued investment in leadership development. The ATA process produces written reports, team maps, and roadmaps that can sit in front of a finance committee without losing their meaning. That is rarer than it should be.

The Three Instinctual Biases at a glance

The biases are not personality types. They are the foundational orientation a leader brings to their environment: what they value, what they pay attention to first, where they spend energy, and what they over-rely on under pressure.

Preserving leaders organise around stability, foundational care, and risk management. In LTC, they often hold the operational backbone. They know the building, the systems, the resident files. Under pressure, they can become rigid, conserve energy by withdrawing, and quietly resist change that hasn't been fully scoped.

Navigating leaders organise around relationship, group cohesion, and reading the room. In LTC, they are often the connective tissue between the administrator, the team, and the families. Under pressure, they can over-mediate, lose their own position in service of group harmony, and absorb conflict rather than route it.

Transmitting leaders organise around influence, expression, and impact. In LTC, they tend to be visible, persuasive, and willing to take a stance. Under pressure, they can dominate the room, override quieter voices, and mistake their own intensity for team alignment.

In Long-Term Care specifically, Preserving is overwhelmingly the dominant bias. The work itself selects for it: operational continuity, risk management, attention to the systems and rhythms that keep residents safe. Most LTC leadership teams, in our experience, cluster heavily Preserving. That clustering produces predictable team blind spots: a tendency toward conservation when the situation calls for visibility, quiet resistance to change rather than open dissent, and a relational and political read that is often underdeveloped because the bias toward those domains is weaker. Mixed-bias teams develop different blind spots. Single-bias teams develop deeper ones. Naming the distribution is the first move toward changing what the team can do.

Who this work is for

This work is for Administrators of Municipal Long-Term Care homes who:

• Have a leadership team carrying real weight and want a clear, evidence-based picture of who is on it.

• Have already tried generic leadership training and noticed that it didn't move the patterns they hoped it would.

• Need a defensible case for continued investment in development. Not a binder, but a roadmap.

• Are leading through redevelopment, regulatory pressure, succession, or post-pandemic recovery, and need their team to lead through it with them.

It is not for organisations looking for a single workshop that will fix communication. The diagnostic phase alone takes longer than that, structurally, because it has to.

What the work looks like in practice

Engagements typically begin with a phased assessment of the leadership team, combining CliftonStrengths and ATA Enneagram, delivered through individual sessions, integrated into a written team-level diagnostic, and concluded with an Administrator debrief and development roadmap.

The output is not a personality binder. It is:

• An individual summary for each leader, naming the motivation that organises their pattern, in their own language rather than generic type description.

• A team-level map showing how the biases and strategies are distributed, where the dynamics are working, and where they are quietly costing energy.

• A roadmap that sequences development with the realities of the LTC operating year, including survey cycles, redevelopment milestones, and budget timelines.

• The language and evidence to support performance conversations, succession planning, and the case to the board.

After the diagnostic, optional facilitated work continues with the team. But the diagnostic comes first. The reason is structural. Generic training in a culture where blame, avoidance, or staff entitlement is normalised does not shift those patterns. It can reinforce them. The diagnostic is what makes the development land.

Frequently asked questions

Is this the same as the Enneagram I took online? Probably not. Most online Enneagram tests come from approaches built for personal growth and produce a type label. The ATA approach uses a longer, structured assessment process, weights the Instinctual Biases equally with the Strategy, and is built around motivation rather than fixed type. The output is built for leadership decisions, not personal identity.

How is this different from CliftonStrengths? CliftonStrengths describes what a person is naturally good at. The ATA Enneagram describes the motivation organising what they default to under pressure — including the patterns that get in their own way. The two are complementary. Most engagements use both, sequenced: strengths first, Enneagram second.

Do leaders have to "believe in" the Enneagram for this to work? No. The work is diagnostic. Leaders engage with what shows up in their own assessment and what their team is actually experiencing. Belief is not the entry point. Evidence is.

What does an engagement look like, end to end? A full diagnostic across a leadership team of around ten, covering individual assessments, a team dynamics report, and an Administrator debrief, typically runs three to four months end to end, depending on scheduling.

Is this only for Municipal LTC? Municipal LTC is the focus, because the operating reality, the governance structure, and the regulatory environment are specific. The work can apply more broadly, but the language, examples, and sequencing here are built for that audience.

What does it cost? Engagements typically run between $15,000 and $25,000 plus HST, depending on team size, scope, and the depth of work required. A discovery conversation is the right place to scope it precisely.

A closing thought

Most organisations don't have a leadership development problem. They have a behaviour change problem. And behaviour does not change at the level of behaviour. Leaders under stress revert to patterns developed long before any development happens — habits that feel like identity, because they are doing important work. They are satisfying a need the leader has not consciously named.

The ATA Enneagram, applied with the specific weight of LTC in mind, is a way of seeing the motivation underneath the pattern clearly enough that the leader has a real chance to satisfy it differently. That is the move that changes behaviour. Nothing else does for long.

The first question is not what to develop. The first question is what is actually there, not just what the leader does under pressure, but what they are trying to feel when they do it.

If you are an Administrator and that question lands somewhere in your last leadership meeting, in a survey result that surprised you, in a conversation you have been avoiding for six months, a 30-minute discovery call is the next step.