From left: actress Natalie Portman, Angel City Football Club co-founder Julie Arman, and Angel City Football Club co-founder Carla Nortman.
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Business leaders often look back on the aha moments in their lives for lasting lessons about success.
For Kara Nortman, who had a long and successful career in technology and venture capital before becoming an owner of women’s professional sports, that moment came while attending the 2015 Women’s World Cup finals in Vancouver.
After watching the U.S. team win, Nortman could hardly find any jerseys or merchandise to buy, or even any online information about women’s soccer. And that gap remained with her as an indication of an untapped business opportunity. She began researching women’s soccer, served as an advisor to the U.S. Women’s National Team Players Association, and eventually co-founded Angel City Football Club in Los Angeles. The club is the most valuable women’s soccer club in the world and is currently majority owned by former Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife Willow Bay.
But looking back, Nortman says none of it would have happened without her belief in a personality test called the Enneagram. This helped me understand why it felt right to follow my instincts about women’s sports and change my career trajectory. “The Enneagram opened up a lot of doors for me,” she said on the latest episode of the CNBC Changemakers podcast, explaining that she identifies as a Type 7 and associates that with “discovery, creation (and) adventure.”
Throughout her career as a team leader, Nortman says she has tried multiple personality assessment tools, including the DiSC model, the Hogan rating system, and Myers-Briggs, but none of them led to the change in team dynamics she was looking for.
The Enneagram categorizes people into nine personality types based on their core motivations. Nottman said the framework not only helps her better understand herself, but also what drives others. Some people may be motivated by power, while others may be motivated by creativity, safety and rules, she said.
That perspective has shaped the way Nortman, who is also co-founder of Monarch Collective, an investment firm focused on women’s sports, approaches team building. In addition to Angel City FC, Monarch also has investments in NWSL teams Boston Legacy FC and San Diego Wave, German Bundesliga team FC Victoria Berlin, and the WNBA’s Cleveland Sirens, which are scheduled to debut in the 2028 season.
Nortman said she discussed using the Enneagram with Angel City co-founders Natalie Portman and Julie Ehrman about how to communicate and make decisions. When she and Jasmine Robinson started Monarch Collective, she said, they began using each other’s tests to profile people who joined the company.
Nortman says it’s not just about identifying someone’s “type.”
It’s about understanding how different personalities impact a team and how to help people work well with each other. Nortman said on the podcast that the Enneagram is “a new lens through which to view ourselves and our teams.”
“I don’t think it’s true that we all have to be great at everything,” she said. Rather, she added, doing a great job requires “knowing how to operate in an environment as part of a team and helping bring out the best in others.”
Earlier this year, at CNBC’s Changemakers event, Nortman said the Enneagram also helped her understand her husband better. She described her husband as a fear-motivated Type Six, or “Danger Ranger,” who she joked was someone who would spot a company’s cash flow problems early on or show up at Burning Man camp with a first aid kit and extra water.
“You want him on your team, you want him in your marriage, but sometimes he can be a pain,” Nortman said. Recognizing that has helped her respond with more empathy, and understanding her own personality has helped her understand the risks and motivations behind building something new, she added.
“It was a huge turning point in my career, but it affected everything, even my marriage and my motherhood,” she said. It’s a way to understand “what turns you on,” she said, rather than focusing primarily on how others observe your behavior.
Find a way to be trusted and, in some sense, fit in, but hold on to what makes you different. It will change your industry. That’s what changes the world.
The 9-point Enneagram system traces its modern development to Bolivian philosopher Oscar Icazo. Also introduced to the United States in the 1970s were Icazo’s students, including psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo and neuroscientist John Lilly, best known for creating sensory deprivation isolation tanks. More widespread adoption of the Enneagram in the United States in the 1980s was championed by Enneagram evangelists such as Don Richard Riso and Helen Palmer.
Despite the popularity of this system, scientific evidence remains mixed. A systematic review of 104 independent samples published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 2021 found “mixed evidence for reliability and validity.” Although some studies suggest it may be helpful for personal growth, researchers have found that analyzes often do not support the nine different types.
But Nortman isn’t the only business leader to cite use of the Enneagram as a factor in their success.
Dropbox co-founder and co-CEO Drew Houston, who earlier this year announced plans to eventually step back from day-to-day management, said the Enneagram description helped him recognize how strengths such as creativity can lead to conflict avoidance and a lack of internal structure. “I was skeptical at first, but after reading the description of my type, I found that it pinpointed what excites me: what drives me, my natural strengths, and what tends to be my blind spots. It helped me tailor my role and leadership style to my strengths,” he told entrepreneur and angel investor Tim Ferriss of the book Tribe of Mentors.
“It’s even more effective for teams. All of our senior leaders have input themselves, and we encourage everyone at Dropbox to learn about it. … Over the past few years, I’ve found myself looking at all of my important relationships through an Enneagram lens.”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said Shopify uses employees’ Enneagram types as a tool to understand how co-workers work together. “The Enneagram, it worked really well for us. In our internal system, we can actually see everyone else’s Enneagram,” he told Ferris on a 2019 episode of the Investor podcast.
Luedtke says it’s less about what your personality type is and more about how you and those around you understand it and train it. “And I think that’s a really valuable discovery, especially early in your career, because again, a lot of the people we’re hiring, the average age at Shopify is 29. So what we want to achieve, and this is really the goal of all our internal programs, is to approach people very early in their career. We want to find out what areas they’re fixated on and get people into a growth mindset. Think of their intelligence as something that can grow.’ And once they develop this growth mindset, at least for different traits, they usually go a very long way and can build a 10-year career in one year. ”
Nortman’s advice is less about fitting into a category and more about understanding the differences between people. “Think about how you can be trusted and fit in in a way, but hold on to what makes you different. That’s what changes your industry. That’s what changes the world,” she said at the CNBC Changemakers event earlier this year.
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