The Ambition Myth: New Enneagram Research Reveals That Not Everyone Wants the Corner Office

For most organizations, career progression is the gold standard of employee reward. You perform well, you move up. You move up, you earn more. The system is designed to reinforce ambition, and managers are trained to spot it, nurture it and reward it.

The problem is that ambition isn't uniform. And new research from Truity suggests that the gap between what organizations offer and what employees actually want is widest — and most consequential — when it comes to career advancement.

Across more than 64,000 respondents, the data shows that how a person wants to move forward in their professional life varies dramatically by Enneagram type. This means that if you lead  a diverse team, there’s a high chance that you're going to be managing people whose appetite for progression sits at completely opposite ends of the ambition spectrum.

If you're new to this research, start with our first piece, The Engagement Gap. Here, we cover the methodology and introduce the Enneagram as a strategic window into the 'why' behind how people work. 

Who Wants to Climb the Corporate Ladder?  

Career advancement sits at the heart of how most organizations think about reward and retention. A Pew Research survey found that nearly two thirds of people who left their jobs cited “lack of advancement opportunities” as a reason. McKinsey has reported similar findings, consistently placing career growth (or lack of it) as a top reason why people quit. The message is loud and clear — if you want to keep your best people, you need to offer them a path forward.

But a path forward to where, exactly?

We know through extensive workplace research that “advancement” isn't always a vertical climb up the corporate ladder. It comes in a few distinct forms: lateral moves, individual contributor tracks, cross-functional projects,  stretch projects, roles that better accommodate work-life integration. So when we surveyed over 64,000 people about their professional values — including how much they valued Advancement, defined in our study as opportunities for promotion and upward career progression — we were not surprised when only one Enneagram type explicitly listed it as their top priority. 

Type 3s, known as the Achievers of the Enneagram, are the people for whom the conventional advancement model was essentially designed. These types set ambitious goals and work hard to hit them, and they want that effort to be seen and rewarded. They’re also image-conscious, tying their self-worth to their status, and a clear path upward is one of the most powerful signals an organization can send that they are succeeding in their career. In our data, 23% of Threes selected Advancement as a top work value, alongside Recognition (30%) and Compensation (27%) — the highest rates of any type across all three categories.

Type 9s, the Peacemakers, sit at the opposite end of the ambition spectrum. Nines are steady and considered in their approach, and they desire harmony above all. They are often among the most dependable and easy-to-work-with people on a team, but more seniority usually means more pressure, more conflict and more time being visible in ways that do not come naturally to them. Only 9% selected Advancement as a priority in our data. What Nines actually care about is Balance (36%) and Security  (29%), so if your standard reward for a high-performing Nine is a promotion into a more demanding or “political” role, you may be offering them the one thing most likely to make them miserable. 

Career Ambition Isn't a Binary

Here’s where the data gets interesting — low scores on Advancement do not mean low motivation or that someone does not want to progress. For several types, their ambition is simply pointed somewhere else.

• Take Type 5s, the Investigators. Fives are analytical, intellectually driven people who want to be genuinely expert in what they do. They want hard problems to solve and the freedom to go deep on them, and they’re only interested in climbing the ladder if it increases their access to meaningful, complex work.  Only 14% selected Advancement as a priority, but 30% selected Challenge, the highest rate of any type in the study.
• Type 4s, the Individualists of the Enneagram, are creative and deeply motivated by self-expression. For a Four, the most compelling career path is one that allows them to do original work on their own terms. Only 12% prioritised Advancement — Creativity (28%) and Autonomy (33%) ranked far higher. 
• Autonomy was also a top priority for Type Eights. These “can do” types are natural leaders so you might assume that they would seek out higher-level roles. But the data suggests they’re motivated less by titles themselves and more by the independence and control those roles can provide. 
• Type 2s, the Givers, are warm, people-focused team members who want to make a difference to the people around them. Their ambition tends to show up in relationships and impact rather than seniority. Only 15% prioritized Advancement, while Collaboration (40%) and Connection (33%) came out on top.

For each of these types, the traditional reward structure — job grades, title, perks, recognition — is not what gets them out of bed in the morning. Yet because they’re not clamoring for promotions or putting themselves forward for leadership roles, it’s easy for managers to assume they lack drive. They don't. Their ambition is simply directed toward mastery, meaning or impact, and when those motivations are recognized, they can be just as driven and high-performing as any traditional Achiever. 

What to Do With This Information

Business psychologists will not be surprised by these findings. For many people, having an upwardly moving career is not the be-all and end-all. In fact, a Workmonitor survey of 27,000 workers found that 51% would happily stay in a role they liked even if they had no possibility of advancement. As a senior partner at Kornferry put it, firms dedicate enormous resources to helping people get ahead, but “workers don’t want to be put in a box for thirty years.” They want to learn and grow, but in ways that feel meaningful to them. 

For managers, this means you need a broader lens on what career advancement looks like. Organizations are good at spotting high performers and rewarding them the way the system was designed to reward them, but for some Enneagram types, that could be a disruption to everything that motivates them and makes them effective. The next rung on the ladder is not always the answer. Meanwhile, your Type 3s are not going to wait indefinitely for recognition that doesn't come. 

What Truity's research adds to this picture is a clearer map of what ambition actually looks like for different people. Knowing that ambition varies across your workforce is useful. Knowing which people on your team are motivated by promotions, which are driven by mastery and expertise, which find their deepest satisfaction in relationships and collaboration — that is something you can actually act on. And that’s exactly what the Enneagram gives you: a shared language you can use to have honest conversations about what “progress” looks like for that person, and to think more creatively about how to build it into the role they have now or the one that comes next. 

If you want to start building that picture, head over to Truity@Work, our personality testing platform for teams. Here you can access all of our researched and validated personality assessments, including our Enneagram for the Workplace assessment, and send them to every member of your team.  Our comprehensive reports provide an objective foundation for conversations on professional growth and advancement, and we have plenty of resources to support you on that journey. It’s a practical way to turn vague ideas about ‘ambition’ into specific, personalized growth paths that actually fit how each person wants their career to evolve.