Organisations are placing greater focus on understanding how people work together, from leadership teams to newly formed groups. There is growing recognition that stronger awareness of preferences and working styles leads to more effective collaboration and better outcomes.
Insights helps make that possible. Through our Insights Discovery programme, we support people to recognise how they show up, understand how others may experience them and adapt their approach to work more effectively together.
This is increasingly a priority at leadership level. Senior teams are using Insights to work more intentionally together, build trust and strengthen alignment, while also shaping culture and setting the tone for how collaboration happens across the organisation.
Here, we explore how five organisations are using Insights to build trust, strengthen collaboration and elevate performance.
Let’s dive in…
Like many of our clients, Organon has a robust team of Insights client partners - accredited professional who facilitate, coach and deliver Insights Discovery personality assessments and leadership programmes.
These partners act as facilitators of change. They help leaders and teams translate the insights from their personal Insights Discovery profiles into individual action plans that can enhance performance.
In this project, spanning the US, Europe, and Japan, the 10-member Global Supply Chain leadership team sought a shared framework that they could use to strengthen collaboration, build professional intimacy and bridge cultural and geographic differences.
An Insights-accredited Associate Consultant delivered a two-step coaching journey: a full-day introduction to the Self-Aware Leader programme and the Insights Discovery Transformational Leadership Profile, followed by completion and debrief of Discovery Full Circle 360 feedback to create individual action plans.
The memorable Insights Discovery language of colour energies helped the team understand personal preferences, interpret their colleagues’ working styles and identify potential friction points early on.
Following a series of facilitated sessions, the leaders progressed from self-awareness to practical application quickly, embedding new behaviour into daily leadership routines. They later reconvened to continue working autonomously on team effectiveness.
Again, this programme built on Medtronic’s existing foundation of accredited in-house Insights client practitioners.
The regional leadership team participated in The Insights Self-Aware Leader programme, built around eight crucial leadership dimensions that form the foundation of exceptional leadership effectiveness.
Leaders received an Insights Discovery Transformational Leadership Profile to evaluate their natural strengths and development areas across the eight dimensions, which include ‘communicating with impact’, ‘creating a compelling vision’ and ‘leading change’.
The programme offered modular elements that allowed the leaders to focus on specific areas where they needed the most development, creating a personalised pathway to improving leadership skills.
The HR team, supported by the Board, used Insights Discovery to help develop their global team collaboration AND develop a unified leadership culture.
Across 16 countries, leaders and employees generated more than 600 personal employee profiles, embedding a shared approach and the shared language of colour energies across their workforce of 2,400 employees.
Throughout the process, BRITA accredited a team of 11 Insights Discovery practitioners, who helped them design and deliver a comprehensive journey to develop teams and leaders using three programmes: Insights Discovery, the Self-Aware Leader framework and the Insights Discovery Transformational Leadership Profile.
BRITA also delivered Discovering Leadership Effectiveness workshops across different organisational levels, giving leaders the opportunity to explore Insights’ four manifestations of leadership (Results, Visionary, Relationship and Centred) and translate them into practical action.
At the same time, BRITA embedded Insights Discovery into their wider people processes; new employees encountered it during onboarding, and future leaders engaged with it as part of BRITA’s junior leadership programme.
The finance leadership team for France were keen to not only work better together, but also to ensure their overall leadership reflected the corporate values and culture.
They sought to provide a supportive opportunity for leaders to reflect on their leadership style, raise self and other-awareness of working and leadership styles and break down cross-functional silos.
The six-month development programme started with Insights Discovery to build personal effectiveness, then moved to Insights Discovery Team Effectiveness to reduce silos.
The learning journey went on to feature the Discovering Leadership Effectiveness and Self-Aware Leader programmes to help leaders examine their own practices and live the company’s leadership values with their own teams.
As they progressed from working with their Insights Discovery Personal Profiles to the Insights Discovery Transformational Leadership Profiles, leaders enjoyed reflecting together on strengths and challenges along identified critical dimensions.
Automated coaching platform Cloverleaf sought a psychometric data partner that could integrate with its smart digital engine and expand learning across thousands of client teams.
It formally integrated Insights Discovery data to scale personalised development and improve day-to-day team performance. They recognised that everyday micro-interactions build emotional intelligence, psychological safety and trust (proven drivers of measurable performance and retention).
This type of digital-focused collaboration with Insights helped to bridge the gap between one-off personality assessments and daily behavioural change.
Cloverleaf sought to move beyond the traditional model where an employee receives a detailed profile but may not refer back to it as part of their daily work.
In a pioneering L&D move, they chose to integrate the Insights Discovery data through the recently-launched Insights API, using it as a powerful engine to personalise its AI coaching platform and drive measurable behaviour change for its clients’ learners.
They now use the API to bring the language of colour energies to their L&D systems, calendars and collaboration systems like Microsoft Teams. This layers and reinforces learning at the moments it matters most (for example, before meetings and presentations), helping to disrupt potential personality-based tension while integrating seamlessly into existing daily workflows.
The platform uses Insights data to deliver automated daily coaching tips that provide real-time advice on how to communicate with colleagues based on the specific colour energy mix of the group.
Cloverleaf even refreshed its Team Dashboard to include a redesigned Insights Discovery Wheel to help managers visualise the collective energy distribution of their teams and so better manage dynamics and conflict.
Speaking of Insights partners, we are reminded of a quote from Gerben Willemse of LightUp (a successful Insights partner in The Netherlands) from an earlier blog on organisational challenges:
We work with organisations to show how teams can become an ecosystem, not an ego-system. Managers sometimes wonder why someone in their team is being so difficult. We remind them that diversity is about getting to know each other and yourself and about learning why something is so important to someone.
High-performing teams are non-negotiable for successful organisations. Insights teams solutions help you tackle your most pressing team challenges on two fronts: how your team likes to work together and how well they work together. They provide practical and sustainable tools to help your teams collaborate effectively for success today and long into the future...