Case Study:
NHS
- Difficult Conversations
- Feedback
- Influencing
- Insights
- Listening
The Challenge
A large NHS directorate wanted to strengthen communication, collaboration and decision making across their leadership community. Their senior Directors had already completed Insights Discovery® and found it transformative, especially in how it helped them work alongside each other with more trust and clarity.
They wanted the next tier of leaders to have the same shared language, the same understanding of how different people prefer to work, and the same tools for better conversations.
The brief was simple:
Give one hundred and twenty leaders a day that feels practical, energising and genuinely helpful in their everyday work.
Our Approach
We brought everyone together for a full day session in a beautiful rural setting, the sort of place where people naturally relax and settle in. Every delegate completed their Insights Discovery® personal profile ahead of the day, which gave us a strong starting point for real reflection and discussion.
Angela led the workshop, using the same structure we use in our high impact leadership programmes. The day was deliberately active, sociable and grounded in real behaviour rather than theory.
A few elements that made the biggest difference:
Hands on collaboration
Teams were challenged to build the tallest free standing structure using spaghetti, tape, string and a measuring tape.
It was a brilliant moment of colour energy in action.
- Blue leaning teams took time to plan, analyse and get it right.
- Yellow leaning teams jumped in with enthusiasm and plenty of laughter.
- Greens brought calm, connection and steady progress.
- Reds pushed for decisions and momentum.
You could almost see the colour energies moving around the table.
Perception exercise
Everyone wore a blank wheel on their back while colleagues placed coloured stickers to show how they experienced that person’s energy.
It sparked honest reflection and conversation, especially when people compared how they see themselves with how their colleagues experience them.
Walk and talk
Regular breakouts gave people space to connect, decompress and think aloud. As the day went on, the room shifted from quiet and cautious to open, relaxed and talkative.
The Results
By the end of the day, the energy in the room had completely changed, and 97% of the 120 leaders who attended the one-day session said they would recommend it. Leaders who arrived quietly and cautiously were laughing, sharing and speaking with much more ease.
Several commented on how refreshing it felt to have time together that was not dominated by firefighting or operational pressure, yet still very relevant to the work they do every day.
Directors told us they were very pleased with how the day landed. What mattered most to them was seeing people engage honestly, recognise themselves in the colour model, and start using it as a shared language straight away.
The group left with:
- A clearer understanding of their own communication style
- Greater appreciation of the differences around them
- Practical tools to improve collaboration
- A shared vocabulary they can use back in the workplace
- Stronger relationships across teams and levels
