Challenging mindsets, changing behaviours.

🙏 Thank you to everyone who joined today's webinar on the Insights Discovery app for Microsoft Teams.

We started with an uncomfortable question. How many of your delegates could find their profile right now?

The room's answer was honest... with not many being the answer.

That's why the Teams app matters. It takes the profile out of the drawer and puts it where people already work, so they can check how to connect with a colleague minutes before they need to.

A big thank you to Olly Nelson and Kate Hole (nee Roberts) from Insights who partnered with us on this event.

Olly (Senior product manager at Insights) walked us through what IT needs to have in place, and the questions they'll ask before saying yes.

Kate (Learning experience designer at Insights) shared practical post-workshop activities that hand ownership of the model to managers and teams.

We also gave everyone a first look at the new Critical Thinking chapter. It's a strong addition for teams who need to make better decisions under pressure, and we're looking forward to using it with clients.

Two things if you missed it:

The Teams app is worth exploring if you've already invested in Discovery: [link]
The Critical Thinking chapter is available. Drop us a message if you'd like to talk it through.

“If AI does the thinking, what does that mean for my job?”

It's a question that keeps coming up among the leaders we work with. 

Two numbers stopped us in our tracks:

1️⃣ Only 25% of US employees say their organisation has a clear AI plan (Gallup).
2️⃣ 66% rely on AI output without checking it (KPMG and University of Melbourne).

Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found the more people trust the tool, the less they think critically. 

What’s left for leaders is the bit that was always the job. Judgement. Presence. Knowing your own blind spots and asking the right questions.

Full blog in the comments 👇

What’s your team’s unwritten rule on AI?

There's a new chapter for Insights Discovery profiles, and I think it's one of the most useful they've released in a while: Critical Thinking. 🧠

McKinsey found that 61% of managers say at least half the time they spend on decisions is ineffective. Most of that isn't carelessness. It's confirmation bias, anchoring, groupthink, and the vivid example that crowds out the data.

This new chapter gives each person a view of how they think through a decision, stage by stage, through the lens of their colour energies. It shows where their preferences help them and where they tend to skip a step.

For teams, the real value is having a shared language to work through it.

Once you can name the pattern, you can talk about the decision without it feeling personal.

With more decisions now partly shaped by AI, that matters even more.

We've written up how the chapter works, plus seven habits any team can start with this month 👇

https://lnkd.in/eTQkYTHR

Which step in your team's decisions gets skipped most often?

6% of managers think young recruits are ready for work.

45% of Gen Z think they are.

You could drive a bus through that gap. It comes from the Chartered Management Institute's Bridging the Gap report in July, where almost eight in ten young people also said their education leaned too heavily on theory.

That's why we built our early careers programme around the stuff lecture rooms skip - real work-life skills. 

There are 13 modules, and these are the four graduates and apprentices tend to talk about most:

1️⃣ Personal Effectiveness. Insights Discovery gives them a language for how they work and how everyone around them works. Every other module builds on it.

2️⃣ Navigating the Professional World. Managing upwards, reading the room, the unwritten rules nobody bothers to write down.

3️⃣ Coaching and Feedback. GROW and Radical Candour, then small peer coaching groups that carry on long after the session finishes.

4️⃣ Imposter Syndrome. Starting out can feel like everyone else got the manual except you.

Programmes run anywhere from 6 to 36 months, and the part I'm proudest of is 98% attendance three years running. Graduates don't keep turning up to things they find pointless.

If you look after a graduate or apprentice intake, the full programme is linked in the comments.

What's the one thing you wish someone had taught you in your first year at work?

#EarlyCareers #GraduateDevelopment #Apprenticeships #InsightsDiscovery

Fifteen of us sell the same product. We spent an afternoon in London making each other better at it.

Sandy Wilson, People and Strategy Director at Insights, brought together a room full of Discovery Partners, most of whom, on paper, are each other's competition.

We talked about two things that matter far more than who gets which contract.

1. Storytelling in leadership
Every leader knows their strategy. Very few can make people care about it. 

The colour energies give people a language for how they show up, but the story is what makes it stick six months later, once the workshop poster has come off the wall. Anna Schaffner walked us through her philosophy of Leadership Storytelling, and presented the impact one workshop had on the leadership team at Insights... laughter, tears, change of perceptions and improved communication, to mention a few.

2. The room itself
Much like any workshop you would attend with us, a lot of value came from the people in it. Listening, challenging, connecting, swapping stories about the people we've worked with along the way with no agenda or ego to be seen.

Insights Discovery is a fantastic tool. What makes it more than a tool is the 10k+ community of practitioners, who between us have put nearly six million profiles into the hands of people who needed them. 

For one day, the commercial differences went in the bin, and our purpose did the talking.

Give a little more than you take. Everyone walks away with more than they need - it's the Unify Partnership way!!

We're ending the week on a high! 🥳 

Unify Partnership is now formally accredited by the CPD Standards Office.

🤔 Why does that actually matter?

👉 It's not just a badge for the website (though it'll be going up there too). It means our Personal Effectiveness workshop is now a recognised CPD activity.
👉 Delegates can log real, formal points for attending, something we know matters when L&D teams have to justify training spend and prove development is actually happening, not just ticking a box.

Practically, here's what changes for anyone participating in the workshop:

👉 You can request a formal digital certificate of attendance.
👉 Hard copies are available too if your team prefer something physical.
👉 You'll see the CPD Standards Office logo on our materials from now on, that's your assurance the content's been properly assessed.

🫸 What hasn't changed is how we deliver. 

It doesn't mean we have to go all 'talk and chalk', or death by PowerPoint 🥱 

We can (and often do) run this as a fully experiential session with no slides shown at all, even in Hyde Park or on the Long Walk at Windsor Castle 🏰 with the King and his entourage trotting past in horse and carriage (true story), so teams still get a personalised experience that focuses on their real-time team and leadership issues.

😍 Proud of this one. It's recognition of something we've believed for years: that development only counts if people actually walk away seeing things differently, doing things differently and building relationships differently.

🙏 Thanks go out to the Unify Partner team who make what we do real 🥁: