The Brief – Understanding the Initial Challenge
When Christian took over a new department at Octopus Electric Vehicles, he was immediately faced with a high-stakes leadership challenge: hiring two senior managers into a team of four, making up 50% of the operations leadership team while also leading a team of 14 managers. As a new leader himself, he had to make the right hires quickly, without yet understanding the existing team's capabilities.
Early one-to-one conversations suggested individuals were collaborative, empathetic, and idea-driven but a shortage of results-driven and data-driven skills. Decisions weren’t always grounded in data or tied to deadlines, and there was a visible gap between the senior leadership team and middle managers.
Rather than impose his own view, Christian wanted an objective, evidence-based way to:
Understand team strengths and development needs.
Help managers understand each other’s working styles.
Identify missing capabilities to guide recruitment and team development.
Break down silos between senior leaders and managers.
He chose to partner with Steve and the Insights™ Discovery programme to create a shared language, surface challenges without blame, and lay the foundation for sustainable change.
The Solution – Delivering Insights™ in Practice
The engagement began with Christian sharing his hypothesis with Steve, who tailored the programme to address Octopus’ specific challenges.
Phase 1 – All-Team Insights™ Session (Day One)
One-day workshop in London with 20 leaders from across the department.
Education on the Insights™ model and colour energies.
Ice-breakers, profile exploration, and practical activities to build understanding.
Focus on self-awareness, helping each participant interpret their own profile.
One leader highlighted the impact of the in-person sessions:
"It was good to get everybody together to do self-recognition and look at different leadership styles, understand their strengths and the areas they could work on."
Phase 2 – Leadership Focus (Day Two)
Applied Insights™ through a leadership lens, exploring transformational leadership and team effectiveness.
Detailed exploration of the team wheel to identify collective strengths and gaps.
Shifted focus from self-understanding to how the leadership team operates collectively and how to drive change going forward.
Delivery Style
Steve didn’t shy away from “pushing buttons” where needed and challenging the group to confront blind spots while keeping the ownership of issues within the team rather than as top-down directives.
The Impact – Tangible Wins and Cultural Shift
Immediate Hiring Success
Within a week of the workshops, the team needed to recruit a new manager. Using Insights™ data, they refined interview questions to identify candidates with traits of blue and red energy. The successful hire brought much-needed diversity of thought and quickly began driving the change Christian had envisioned.
One leader added:
"It’s gone further than I expected. We even had someone who hadn’t done the training but said, ‘I think I have high earth green energy’ because they’d heard about it from their manager.”
Better Handovers and Leadership Continuity
Insights™ profiles and the team wheel became a core part of Christian’s handover to the incoming Head of People, ensuring a smooth transition and clear understanding of team dynamics.
Scaling the Approach
Other departments adopted Insights™ after seeing the results.
Incorporated personality profiling into Octopus’ new eight-week Training Academy, matching graduates to teams where their strengths fit best.
Leaders now use Insights™ to inform talent mapping, team development, and hiring strategies.
One leader commented:
"It’s really transformed the way people see themselves and others. We now often say things like, ‘That makes sense because they are dominate fiery red,’ and it’s just become a normal part of our conversations."
Cultural Acceptance and Behavioural Change
Even initial sceptics were quickly won over during the sessions, and managers began taking greater autonomy in addressing development areas, removing the need for constant top-down intervention.
One leader highlighted the impact:
"I personally think it’s great and I wish we could put more people through it because it’s given us visibility not just within our own teams but across the wider department."
Looking Forward
Octopus plans to:
Deliver Insights™ training to every department to build a shared organisational language.
Support new managers with structured growth reviews, competency frameworks, and 360° feedback.
Use Insights™ profiling as standard in recruitment and internal mobility decisions.
Strengthen leadership capability in underrepresented colour energies to create a more balanced, data-driven, and results-focused culture.
Ultimate Goal: Ensure every leader and team member understands themselves, their colleagues, and how to work together effectively, creating a more agile, well-rounded organisation prepared for sustainable growth.
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