Insights Discovery helps leaders recognize employee strengths and use coaching-style leadership
Amanda Cahal
Another fabulous weekend of friends, family and fun has come and gone, leaving only the “Sunday Scaries” behind. The work week is looming and with it, the anxiety that 80% of Americans experience in the hours prior, according to studies from LinkedIn and the American Academy of Sleep medicine.
The causes, according to the research, are many. But the toll the “Sunday Scaries” take on employee engagement should be troubling to business leaders globally. Engagement, after all, has a straight-line connection to productivity.
According Gallup, just 32% of U.S. workers felt involved and enthusiastic in both their work and workplace in 2022, the latest data available. Globally, the feeling of engagement hovers at just 23%.
Amanda Cahal, an adjunct faculty in the Executive Education program at the Daniels College of Business, is one of the people helping businesses reverse that trend.
“I think about engagement as a combination of three different things,” Cahal said. “When you’re highly engaged, you wake up wanting to go to work every day; you have a deep understanding of your role there; and you know how the work you do fits into the broader mission of the organization.”
Cahal focuses much of her teaching and consulting work on improving employee engagement using Insights Discovery, a tool for enhancing business communication and emotional intelligence in the workplace.
Cahal says that Insights Discovery, which is rooted in the psychological theories of Carl Jung, is an ideal mechanism for supporting engagement because it focuses on developing self-awareness of individual strengths.
“The Insights Discovery framework is all about knowing and, importantly, being able to articulate the strengths you bring to the team,” Cahal said. “Your own self-awareness is a critical component of it. How are you best motivated? What does the ideal work environment look like for you? What stresses you? This combination of self- and social-awareness components serves as the foundation for relationship building, which is so is important to team dynamics.
“The Insights framework also allows us to have and build out those meaningful conversations because it helps us articulate things that we otherwise often have a hard time putting into words,” she said.
Ideally, Cahal added, it’s important that teams go through the Insights Discovery assessment process together. When Cahal works with a company, she spends time on individual assessments, but also puts each person’s results in a broader context.
“The individual component is all about ‘me,’” she said. “In additional to my strengths, it increases my self-awareness and helps me understand my emotional orbit, or how it is that I show up every day.
“But when we go through that as a group, you suddenly have a framework that gives you a deep dive. How do we make decisions as a team and is that working for us? And what are the blind spots we might have? If we look at our Insights profiles as a team, what are we missing?”
By the end of a half-day session, the teams Cahal works with have developed awareness of their communication preferences; improved communication, trust and interpersonal dynamics; understood how to calibrate unique communication styles; and learned how to harness diversity to improve organizational performance.
COVID-era research from Gallup shows that human nature and manager-worker interaction also play key roles in the engagement equation.
“Gallup’s research determined that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined by the manager—just one person,” Cahal said. “But they also identified what differentiates an average manager from a great one that’s driving employee engagement. It comes down to two elements.
“First, that manager is great at putting people in roles that play to their strengths or allow them to use their natural strengths. The second is that they have a coaching style of leadership rather than an administrative or tactical style of leadership.
“Then they asked a critical question, ‘What is the one most important habit of a great manager?’” Cahal continued. “It came down to that person having one meaningful conversation per week with each team member. So it’s very much this human element.”
Individuals and teams looking to improve their communication, culture and dynamics can register for sessions and half-day workshops with the Daniels Executive Education team, including on May 8 and July 25, 2024. Visit the ExecEd website for more information.
