“I was slightly sceptical about giving up 4 hours after a tough day…How wrong could I have been. I received a document that upon reading felt as if the author had been watching me for the past 5 years. It was also really useful to have discussions about dealing with your opposites and looking at the make-up of our own personal teams. The time flew by and we are all still talking about it now.”
Westlands School
Clients Needs
Derek Trimmer, Executive Headteacher for Secondaries at Swale Academies Trust, believed that using the colour language of Insights Discovery and profiling his fast-growing team across the South-East would allow staff to see how they work individually and as a whole. He needed to gain an overview of the varied leadership styles within the Trust and for his diverse teams to be aligned to the academy’s Vision.
The Solution
During Term 5, Swale Academies Trust launched its first leadership conference, which saw 64 secondary school leaders from across the Trust come together for a full workshop of interactive learning. Individual school leadership teams were able to see how they each worked differently through various elements of challenge and conflict alongside people with completely different leadership styles, encouraging mutual respect, compromise and a pathway to even more successful team-working in the future.
The Results
Lisa Murphy of Community College Whitstable commented “The Colour Works workshop was superb. It was extremely informative and offered a deep and comprehensive insight into ourselves, our behaviour and where we sit within our team.” Organiser Derek Trimmer remarked that he was “constantly thinking about how he was able to create new leadership groups for different environments” in order for the Trust’s support work to continue and that the workshop “gave him an excellent opportunity to do that.”
