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Episode 3: A catalyst for behavioural change
314 Plays10 months ago
Tune in and discover how we’re making waves in the world of people development!
Between plenty of laughs and ah-ha moments, Steve Daly, Head of People Development Partners at Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, describes the winding road that led him to shape cultures.
From acting on stage to moving into L&D, Steve has an impactful story to tell as he reminisces about facilitating at an array of unique venues from a rugby club to a grand chateau near Paris.
Insights Discovery remains a “red thread” he’s always deployed to support teams with behavioural changes and more.
Don’t delay – press play now for a dose of inspiration and learns…
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Transcript
Introduction to Voices with Insights
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello to our Insights community who continue to change lives around the world. My name is Marcus Wiley and welcome to the Voices with Insights podcast. I hope you're feeling colorful to your core today as you join us on a ride of discovery. We will chat with practitioners from across the globe to discover their fascinating untold stories.
00:00:22
Speaker
Whatever you are doing listening to our podcast, let's see if we can uncover an idea or two that will help you to create high performing teams through awareness of self and others in a powerful and simple way.
00:00:37
Speaker
So
Steve Daly's Introduction and Personality
00:00:38
Speaker
I am joined here today by Steve Daly. Hi, Steve, how are you? Very well, thank you, Marcus. Great to see you and hear from you again. Fantastic to have you on the podcast today. That is brilliant. And before you tell us a bit about yourself, Steve, and your day-to-day role, how would the person who knows you best describe you through the lens of the Discovery colour energies?
00:00:59
Speaker
I've typed across a whole host of different positions over the years. My last report told me that I was positioned 23, but I've been everywhere from 22 all the way down to 26. I think most of the people who know me well will recognize perhaps not a double dose of extroversion, but certainly the intuition. I like making connections and finding patterns within things.
00:01:24
Speaker
So from a work perspective, that could be aligning projects and connecting people. And from my home life, it's that sudden...
00:01:32
Speaker
spontaneity of, let's go to the beach, we're going ice skating, or just connecting to and finding different and exciting ways to spend time together. Love it. That's how people experience you with the red and yellow energies, interchangeably with a bit of intuition to boot. Love it. Can you tell us a bit about your role, Steve, in the company that you currently work for? Absolutely.
Steve Daly's Role at Novo Nordisk
00:01:55
Speaker
I work for a Danish pharmaceutical company called Novo Nordisk. I've been there for
00:02:01
Speaker
for seven years, and we're a company that specialize in diabetes treatments. So we've been around for a hundred years now, and I'm proud to say we make 50% of the world's insulin, and we currently have just over 36 million people that we're helping with our diabetes care treatments. So a fantastic purpose to the organization. In terms of my role, I currently work as a people development partner for our global HR function, and there's two elements to that role.
00:02:28
Speaker
One element is a business partner, consultant to the business, helping them to define and solve their development issues. The other part is in a leadership role. I support a small team of people-dependent partners spread from Latin America all the way across to China, so a virtual team.
00:02:48
Speaker
Fantastic. Sounds like a great challenge that you have most days in your role. And related to the insights part of it, you wouldn't be what we would typically describe as an insights discovery practitioner, but you certainly interact with insights and some of our products along the way. Would that be fair? Yeah, absolutely. So you are one of our global providers. So we have that kind of great connection with you. And from a personal perspective, whilst I'm not,
00:03:14
Speaker
not delivering introduction to discovery workshops. I'm certainly using team effectiveness and some of the core elements of the.
00:03:21
Speaker
of the tool as I work with leadership teams across the organization. Superb. Superb, and thank you for doing that. So maybe if we hear a bit of your story and start with the beginning of what you did before you were introduced to insights, and maybe you could tell us something of your early experiences of learning about insights and discovery. So what were you up to before, Steve? Let's start there.
From Acting to Training: Steve's Career Journey
00:03:45
Speaker
So I haven't necessarily had a traditional career path
00:03:48
Speaker
I actually trained as an actor and spent the early days of my career as a job in actor, traveling the world, doing stage and screen, which was fabulous. And then I hit a tipping point where all of my friends were buying houses, getting married, and doing all these grown up things. And I suddenly panicked and thought, I need to get a proper job. I need to be a grown up.
00:04:13
Speaker
And I went along to a recruitment agency with this kind of eclectic CV and just said, help me. And one of the things that they identified was perhaps there's an alignment between acting and presentation and training and facilitation. And so I fell into a role as a trainer. Initially that was focused on product and process, but I soon moved into more generalized learning and development.
00:04:41
Speaker
And one of the first tools that I added to my toolbox was Insights Discovery. So I was accredited back in 2007, I think it probably was, 2007, 2008, something like that. And then since then, Insights has just remained this red thread through everything that I do. So it's been a tool and a model that I've always deployed in the different organizations that I've worked with. And it's been a fundamental
00:05:09
Speaker
just a fundamental tool that I reach for whenever I'm trying to think of how best to support teams or how best to support the people that I coach. Very cool. And can you remember one of the first experiences you had being introduced? I guess it was at that accreditation or maybe it was before? Yeah, I'd never had any experience as an individual. I never received a profile until that accreditation.
00:05:31
Speaker
But the organization that I was working with were going through a change process. Unfortunately,
Using Insights During Redundancy
00:05:37
Speaker
a mass redundancy, about 350 people were being made redundant, of which I was also one. We'd been given three years' notification of that redundancy. Everyone knew that we were tied to the organization for a set period of time, and then after that, we'd be let loose. One of the choices we made was to use insights as a tool to support the leaders,
00:06:01
Speaker
in understanding how their people were reacting and responding to the change that they were experiencing, but also to help the individuals themselves to just be more aware about their own behavioral patterns and when things were working and normal or when they were perhaps a little bit more out of character. So I was really thrown into the deep end, going from knowing nothing about insights to them being accredited and having to support the organization with
00:06:28
Speaker
a dramatic change process. Yeah. Sounds very, very intense over a three year period. And can you remember those days then back in 2007, eight, nine, I guess, as you started off working with, with insights discovery and becoming a practitioner, what were some of the biggest hurdles you faced and how did you get over them or around them or under them or running the other direction or whatever it might've been? I think the biggest hurdle that I faced then is, is probably still the same hurdle that I battle with now.
00:06:58
Speaker
And that's not getting caught up in the detail. So whilst the graphs and the wheel, there's lots of detail and data and science that sits underneath that. And if you get caught up in that, you can lose the room, lose your audience and find yourself focused in a conversation of proving a model or proving the technical elements that sit underneath the model instead of
00:07:27
Speaker
where I've experienced the discovery model having the most value. And that's as a catalyst to conversation, helping people to use it as a common language to connect and to discuss their behavior and the behavior that's needed of the team, instead of a process of, I must stand here and talk to you about those numbers and the process of creating those numbers.
00:07:53
Speaker
I can remember some horrible conversations with scientists and financial workers who want to get very caught into the tell me how and tell me why and the detail. That really misses, for me, the value of the model. It's about the conversations and the connections. It's not about the science and the graphs.
00:08:17
Speaker
Got you, right. And I guess coming out to the accreditation, you get genned up on all the graphs and the science and the data, and sometimes that spills out and leads to some of these conversations. Absolutely. I've just learned this, so therefore I want to share it with you. I know, I know. And people, our practitioners are passionate about it. I found this myself. And hearing you talk about the content being used as a catalyst, like for behavioural change or for improving the team and the performance,
00:08:45
Speaker
Can you think of a couple of stories along the years where you've really seen that happen? I think there's been lots of individual moments that mattered, but actually one of the most defining moments for me probably would have been in that initial change experience. As I mentioned, the process we were going through was twofold. It was help the leaders, but it was also help the individuals. In those one-to-one sessions with the employees across the company who are at risk of redundancy,
00:09:15
Speaker
For many of them, they'd been working for that organization for 10, 15, 20 years and couldn't see themselves outside of that current role. And having the opportunity to have those one-to-one discussions, to help them to recognize strengths and weaknesses that perhaps they had forgotten about, that for me was really powerful. And I know that for many of those employees, they were literally cutting and pasting sections of the profile into their CV.
00:09:45
Speaker
because they hadn't written a CV for so long, they hadn't had to think about the outside world as it were. So being able to help someone who couldn't see a clear future to recognize the qualities that they bring and to give them a very tangible step towards promoting themselves to the outside world.
00:10:07
Speaker
I think that for me was, was incredibly powerful. Yeah. So it's
Impact of Insights on Team Communication
00:10:10
Speaker
hugely valuable around the application of some of the content and making it come to life. What would be some of the learns that you had along the way that you would share with, share with our audiences today? I think over and above that, that shift away from, from the data, the other parts is just helping, helping people to tell their story.
00:10:31
Speaker
Um, uh, we, we recently were, we're very fortunate to have, um, a member of your team come out and, and facilitate, uh, for our team. And I remember sitting and, and watching you and just, just kind of at this stage, he was, he was lying on the floor by the mat and just helping the team to have the conversation that was most important to them in that moment. And
00:10:55
Speaker
Yes, the context of insight discovery, the context of team effectiveness was there in the background, but it was just this gift, this ability to be able to help people to have the most important conversation at that time. That, for me, I think is where I've tried to emulate that process or where I've been lucky enough to see people unlock and connect.
00:11:18
Speaker
It's been those conversations that have happened around the wheel and on the wheel, not the conversations that have happened when we've been looking at a PowerPoint slide or talking through the technical elements. There's just something magical about
00:11:32
Speaker
helping people to have the conversation that's most important for them. So it sounds like you've had the role of both practitioner at times where you've been doing that, and then also learner where you've had the experience, the benefit of the conversations that are catalysts for change. Yes. Any other examples of where you might have had some personal experience from insights discovery, team effectiveness, and various other products? One of the most powerful experiences for me was actually an experience that I had with you, Marcus.
00:12:02
Speaker
So in the window where I worked for insights, because I've been on both sides of the fence. I've been both a customer and then also a part of the internal facilitation team. And you took me through the accreditation process for deeper discovery. And I mentioned at the start my preferences and that red and the yellow energy I've always connected with. But when you think about thinking and feeling and extraversion,
00:12:32
Speaker
Yes, I connect to them, but I struggled to really have the right language to describe my preferences. And it was the work that you took me through around deeper discovery and unpacking my connection to intuition that for me was one of those personal aha moments. And I also remember that we were in Dundee and my son was unfortunately ill. And so I had to fly home in order to be with him.
00:13:02
Speaker
And the work that we'd been doing literally maybe an hour before I had the phone call and I had to leave was focusing on two different archetypes. And it was the mother and the father and the kind of the tension between those two different archetypes and how that played out within my preferences. So there's something very personal and very special for me about the relationship that I have with Insights.
00:13:30
Speaker
I'm lucky enough to have worked with other people and helped them to change their behavior and improve. But for me, there's always been a personal link to it. The year that I was accredited was the year my son was born. It's always looped back and linked back to both business
00:13:48
Speaker
and my personal journey as well. Got it. I love it. What a fantastic story. It's been a long time since we had that session. I'm remembering it as you had to leave and go to that. Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. There is something as being a practitioner over a number of years, that's 17 years now, right? So 17, 18 years.
00:14:10
Speaker
And the fact that it's touched your life, your spirit, and the passion of who you are, I can obviously see that that's how you use it as a catalyst for growth for others, which is fantastic. To hear your story, Steve, has being involved with insights led you to any opportunities or environments that you perhaps didn't expect to be in? Has it got you to places and conversations where you're like, oh my gosh, I'm talking about this stuff here. And why am I, how did this happen?
Opportunities and Connections through Insights
00:14:37
Speaker
I think that there's
00:14:38
Speaker
Working with teams, you often find that the starting point to a conversation is not the ending point to a conversation. You kind of get pulled in all kinds of different directions. And there's something about that ability to both follow the conversation, but also try and shape the conversation for people. So Insights has constantly surprised me in terms of the types of conversations, be that personal or business focused.
00:15:07
Speaker
that you end up having with people. But it's also taken me to some very unusual places physically as well, facilitating in all kinds of strange environments, be it outside in a field or
00:15:21
Speaker
in the bar at a rugby club. I remember one particular time I was facilitating a session for a leadership team on the outskirts of Paris. It was this wonderful chateau that had been booked as the venue. I arrived and I was taken to the room being used for the event. Thankfully, there was no table fixed to the floor.
00:15:44
Speaker
so many of the times where we've facilitated, you've arrived and it's a bordering fix to the floor that you can't move to get the wheel out. Instead, this was a huge, beautiful open space with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the grounds of the chateau. It had this polished wood floor. This was at the time that Insights had just introduced the fabric mats. When you were traveling with those heavy plastic mats,
00:16:11
Speaker
I mean, they're a great resource, but they weigh a ton. So it's half your hand luggage gone. So I was really proud to have this fabric mat, which I kind of unrolled into this meeting room. And it was only when I had the team on the wheel that I discovered the challenge of fabric on polished wood flooring, which creates almost an ice rink. So there was this wonderful image of a team standing on the wheel
00:16:41
Speaker
physically holding on to each other to support each other from falling over. So it was this lovely, funny and stupid moment as the team were talking about how they best could support each other whilst
00:16:55
Speaker
physically supporting each other on this slippery mat. I love it. It's so symbolic, right, of standing and just holding each other in the space to be an effective team that can actually stand up. Absolutely. Brilliant. Lovely. Thank you for the stories today, Steve. One last question,
Beyond Foundational Sessions: A Wish for Practitioners
00:17:13
Speaker
if that's okay. And it's for other practitioners out there or other people that might have been on a similar journey to you. If you had one wish for the other practitioners of insights around the world, what would it be and why?
00:17:25
Speaker
I think my wish would probably be, and this is going to sound a little strange, but my wish would be that they didn't have to deliver another introduction to discovery session. And I say that not because I don't love that session and I don't think it adds value, but I've just seen how organizations can get hooked on that and think that the value that Insights brings is that one workshop
00:17:54
Speaker
And that's not the case, the value that I see the tools and the models, the resources bringing is in the conversations that happen. And having the freedom and the opportunity to step away from, let's teach you the foundations and move into what does this actually mean to you, your team and the organization is so powerful. And it's the space that everyone wants to play in. I think I'm very lucky in that.
00:18:23
Speaker
Our connections with insights means that I don't have to get pulled into some of those more technical sessions. I'm lucky to be able to then spend my time talking about the so what, and so I think my wish for other practitioners is that they get to experience more of that magic because when you see people unlocking, connecting, and coming to life thanks to that foundation, it's a real privilege to be in that space.
00:18:50
Speaker
So I think, yes, that would definitely be my wish for others. I love that wish, Steve. Once you've walked through that door of introduction to how do you really apply it and make a shift and make a difference in the world. And it sounds like you've had that experience and you're creating those experiences. So thank you very much to Steve Daly, who's been with us on the conversation today and wish you well. Any last word from you, Steve, just before we go? Not at all. No, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure just to share some of my thoughts.
00:19:18
Speaker
Great. Thank you. That's us for today. Well, that was a truly fantastic story we shared together today. I love the fact that our community of practitioners make such a huge difference across the globe. That's all for today, folks. Thank you for listening to our Voices with Insights podcast. Look out for the next story in our series.