Leadership, Change, and Insights® Insights
Some of you may be familiar with the personality instrument Insights Discovery and some of you may even know whether you lead with blue, green, yellow or red energy. Me? While I’m a colorful person, I don’t tend to connect with the color framework well enough to actually use it.
Instead, I tend to use the WorkPlace Big Five Profile because it’s one of the most valid and reliable instruments based on the Five Factor Model which is perhaps the most researched, replicated, and respected framework in personality psychology – and Insights and many other popular instruments is not.
Still, in the spirit of “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” Insights has its place and usefulness. They’ve recently published their Global Change Readiness Report 2026* and it’s worth a look, but if you only have time for a glance, here are some takeaways for me:
“87% of organizations were not highly prepared for their most recent significant change” and underestimated the amount of disruption the change would cause.
Of the six areas of change preparation organizations undertake - structural or operational planning, communication planning, leadership behavioral preparation, team alignment preparation, cultural integration planning, and employee engagement planning – no organizations did all six and 46% of them did only one or two.
Organizations that prepared more had better outcomes. No surprise there.
“81% of HR leaders observed senior leaders behaving differently during change” – often positively and sometimes negatively with the leaders engaging in negative behaviors regularly unaware they were doing so.
Behavior leadership preparation is the least common area of preparation.
If you’re a leader whose team or organization is about to go through some significant change, contact me and become a leader others want to follow.
*survey of 250 small, medium, and large companies regarding recent significant change involving team changes, market expansion, organizational restructures, operating model shifts, workforce reductions, strategy resets and technology-driven change, including AI-enabled solutions