Anyone who has worked in a multi-site real estate business will recognise the gap. On one side, the site teams: running buildings day to day, looking after residents and customers, solving whatever the morning throws at them. On the other, head office: finance, asset management, marketing, operations support, all working to longer timelines and bigger-picture targets.

Both sides want the same thing. A well-run property, happy customers, a business that performs. But they don't always hear each other. A request from HQ lands on site as a demand. A site team's pushback reads at head office as resistance. Nobody is wrong, and yet the friction builds.

This is the story of how we used Insights Discovery to give everyone a common language, and why I believe it became one of the foundations of an engagement score of over 82%.

The challenge

We were a growing real estate business with 50+ sites and a central HQ team. As we grew, I noticed that most of our people challenges weren't about capability or commitment. Our people were good at their jobs and cared about doing them well.

The friction was about style. Site teams moved at pace and valued quick, practical answers. Some HQ colleagues needed detail and time to think before committing. Others wanted to talk ideas through out loud. Emails were misread, meetings went round in circles, and small misunderstandings took far too much energy to resolve.

We didn't need another policy. We needed a way for people to understand each other.

Why Insights Discovery

Insights Discovery is a psychometric tool rooted in Carl Jung's work on personality. It describes behavioural preferences through four colour energies:

• Fiery Red – direct, driven and focused on results
• Sunshine Yellow – enthusiastic, sociable and full of ideas
• Earth Green – supportive, considerate and focused on relationships
• Cool Blue – thoughtful, precise and keen to understand the detail

What drew me to it was its simplicity. Everyone has all four energies; we simply lean on some more than others. There are no good or bad colours, which made it feel safe and strengths-based rather than a test people could pass or fail.

Just as importantly, the language was easy to carry. You could use it in a board meeting or in a quick conversation on site between viewings and maintenance calls, and it meant the same thing in both places.

How we introduced it

1. We started with the leadership team. If leaders didn't model it, nobody else would. Seeing senior colleagues talk openly about their own preferences, and their blind spots, gave everyone else permission to do the same.
   
2. We mixed site and HQ teams in the same sessions. This was deliberate. Some of the most valuable moments came when a site manager and a finance colleague realised why their conversations kept stalling, and that it had nothing to do with either of them being difficult.
   
3. Everyone received a personal profile. People took time to reflect on their own style before exploring how it played out with others.
   
4. We kept it practical. Sessions focused on real situations people faced: handing over a building issue, presenting a budget, giving feedback, running a team meeting.

Keeping it alive

A workshop on its own changes very little. The real value came from weaving the language into everyday working life.

• Building colour energies into team meetings and one-to-ones
• Using it during onboarding so new starters joined the conversation from day one
• Encouraging HQ teams to adapt how they briefed sites - leading with the headline for some, the detail for others
• Referring back to it when tension surfaced, so conflict could be talked about without blame

What changed

The most noticeable shift was in how people spoke to each other. It became normal to hear things like "I'm leading with my red today, can we get to the decision?" or "Could you send me the detail first so I can think it through?" Those small requests took the heat out of situations that might once have escalated.

Site and HQ teams began to see each other's perspectives rather than each other's frustrations. Misunderstandings were resolved faster. Meetings became more productive. People felt more understood, and more able to be themselves at work.

Our employee engagement rose to over 82%. I want to be honest here: Insights Discovery didn't achieve that on its own. It sat alongside other initiatives such as leadership development, internal communications, recognition. But it gave us the shared foundation everything else was built on.

What I'd share with other leaders

1. Start at the top. Leaders modelling the language makes it real.
2. Bring different teams together. The breakthroughs happen between groups, not within them.
3. Treat it as a language, not a label. The aim is understanding, never putting people in boxes.
4. Build it into everyday rhythms. If it only lives in a workshop, it will fade.
5. Connect it to the work. Show how it helps with the real conversations people have every day.

A final thought

In a multi site business, so much depends on people working well across distance -between buildings, between functions, between the front line and head office. When people understand each other, they perform better and enjoy their work more. That is what I care about most.

If you're seeing friction between your sites and your central teams or you’d simply like to elevate communications within your team, I'd love to have a conversation about what might help.