Warwickshire County Council’s Corporate Policy Unit participated in the Emergenetics pilot. Read below to find out about the team and their Emergenetics experience.
Background
The Corporate Policy Unit (CPU) was established in 2020 just before the pandemic. It sits at the heart of the organisation providing strategic capability, insight, and advice. Although small in numbers, the team has a big reach, working with a wide range of services and partners, so good relationships are key to success.
The CPU team is made up of policy & strategy leads as well as six graduate management trainees recruited from the LGA’s own scheme.
The team wanted to use the Emergenetics tool to better understand each other as a team, support future working together, and use this insight to develop a refreshed team offer and brand, thinking carefully about how they communicate with a range of stakeholders.
Feedback
The CPU team enjoyed the interactive nature and energy of the facilitated sessions and felt it had revealed individual as well as collective strengths through the process of listening and learning that the session offered.
Each team member received their own profile pack and was very excited to receive these on the day.
With the benefit of facilitation, the team felt they gained a greater understanding and appreciation of each other and the different thinking styles and strength within the team.
It was great to see the team enjoying seeing where each member was placed on the different scales of the Emergenetics model.
Equally when the profiles were combined, it demonstrated how well balanced the team was in terms of thinking preferences.
The team also ran a follow up session focused on how to use and apply the profiles, thinking about how to interact with different types of profiles and tailoring their communication styles. Some team members found this particularly insightful as it made them attune to how their behaviours could be perceived by others who express differing behaviours and preferences.
Both Emergenetics sessions formed a key part of the team development. Individual profiles have supported further conversations on a one-to-one basis and the team offer and style of working has subsequently been refined and launched in line with the findings. Overall, the session has helped to identify their strengths as a team and individually, whilst also understanding different thinking styles.
Learning points
Feedback on the session and product was overwhelmingly positive across the team.
Reflecting on the sessions, the team felt that getting the most out of the Emergenetics tool relies on being able to look at the consolidated team picture and feeling comfortable being able to share and discuss individual profiles with others. The follow up session explored this in more depth, emphasising that sharing the individual profiles shouldn’t lead to a risk of ‘categorising’ or typecasting’ people. The team were able to talk this over and reinforce that there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ profiles. The ability to share individual profiles via the Emergenetics app was also positively received.
The team also reflected that whilst highlighting preferred thinking styles, this might change over time and in different roles, depending on experience – this was particularly important for the NGDP graduates, who are early in their local government career.
Reflections at the end of the session included:
Fascinating, Interesting, Enlightening, Insightful, Enjoyable.