Deep conversations
The team valued care, support and sociability, but those strengths could become overdone when expectations, boundaries or challenge were unclear.
Helping a creative leadership team turn care, autonomy and challenge into clearer ways of working.
A Relationship Intelligence and Core Strengths programme helping the team name its motives, conflict patterns and underused strengths, then turn insight into practical habits around trust, clarity and challenge.
We Are Unknown is a creative company working with brands, culture and people, where collaboration and relationship intelligence were central to the leadership work.
The context
The team cared deeply about people and culture, but growth, remote working and pressure had made some conversations harder to hold. The visible issues were clarity, autonomy and ownership. Underneath sat a more interesting question: how do we keep the warmth and care in the culture while becoming more methodical, analytical, trusting and direct when the work needs it?
The work
We created the space to think clearly, together.
Clear thinking
Kate designed a Relationship Intelligence journey using SDI/Core Strengths, leadership dilemmas, SCARF and practical habit design. The work moved from individual motives and conflict responses into team portrait work, rules of engagement, feedback, decision-making and a shared culture goal: relationship intelligence that helped people get the best out of each other.
Practical ways forward
Used SDI to help the team understand motives, filters, conflict stages and how strengths can be overdone.
The outcome
Stronger foundations. Clearer direction. Better relationships.
- The leadership team had clearer language for motives, conflict and overdone strengths
- Challenge and opposition became easier to discuss without personalising disagreement
- The team identified the underused strengths needed for the next stage: Methodical, Analytical, Trusting and more constructive Forceful energy
- Culture work translated into practical commitments around caring, clear process and quicker action
“Because, how do you truly understand others if you don't understand yourself? And how do we help people stay their amazing authentic individual selves, when they move into manager mode? We decided that SDI would be the best fit for us, and last week we locked Kate in a room with us for 48 hours until we better understood ourselves and one another. Together we explored our individual and collective Motivational Values System - basically, why we do what we do and what things others do that really annoy us! Thanks to Kate, we've come away with a much clearer perspective of how we can best work together as a leadership team and how this will support the future success of our team and clients. I'd highly recommend Kate, and SDI to any ambitious team who are looking to realign.”
The impact
Clarity that changed how the work could move.
The work was not about making a caring creative team harder or colder. It was about giving that care enough structure, challenge and clarity to keep serving the business as it grew.
Delve deeper
Related resources for the pattern underneath this work.
01
Habits at Work
You are not being collaborative. You are being conflict-avoidant. There is a difference.
A journal on people-pleasing in leadership, the threat response underneath it, and the difference between real collaboration and avoiding the useful conflict.
02
Neuroscience
You know exactly what habit you need to change. So why haven't you?
Most leaders, at some point in their development, arrive at a moment of uncomfortable clarity. They can see the pattern.
03
Leadership
Hybrid did not create your relationship problems. It just made them impossible to ignore.
Hybrid did not create the relationship problems in a team. It reveals the trust, communication and psychological safety issues that proximity used to quietly manage.