This is the recording from a recent Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training webinar. If you’d rather listen than watch, the audio can be accessed as a podcast through all major podcast apps instead. Just search ‘The Skilled Consultant podcast’.
In this engaging and practical webinar, Honeycomb Directors Deri and Jo guide you through the fundamentals of personality and vertical development, and explore why these concepts matter deeply for consultants.
The session offers a blend of psychology, self-awareness, and day-to-day consulting wisdom, all aimed at helping consultants build stronger, more trusting relationships with clients (and colleagues alike).
It begins by exploring the basics: what personality is, how it's shaped, and why understanding it is essential in client work. Jo provides a grounding in the science behind personality which lays the foundation for appreciating why people behave the way they do.
Using the Insights Colour model (Fiery Red, Sunshine Yellow, Earth Green and Cool Blue) as a simplified but powerful framework, participants are invited to engage in an interactive exercise and reflect on their own behavioural tendencies and communication styles. This not only gets people thinking about how they naturally show up, but opens the door to recognising how others may differ and where the strengths of challenges of that combination may lie.
This is not about becoming somebody else or being inauthentic…it’s about being able to adapt your behaviour consciously rather than reacting to things that trigger you in ways that you don’t understand.
Deri then introduces the concept of vertical development, which he describes as a parallel but distinct process: while personality is our ‘wiring’, vertical development is our capacity to choose how we respond to the world. In other words, it's about leadership maturity - growing the ability to respond with intention, not just reaction.
Together, Deri and Jo explore why this matters so much for consultants. Consulting is, at its heart, a people business and the ability to flex your style to suit your client can make the difference between a trusted advisor relationship and one full of friction.
They share powerful real-world examples, including email snippets from clients, and decode how language and tone can reveal behavioural preferences. For instance, a short, punchy message might suggest a ‘red’ personality (direct and results-focused), while a warm, apologetic email might signal ‘green’ (relationship-oriented and steady).
By the end of the session, participants are left with a strong sense of why it pays to notice not just what clients are saying, but how they’re saying it. With this awareness, consultants can make more informed choices about how to present ideas, give feedback, or even just structure an email so they are speaking a language their client understands and responds well to.
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