Building Strength Under Pressure for a legal division within the United Nations system

The Opportunity

UNICEF’s Legal Office operates at the intersection of humanitarian law, global policy, and high-stakes decision-making. Advising on operations across some of the world’s most complex environments, the team must navigate ambiguity, competing pressures, and time-sensitive judgments.

UNICEF’s Legal team needed more than surface-level team building. They needed a structured way to understand how individual differences in personality, values, and decision-making tendencies shape the way they collaborate, especially when pressure mounts and the right answer isn't obvious.

This was not a new question for the team. Over four years and four retreats, the UNICEF Legal Office has invested progressively in understanding these dynamics, building a culture where self-awareness and mutual understanding are treated as professional competencies.

Deeper Signals Solution

Deeper Signals partnered with the UNICEF Legal Office to deliver a two-day immersive retreat in Copenhagen, built around high stakes decision making. Our solution followed three steps:

• Assess: Teams completed the Core Drivers and Core Values diagnostics to generate individual and collective profiles. The results serve as a structured map of how each person thinks, decides, and collaborates.
• Understand: Personalized reports and team profiles revealed individual differences, collective strengths, shared blind spots, and the specific dynamics likely to emerge under pressure, giving the team a shared language for self-awareness. The results anchored group discussion in a way that led to meaningful insights and practical strategies to support team effectiveness.
• Act: Certified Deeper Signals facilitator led two days of in-person sessions, incorporating experiential exercises including Pressure Mapping and an Escalating Scenario Simulation, leaving the team with new methods and tools to make better decisions together.

The Outcome

• Deeper self-awareness under pressure: Participants left with a concrete understanding of how their own Core Drivers and Values shape their behavior when stakes are high and practical tools to become more intentional about it.
• Stronger cross-team trust: By mapping contrasting profiles and sharing real decision-making moments, the team built genuine mutual understanding across roles, backgrounds, geographies, and working styles.
• A shared language for team dynamics: The retreat reinforced and deepened a common framework for talking about personality, values, and team performance.
• A long-term investment in culture: What began as an introduction to personality tools has evolved into an ongoing program of team development with each retreat building on the last and deepening the team’s collective capability.

The Deeper Signals Difference

Deeper Signals stands out due to its quick, scientific, scalable, and modern tools:

• Scientific rigor: The Core Drivers and Core Values assessments are rigorously tested and validated, ensuring fair and reliable insights.
• Assess → Understand → Act: A three-step journey from assessment to insight to action. Every element of the retreat was designed to move the team progressively from data to experience to commitment.
• Facilitation expertise: Expert facilitation that creates psychological safety. Our facilitator’s role was not to deliver a presentation but to guide a team through genuinely challenging conversations and high-pressure simulations.
• Long-term engagement: Sustained partnership over time. The value of the fourth retreat was the cumulative depth of a relationship built over years, where each session builds on the last.

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