“Success is the freedom to be yourself.”
~Kathy Kolbe

Since getting recertified recently as a Kolbe Consultant, I decided to share some more information about how I use the Kolbe System™.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, here are the basics (which apply just as much to the boss as to the team).

Research now proves we all have a natural tendency to initiate solutions, prevent problems and respond to changing needs. Human instinct is the power behind our actions. It’s the source of our mental energy. Understanding how your instincts combine with your talents and personality will help you optimize your opportunities.

A brief history of where I’m taking you

More than 40 years ago, an intelligence test was developed by E.F. Wonderlic, which was for many years considered a standard in hiring new employees. The test measured not only how smart the applicants were, but also how quickly they could complete a task with the fewest number of errors. His team figured that with this data, an employer would not only hire the best and the brightest, but employee turnover would decline as a result. As it turned out, while the test provided valuable information to employers, turnover rates did not change.

Then along came Dr. Wonderlic’s oh-so-smart daughter, Kathy Kolbe, who shared his passion for understanding how we are wired. After years of research, Kathy developed a simple, effective tool to help people determine their right fit within a company, based on how they instinctively initiate solutions and get things done. For the first time in your life, you’ll have valuable, scientific data that explains how you and your team function best in the world and what you really enjoy doing.

For that reason, I suggest you invest in your future and take the index at www.kolbe.com . (You can do them in about 20 minutes, and you’ll get your results immediately. By the way, I have no financial investment in her company, nor do I profit from your ordering your index.) What I can say, is that reading my index results changed my life and has truly given me the freedom to be myself. If you want to ensure you’re in the right business, improve job satisfaction and productivity for your team, please consider getting the Kolbe A Index for all of you. There are other valuable profiles on the market today including, Now Discover Your Strengths and the Caliper Assessment tool, that you may want to explore in the future. For my time and money though, the Kolbe A Index was the easiest to transfer to both my business and personal life.

In my book, Finding Joy In Your Job, I go into all this in much greater detail, but in a tiny nutshell, Kolbe divides people into profiles based on their abilities in four areas:
1. Being quick to initiate things
2. Fact finding
3. Having the skills to implement ideas
4. Being able to follow through with ideas to completion

For example, many business owners have the entrepreneurial profile, because they rate high as a Quick Start (initiator) with a good dose of Implementer. However, they’re usually much weaker in research and follow through—which is why you want to hire people who complement your strengths and weak spots.

Here’s an excerpt from my book which gives more examples:

If you want to grow passionflowers, you need a hot sunny exposure; if you prefer violets, they’ll thrive in deep shade. One isn’t a better flower, they’re just different, but knowing what they need to flourish determines whether they bloom or wither. You can grow passionflowers in partial shade, but they won’t be prolific bloomers. We can all learn to adapt by trying to function in a different style, but it will never feel quite right. A Fact Finder who is rushed into delivering a presentation without her usual preparation will feel insecure and stressed, afraid she won’t be able to perform up to her usual high standards. Meanwhile, a Quick Start who is asked to design an instructional system before she ever leads one seminar, will go bonkers. She’d rather just jot down a few notes, wing the first seminar and be confident she’ll get better each time she does one. Without physical models of what she’s trying to understand, an Implementor may well panic when asked to explain over the phone how to fix your laptop. A Follow Thru person will feel very unsatisfied if pushed to create a series of press releases, then move on to a different task without knowing whether or not they were effective.

It’s all about doing what is instinctively natural for you.

Imagine having a team where each person understands her strengths and gets to spend the majority of her time excelling because she is working in her core aptitudes. Which also means, she experiences far less frustration, because she isn’t doing many things she’s poorly suited to do. Understanding how each person on your team can make their best contribution and how you can all complement each other, is truly the key to employee satisfaction, a thriving team—and business.

I just had a birthday, which always makes me reflective.

It was a great one, for sure—an incredibly warm day, enjoying the river from my deck with loved ones—everything was perfect. That’s the kind of day we all wish we could have more of, so here’s the wake-up call: we can. We need to make it a priority to squeeze more joy out of the lemons in our lives—to consciously buy more sweet oranges, to extend the metaphor. When’s the last time you took off on a weekday and went fishing or played golf or stayed home with your kids? We may talk a good line about work/life balance, but do we live it ourselves?

I’m blessed with three grandsons, and this is me with my twin grandkids Cruz and Hudson—am I a lucky guy or what? Being around them reminds me of a wonderful little book from many years ago (which is still in print): All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. The author, Robert Fulghum, writes about simple life lessons that we do, indeed, learn at an early age but that still contain useful life management tools. Things like play nicely with others, share your toys, really look at the world around you. When I look into my grandsons’ eyes I wonder what their world will be like. I wish for them a world where joy prevails over hardship, where fun is valued as much as work. I especially hope they don’t grow up too fast, which will be tough to accomplish once they’re old enough to use a computer. (Which ought to be any day now, I suppose!)

Anyway, my point here is that all of your employees feel these same emotions about their families and lives.

We’d all like to slow down our hectic pace a bit. We’d all like more happiness in our lives. As your team’s leader, you do have the power to sprinkle some joy dust on your team.

• Send them home an hour early someday for no reason other than it’s Thursday.
• Have picnic lunches delivered and take everyone off to a park to enjoy some fine spring weather.
• Have a Bring Your Kid To Work Day this summer and don’t stress out over how much work actually happens.
• Bring your dog to the office and let him cheer everyone up.

You get the drift. Little things can have big consequences if you let them. Work hard, but play harder.

I just returned from a few days in Phoenix—always good to clear some of that Oregon rust out of my system in the warm desert sun. Of course I got in a few rounds of golf, but my main reason for going was to attend the Kolbe Re-certification Program. This is something I do every year or so in order to maintain my standing as a certified Kolbe Consultant, able to help my clients use The Kolbe System™.

If you’re not familiar with Kolbe, it’s the world’s leading provider of performance forecasting software. I’ve been using it for years to help me make better hiring decisions for my agency. In addition, I encourage other agents and clients to have their teams and applicants tested, and then I help them to understand and apply the results.

It was great to see Kathy Kolbe again, as well as colleagues from around the country who are making use of this great tool. We learned about some new reporting options, but the most fascinating thing I heard was that there’s been another shift in how business teams are functioning. Kolbe researchers noted that the most recent trend of having leaderless teams is proving not to work well. In fact, teams really do need a leader to function optimally. In most cases, that would be you, the business owner.

So if you bought into that management trend—which was seductive on many fronts, for sure—and you’re not seeing the results you expected, then you’re not alone. It may be time to go back to basics and resume leading your team.

With all the chaos in the world around us—the economy, a pandemic looming, wars and more—it’s easy for a negative mood to infect your workplace and your team.

All it takes is one person who watches too much cable news or subscribes to fear mongers from any source. That person might even be you! More likely, it’s some team member who is stuck in a negative spiral and is trying to take others down with him or her.

The time to stop that energy is the very first time you catch a whiff of it. I’m not saying these events aren’t real and that we should all poke our heads in the sand. I am saying that we don’t have to allow what’s wrong in the world to dominate our thoughts and fuel our actions. What’s wrong with our lives is always available to wallow in. Then again, so is what’s right. You may simply have to look a bit harder to find it in these times.

So how do you improve employee motivation? How do you reverse such negative spirals of energy? Well, you can dissect them for starters. Show your team where the reasoning fails. Point out what IS working in the lives of your team members. Remind them that you’re there to lend an ear, to reassure them about their jobs, to be the solid foundation your business is built upon. These are times that test your leadership skills, that may ask of you things you’ve never had to deal with before. Many people are living in a heightened state of emotion, are on edge, are intensely worried about their futures. You know what worry does to your team—it halts productivity, it sucks the life force out of your staff.

Here are a few remedies.
• Distraction often works. Give them something new to focus on, perhaps a project that’s been on your To Do List for a long time.
• Find no-cost ways to boost morale. With warmer weather, have lunch outdoors or bring in a jug of homemade lemonade—with the idea that you are all going to make lemonade from your situation. Brainstorm among your team for ways to improve whatever situations are bugging everyone. Never underestimate the value of employee feedback. Ask THEM what would cheer them up.
• Start a friendly competition over small things. I’m not talking about big sales contests which are stress-inducing. Instead, contests to see who can field the most phone calls in one week, or find the most ways to save money around the office through conservation measures. Or what about a contest to see who can make the most calls to clients just to check on them and see how they’re doing, to ask them if there’s anything you could do for them? Hey, how about a contest for the best contest ideas!

• Food rarely fails. Bring some homemade cookies or asparagus from a local grower or fresh strawberry shortcake. Comfort food. You must deserve it!
• Collect a few short inspirational videos from YouTube (like the one below) and download them onto CDs, then give one to each employee. Let them watch the CD when they need an emotional boost during the day. Videos like this are great at shifting a person’s mental state.

Above all, as the boss, you are the leader of your “tribe” and it’s up to you to set the example of someone who maintains a positive attitude and good work ethic—despite what may be going on around you. So how are you doing on that score? Are you taking extra long lunches, sleeping in, playing more golf, finding excuses to avoid the office? Are you in denial about the general mood of your team members? Is it time for you to confront your own mindset? Just asking.

For more ideas on motivating your employees, download my free report: Engaging the Disengaged.

I know you’re a leader. You wouldn’t own a business if you weren’t already a leader. My question for you today is: How well are you leading your tribe, and did you realize you have one?

First off I want to recommend an excellent book on the subject: Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin. Godin is definitely a genius, one of those guys who could’ve been an example in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (another great book, by the way). A world-famous marketer, author & pot-stirrer, Godin founded Squidoo.com and also has the most popular business blog on earth. Yes, on earth. So he can be trusted on the subject of leadership.

One of his points is that leaders help their tribes create change. Now that might sound scary because you might be change-averse. What I’m talking about is creativity, ideas your team might have to change how things have always been done, ideas to improve your customers’ experience with your agency or business. Teams need to feel their ideas are heard, and when appropriate, valued and implemented—and then credited back to them. Life is nothing but change; clinging to the status quo will just wrench your back and ruin your golf swing. Therefore, why not encourage your team to think for themselves, to improve your business, to innovate?

Now I realize that not all team members are inherently wired for that kind of initiative. Nonetheless, some of your employees probably are, and innovation can actually be contagious. So stop resisting and start encouraging. Besides, it’s really good for employee morale.

In his book Godin explains the importance of a happy tribe:

“How was your day?” is a question that matters a lot more than it seems. It turns out that the people who like their jobs the most are doing the best work, making the greatest impact, and changing the most. Changing the way they see the world, sure, but also changing the world.”

Godin contends that people now hunger for novelty, for change, for a new way to look at things. He encourages us to be remarkable, fearless and to avoid selling in the same old boring manner. He believes the marketplace rewards innovation. How about you? Have you come up with (or encouraged your team to invent) new ways to drum up business in this economy?

Godin also says leaders can expand the effectiveness of their tribes by “transforming a shared interest into a passionate goal.” For example, when some natural disaster or big weather event hits your area, do you complain about all the extra work and claims you’ll have to process? Or do you see it as an opportunity to lead? You might get your team all fired up and impassioned about helping people to recover from the event. As a team you might volunteer to help your community outside the office. You might do some subtle self-promotion of that fact on your blog. (Though if you really make a great effort on behalf of your fellow citizens, word will spread on its own.)

The feel-good vibe that ensues among your team members will carry over long after the claims are settled and the windstorm is forgotten. In addition, your standing in your town will rise, and you’ll develop a reputation as the kind of place where people want to take their business.

As Godin also points out, happy tribe members recruit other tribe members, which is one of the core ideas in my Employee Attraction program. Inspiring and leading your team well really can lessen your work when it comes to finding the best people to work for you. When your valued team members bring in their friends and family, you can skip right over the recruitment phase—wouldn’t that be nice? Try taking the time and money you would have allocated to that process and instead applying it to creating a happy tribe. You’ll all have a lot more fun.

For additional ideas on the topic of leadership, download my report: Employee Motivation: Coach Your Team To Success.