“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.

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