Kolbe and Instincts

Leadership

May 19

For over 25 years, we have used Kolbe Wisdom™ to identify instincts among leaders and their teams. The Kolbe Indexes™ are the only assessment tools available to purely measure conation or instinct.

Long ago, Plato and Aristotle defined that there are three parts of the mind.

Affective - relating, feeling
Conative - instincts, natural talent for doing
Cognitive - thinking, skills, IQ

No one assessment measures all three parts. The field of psychology has predominantly focused on the affective and cognitive parts of the mind, believing that conation was too primitive and perhaps too fixed to affect. After all, a Kolbe results - or MO (modus operandi) - does not change throughout one's life, and it is not hereditary. Kathy Kolbe defines your MO as your God-given talent.

Kathy Kolbe has made it her life's work to prove how conation is critical to predicting human behavior and mitigating work-related stress. Kolbe Wisdom gives you the power to build on your team’s natural strengths by providing the tools that will:

Identify individuals’ instinctive strengths and abilities
Ensure the right person is in the right job and/or the right team
Improve communication strategies and job satisfaction
Pinpoint areas of stress in the organization and prescribe solutions
Reduce conflict, strain, and tension in the workplace
Enhance your competitive advantage by capitalizing on people’s innate strengths
Provide the information necessary to predict and maximize performance
Improve team synergy to ensure long-term viability
Maximize your employees’ Return on Effort
Reduce selection costs while increasing your “hit” rate

Kolbe Wisdom is a method for assessing and accessing 12 basic instincts or approaches to creative problem solving. Every human being is endowed with a set of creative instincts – the hard-wired part of us that makes us who we are. Understanding these natural attributes helps focus energy on what we do best. Each person contributes four of these natural abilities. The goal is to seek out people who complement each other through different combinations of creative problem-solving methods.

Kolbe Wisdom provides tools to inventory the available and needed creative energy on project teams. We coach leaders to help them “better their best” by building and managing teams that leverage the synergy from combining diverse creative instincts. Our products and services will enable you to allocate people and resources more effectively as you navigate the decision-making cycle.

Kolbe Indexes™

Have you ever wondered why two successful people approach the same job differently? Kolbe indexes™ allow you to discover individuals’ striving instincts and the actions they take because of them. Now you can know in advance what actions you can expect from your employees, how they will perform in teams, and where they will be most effective in your organization. These instincts are identified through an easy-to-understand, internet-based 36-question index called the Kolbe A™ index. There are three separate indexes (Kolbe B™ and C™ indexes have 24 questions) that provide the foundational data for all Kolbe performance forecasting.

Kolbe A™ Index - validates an individual’s natural strengths and most effective contributions.
Kolbe B™ Index - defines the individual’s self-expectations of job performance.
Kolbe C™ Index - defines a manager’s requirements for a specific job.

By comparing the Kolbe A and B™ indexes, employees can discover the sources of strain between their innate strengths and their expectations of a job. By comparing the Kolbe A and C™ indexes, employers can forecast an employee’s productivity by measuring the tension between a person’s innate strengths and the requirements of a job.

Indexes are taken online by each participant, and results are forwarded to our database. We prepare results and tools for each participant based on their results.

Improving Team Performance

Once you have discovered your employees’ innate abilities, how can you take that information and apply it to successful team building? TeamSuccess® Seminars are dynamic, full or half-day sessions that provide an interactive way to explore the workings of specific teams within your organization. The seminar will:

Inventory the instinctive talents that make up your actual - not just desired - culture
Leverage these talents so that team members consistently and effectively work together
Incorporate diagnostic and prescriptive information to accelerate team productivity
Provide tools to improve communication and clarify commitment levels

A customized set of Kolbe Organizational Analysis™ and Kolbe Leadership Reports™ offers the highly quantifiable diagnostic information you need to maximize the effectiveness of any work group. These reports assess team synergy and effectiveness and identify areas of individual and team stress in the organization. Through our subscription to the Kolbe WAREwithal online software system, prescriptive advice is presented in these reports, which are given to management for use after the seminar.

Kolbe RightFit™ is Kolbe’s solution for job matching and selection. You can accomplish four key objectives by creating a range of success in the Right Fit™ system:

Identify individuals who are already high performers in a role.
Identify individuals who will work cooperatively with the person who fills the role.
Assign the Direct Supervisor of a candidate for a role, which allows you to detect potential instinctive conflicts between the supervisor and the candidate.
Match the requirements of a position against a candidate's natural instincts. This can be done only if the Direct Supervisor has completed a Kolbe C™ index.

Insight’s Kolbe Consultant will spend time with the business leader(s) reviewing the Leadership and Right Fit™ reports and identifying areas of focus or needs for improvement. This will include identifying challenges with team dynamics and offering prescriptive advice on required action.