Understanding how your team works best is the key to unlocking productivity. The Kolbe index is a personal and professional development tool that can give you insights into just that. Ross Slater, a partner and VP at Reach Capabilities, is here to discuss Kolbe and how it can improve communication, help you play to people’s strengths, and can add accuracy to the hiring process.
But first, Richard Tubb and Karl Palachuk are back in front of the mic for What’s Going On.
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What’s Going On
[03:56] Datto CEO Austin McChord has resigned from the company he founded more than a decade ago. His resignation came just a few days before he was due to keynote at DattoCon 18 in Barcelona.
[04:26] His decision was based on Datto’s plans for 2019, which include heading towards an IPO and he didn’t feel he was the right person to take the company on that journey.
[04:42] During his keynote, Austin gave a history of Datto’s growth and it was clear that he’s put an incredible amount of time, energy, and sacrifices into growing the business to what it is today.
[04:56] He’s handed the reins to Chief Financial Officer Tim Weller, at least for the interim.
[05:10] Life events can really change things, and Austin McChord’s great friend and the head of Datto in the UK Andrew Stewart passed away earlier this year.
[05:43] Life-threatening health events can often cause people to make major changes in their life.
[06:16] Austin McChord often talked about working 15 and 16 hour days. This is going to be a big change for him.
[06:37] In business and startups, the team that gets you to one point often can’t get you to the next major point.
[07:40] When you get to the stage where you’re ready for an IPO, you need to turn the reins over to someone who does just that.
[08:23] One of the things that holds many MSPs back is their inability to turn things over to someone else.
[08:54] You can make more money when you give up tiny little pieces of your authority.
[10:18] When you grow a business for years it’s hard to turn things over to someone else even if they do the job better than you.
[11:02] The EMR and HIPAA website had an article about an incident in New Jersey where a medical transcription company had mishandled patient records.
[11:28] The state attorney general not only convicted them on the HIPAA violation but also called it consumer fraud for allowing the records to be made public and accidentally posted on the internet.
[12:26] The service provider was fined $200,00 and banned from ever managing or owning a business in New Jersey. Many states are adopting laws about public and private records.
[12:35] As technology professionals, we have a responsibility to take this very seriously.
[13:03] You can follow all the rules but if you don’t document it properly, you’re not in compliance.
Interview with Ross Slater – How to Unlock Greater Team Productivity With Kolbe
[15:07] Ross Slater is a Kolbe expert. He’s been certified for 20 years and has worked on tens of thousands of Kolbe indexes. He also just recently won the 2018 2018 Kolbe Professional Award, a tremendous accomplishment.
[16:01] Kolbe measures how you go about getting things done, not what you’ll choose to do or what you feel is really important but the methodology and the mental energy you have.
[16:21] Ross wanted Jennifer to take the Kolbe when they were starting a business together because he wanted to know how they would interact together.
[17:50] Jennifer and Ross worked together in a business called Highspot where they used Kolbe on every staff member, client, and freelancer. They discovered they could predict a freelancer who always missed deadlines, or which kind of designer was best for a certain type of assignment.
[18:30] Knowing every client profile allowed Highspot to tailor their communications and to know how much structure they needed to provide or how they were going to react and how long a project might take.
[19:47] It’s not about the talent a person has for writing or graphic design or anything else, but the way you manage them and how you interact with them.
[20:07] One aspect of the human mind is cognitive, which is how smart you are, what information you know, how fast you process information.
[20:31] The second part is affective, which is personality and how you operate in terms of feelings and values.
[20:38] The third part is conative or how we operate as human beings. Kolbe is the only tool that measures conative.
[20:52] It measures how we go about getting things done or the mental energy we have to solve problems in different ways.
[21:34] It’s not about good or bad, it’s putting yourself in positions that are good for you.
[22:04] Kolbe is rooted in brain science research
[22:17] Kathy Kolbe wanted to know what makes people successful. Kind of like a swan swimming on the water, the Kolbe measures what the legs are doing down below to produce the result we see.
[23:14] The four main action modes are Fact Finder, Follow Through, Quick Start, and Implementor.
[24:15] Fact Finder is about a person’s need to gather and share information.
[24:26] Follow Through is about structure and systematization.
[24:51] Quick Start is how we handle risk and uncertainty.
[25:53] Implementor is the need for things to be tangible.
[27:26] Ross has a mediator and facilitator profile. His conative methodology is to adapt to what everyone else needs.
[28:46] Being a mediator is fantastic when you can react to other people or situations but when there’s nothing to react to that can be really frustrating.
[29:29] You can have a lot of conflict from conative difference but also when two people are really similar to each other.
[29:43] Myers Briggs, DiSC and CliftonStrengths all measure the affective side of the human mind..
[31:08] Kolbe is highly predictive of people’s behavior and what they need to succeed.
[33:45] In lots of jobs you have to be successful in your job in order to get the next opportunity. That becomes a challenge when the job you take on is a job that doesn’t suit you.
[34:12] Kolbe can help you make better decisions about your job and what you’re going to do.
[34:42] It can also help you appreciate others who have different things to do than you.
[37:13] Great managers need to find out what their people are really good at doing and then removing any obstacles that prevent them from doing that.
[37:53] When screening for a job, hard skills fall into the cognitive area. Soft skills are an affective. Then insert Kolbe to measure conative.
[39:09] Kolbe is 82% effective for a good long-term hire.
[41:41] You tap into who people naturally are.
[42:30] If there’s one thing to understand about Kolbe: Know yourself and give yourself the freedom to do things your way.
Links from this episode
What’s Going On
The Hosts
- Karl Palachuk: Small Biz Thoughts
- Karl Palachuk (Twitter)
- Richard Tubb: Tubblog
- Richard Tubb (Twitter)
- Josh Weiss (LinkedIn)
- LA Creative Technologies
Interview
- Scaling Your Technical Team – FMSP 030
- Kolbe A Index
- Third Faculty of the Brain Discovered – press release with EEG brain scans
- Research and analysis of Kolbe indexing
- Kolbe C and RightFit hiring
- About Kathy Kolbe
- Wonderlic IQ Test
- Myers Briggs
- DiSC
- CliftonStrengths
- Perfectly Obstinate People – Kathy Kolbe podcast
- Reach Capabilities
- Ross Slater (LinkedIn)
- Ross Slater (Twitter)
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