Unlock Team Productivity

In today's episode of the Business Owner Breakthrough Podcast, host Pete Mohr dives deep into the Kolbe system's "align" phase, exploring how aligning team members’ natural strengths with job requirements can dramatically boost productivity and fulfillment. Pete breaks down the intricacies of the Kolbe A, B, and C assessments, illustrating their critical role in ensuring team members are in their rightful place on the accountability chart. By leveraging the unique insights provided by these assessments, Pete demonstrates how business owners can enhance team dynamics, reduce stress, and fulfill their promise to customers more effectively.

Here are a few things Pete covers:

• The importance of aligning individual strengths with job requirements for maximum productivity.
• Utilizing Kolbe A, B, and C assessments to create a harmonious accountability chart.
• The impact of perception versus innate abilities on team performance and individual stress levels.
• Strategies for minimizing strain and enhancing job satisfaction through better alignment.
• The role of the Kolbe system in advancing team members and improving hiring practices.

It’s time to take action:
After listening, your most important step is to evaluate your team's current alignment. Consider how each member’s natural strengths match their job responsibilities and where adjustments may be needed. If you're intrigued by the potential of the Kolbe system to transform your team, visit SpeaktoPete.com to book a consultation with Pete Mohr and explore how these insights can be applied within your organization.

Are you looking to make some changes in your business and your life in 2024?  Head over to speaktopete.com and book a chat with me to see if we're the right fit!

Transcript

Pete Mohr: 0:32

Hey welcome back to another edition of the business owner breakthrough podcast here on the Colby system again today going through all the different sections of the Colby system. And we've talked about identifying through the Cole ba optimizing through AD reports and overlaying it onto your team chart. Today we're going to dig into the Align portion of the Colby system. And by aligning, we're able to boost productivity by matching the strengths to the job requirements. So, up until now, we really just talked about everybody's unique independent strengths and how they mesh with each other. But now we're going to overlay the accountability chart, which is really an interesting piece of the puzzle here when we start putting in people's Colby A, B, and C results. So we're going to talk about the B and the C results on to their job position and onto your accountability chart at work to make sure that people are in the right seats on your accountability chart right. So important as we look at maximizing the potential of our team and the people on our team in order to make sure that our promise is completed for every one of our customers, right. And as we dig into the Kolbe indexes, obviously, we've talked about the Colby a oh, by the way, if you're listening to this on the audio podcast, this is over on the simplifying entrepreneurship YouTube channel. And I'm have a little slideshow going on there too. So you can sort of see the visuals around what we're talking about here today on the podcast. So just head on over to YouTube, the simplifying entrepreneurship channel, if you want to see the graphics and all the other things that I'm talking about, but so the different Colby indexes, obviously, we've talked a fair bit about the Kolbe a index, which is your strengths. The next piece is the Colby B index. And it's really how you perceive your job. So it's your perception of what it is you're doing. Let's say you are the chief financial officer. So you would do another index called the Colby be all around your decision making and all of the things that you would expect from that position. And then there's the Colby C index, which if you're the boss of that person, you would essentially do that report as to your expectations of that position. So you've got now three reports. One your Colby a assessment, which is how you innately take action, right? Your Colby B report is how you assume the person in your position should take action. And the last one is the Colby C is how your boss perceives that particular job. So if you're the owner of the business, it's sometimes hard to get a Colby C on your own position. What I've done in the past, I've asked people that work with me to do a Colby C on their expectation of what they're hoping from me. So essentially, if you look on the accountability chart, I would have somebody who's essentially below me on the accountability chart, do my Kobe see for me, it's a little bit different. But when basically you're the owner of the business, you don't have anybody above you to do that Kobe see. So that's basically how that works. So when you we start merging these three assessments, the most interesting pieces of the puzzle is when you look at your Kobe a and your Kobe B, just like we looked at the A two A's beside each other. There's often areas gaps and differences. So what you perceive you need in your job, you're not always like that innately, and what your boss perceives in your job. It's not always like that. And here's another piece of the puzzle, we overlay, the Colby B and the Colby C which is how you expect your job to be done. And now your boss expects your job to be done outside of how you naturally are. That's another very interesting point of conversation. So not all of these things are absolute reasons to either hire or fire or any of those sorts of things around certain jobs. But it can tell you where you're going to have stress and strain in the relationship, right? Your own relationship with your job, your boss's relationship with your job, and your boss's relationship with how you perceive that particular job as well. So all of those things, bring up great conversations around what you can do to better the position to better the accountability chart to strengthen the team. And when you start overlaying the B's and the C's onto other people to when we think of advancement within the company, then basically we can be looking through the rest of our bench, essentially, all of the different people that would be applying for this whether they're internal people or external people to this particular position that may have opened up, then we can do some alignments within your A's, B's and C's to see if it's really the right fit for this particular position. So lots of different things to sort of look Got here. And it's really your strengths versus your perception of the job and your strengths versus your job evaluators requirements, essentially your boss, right. So we're gonna take an example here today of a VP of sales, and his name is Jimmy Gregory. So as he did his Kolbe B index, which was his perception of his own job, he came up with seven, in fact, finder three and follow through nine and Quickstart, and one and implementer. So 7391 was his Colby, B result. And he was in quite a bit of contradiction here in a few of the areas when we looked at his actual Kobe a result. So as we roll into his Kobe, a his Kobe a for who he actually is, is 4483. But he thought in his job as the role of VP of sales, he should be a 7391. So going back to last week's discussion, whenever we have differences of three or more, there's areas of conflict. And in this case, Jimmy believes that he should be a deeper factfinder than he is, he thinks in this position, he needs to be a seven factfinder. But his innate way of doing things is just a four. So he's caused a bit of uncomfortableness there with regards to that, because the other ones, as you look through it are fairly close four to three, eight to nine, and three to one. So those ones are relatively, they're within the realm of comfortableness. But it's this factfinder mode, that is the one that's going to give them the most strain, as we call it in Kobe terms. And strain is really self induced stress caused by trying to act outside your Modus of operandi, your own M O essentially. So being that his own Mo is a fact finder out of four, and he feels it should be a seven is causing some stress and strain for him down the road. And it's one of those things when we look at the ADP report. So if you're thinking about an eight A C report, it would be done exactly the same way when we're overlaying the bosses report on to the A where the bosses report onto the see, when we look at these differences, right. And then the reporting, when we start doing an A to B report, it will tell you through the reports on how to minimize that and how to take action around that. So in this case, strategies for minimizing stress for Jimmy would be to get help or a partner to use technology, take actions in short bursts, consider the time of day and to reshape the job. So it works with your strengths. So when we think of those differences, those are all the things that he could do in order to minimize the amount of stress within that particular position. Right. So then really nice thing about the Colby reports is that it's always giving you the way to make your life easier to minimize stress, to have better communication, to have better conversation, and to get things done. That's what Colby is all about how you take action, right? So if we think about those four modes, again, when we think about people that initiate with a high Fact Finder, it's how can I get enough critical pieces of information to move forward? Right, they need the research, they need the data, they need the information. And the people that initiate who have the highest scores in their follow through. It's how can I get closure on this part of the plan? They don't like to move on without finishing their checkboxes lists and things like that to the next step, right? Initiating Quickstart, which I've mentioned in the past that more like me, it's how can I create an urgent deadline? Or change the way it's done? We're generally change agents that often require a firm deadline in order to power through what they need to do initiating implementer How can I build a prototype or make it more tangible or find out what it looks like and feels like when it's done? So they'd like to touch and feel things right? And so the more we can live in those zones, and set ourselves up for minimizing stress, the better we are when we initiate in those different areas, right. So there are really three different types of stress. When we look at these different assessments. There's conflict which can be identified by the Colby a index when we have a Kobe a to a report. For example, there are strain which is your own personal feeling around the Kobe a your own Kobe a versus how you perceive your job in the Kobe EA. And then there's tension. And the tension is when we look at your Colby a versus the boss's lens essentially in the Colby sea and that's when tension can occur. So those are the three different types of stress that we can pull out from these reports in order to have those crucial conversations and move the ball head for you and your business and your team. Wouldn't it be nice to have a stress free business? Well, of course we're never going to have a stress free business. We're never You're gonna have complete and utter utopia. But at the same time, it's our job as leaders to help our team and to help our business. Get through all of these different things. So that we can have a better work environment, we can have better culture, we can have a better team engagement throughout the entire organization. And Colby is really one of those tools, all of the different pieces of the puzzle here you can see how they're coming together. If this is something that you would love to implement in your organization, please reach out to me I would love to have a chat. Pretty simple, all you have to do is go to speak to pete.com that speak to pete.com and booking an appointment on my Calendly chart there. We'll have a chat for half an hour or so to see if we're right fit for each other. And then I can tell you a little bit more about how we may implement this whether it's just for you through the Colby a and doing an assessment around your own Colby a and or whether it's digging deeper into all of these team based analysis and next week, we're going to talk a little bit about the right fit, which is one of the tools that we can use with Colby now that you know about the A B's and C's. We can overlay all of this into your hiring practice, which is a really cool thing as well. So until then, make it a great day

Buzz Burbank: 11:58

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