Powered by Instinct

There is no shortage of assessments on the market, and for good reason. Team leaders know how vital understanding their people is to boosting engagement and retention. But it’s not enough to use assessments; you need to use the right ones for your company’s needs.  

You’ve heard of assessments like the Kolbe Index, DiSC, Predictive Index, and Clifton Strengths. But, do you have a true appreciation for how they can help your team and what other issues may still be in play afterwards?  Fear not, because we’re here to make sense of it all and help set your team up for sustained success. 

In this episode of Powered by Instinct, host Eric Herrera welcomes Stephanie Clergé, the VP of Training and Consulting at Kolbe Corp. The two discuss the three parts of the mind and the various assessments used for each. They also touch upon The Kolbe System™ and what differentiates it from other programs. Finally, they explain how organizations can use these assessments to reduce stress, improve collaboration, and increase productivity. 


Host: Eric Herrera (5392)

Guest-at-a-Glance 

Name: Stephanie Clergé (8363)

What she does: Stephanie is the VP of Training and Consulting at Kolbe Corp. 

Company: Kolbe Corp 

Noteworthy: Stephanie's areas of ease, energy and excellence: Speaking, Training, Executive and Leadership Coaching, Instructional Design, Manager and New Manager Coaching, Career Coaching, Outplacement Coaching, Leadership, and Team Training and Consulting, etc. 

Where to find Stephanie: LinkedIn 

Podcast Insights 

🎙️Assessments are a valuable addition to hiring and onboarding. Various psychometric assessments, including Kolbe Indexes, help companies get to know their new and existing employees faster and better, especially now that remote work has become the norm. ''Assessments have been important because they are reducing the time, especially if you've got a new person, it takes to get going. But also in today's environment, when we've got distributed teams, people are no longer in the same office together; there's a lot more remote work and a lot more hybrid work and those kinds of things. I think it's also a great way for individuals to get to know each other, set expectations clearly, and help employees when they're struggling with their work.'' 

🎙️The Kolbe assessment is for the Conative part of the mind. As we discuss the human mind, we can't miss mentioning three parts: Cognitive, Affective, and Conative. There are different assessments for each part of the mind. The Kolbe Index, for instance, specializes in the mind's Conative part. ''Kolbe is in a class all by itself. [...] It tells us about how we naturally gather and share information; how we naturally organize and arrange and how much structure we put into things; how we deal with risk and uncertainty; how we deal with the tangible or physical things around us; and how we solve problems.'' 

🎙️Each assessment has its unique purpose. Finding an assessment type is not a problem, but choosing the right one may be challenging. ''Make sure that the assessment you're looking at is measuring what it says it's going to measure. Don't take the latest 'What Disney princess are you?' quiz and expect it to yield results that are valid and reliable. Know what you're getting; know if this assessment can and should be used for hiring versus other uses that you might have for it.'' 

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Find the freedom to be yourself by taking the Kolbe A™ Index or Kolbe Y™ Index for the youth in your life. Many successful companies work directly with a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant — find one in your area.

Companies want productive and engaged employees. But not many know when and how to work on employee engagement. First, it is critical to understand that employee engagement depends on their day-to-day role. After all, those who connect with their job are more motivated to work toward the company's goals.  

In this episode of Powered by Instinct, Amy Bruske, the President of the Kolbe Corp, joins host Stephanie Clergé to consider what makes for an engaged culture. The two discuss why it is critical to identify employees' strengths and align them with roles within your organization and why employee engagement starts with the hiring process.


Host: Stephanie Clergé (8363) 

Guest-at-a-Glance 

Name: Amy Bruske (3583)

What she does: Amy is the President of Kolbe Corp. 

Company: Kolbe Corp 

Noteworthy: Amy is one of the company's three Senior Master Consultants. She is also in demand for executive coaching and team building by a wide range of businesses worldwide. 

Where to find Amy: LinkedIn 

Podcast Insights 

🎙️ To build an engaged culture, you must first identify your employees' strengths. As a business leader, you may have people with similar skills and experience, but that doesn’t mean that they function in the same way. Therefore, it is important to know and value your employees’ unique talents and strengths if you want to engage them. ''You have to start thinking about people's strengths. People loving their jobs means that they've got to be in the zone every day. So, I'm looking at individual strengths and how we can capitalize on those.'' 

🎙️ Identifying employees' strengths helps you create productive teams. Just because someone can complete certain tasks, it doesn't mean that it's something they want to dedicate their career to. Identifying their strengths helps you put the right people in the proper position and pair them with employees with whom they can collaborate successfully. "Optimizing strengths is about strategically collaborating and combining them. Just a little bit of information makes a huge difference in identifying where the team will get stuck. Why do meetings go on too long? Why are we missing goals? It's not just because people don't have the time or don't care. Oftentimes, we've got the wrong people collaborating and working together." 

🎙️ Alignment between strengths and job descriptions prevents burnout. People who are "in the zone daily," as Amy describes it, are more likely to stay with an employer for an extended period, work on a shared goal with enjoyment, and experience success in their professional life. Otherwise, they risk facing lots of stress. "All of our research shows that if someone is working against what is natural for them, it increases stress levels. And if left unmanaged, that's when someone's going to burn out — that's when they're going to quit your organization. They don't always know why the stress is there, but the more aligned people are to the role and what their needs are, we find that those are the most engaged employees." 

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Find the freedom to be yourself by taking the Kolbe A™ Index or Kolbe Y™ Index for the youth in your life. Many successful companies work directly with a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant — find one in your area.

When you hire a person with a specific set of professional skills and experience, you are also welcoming a particular personality, AND someone with a specific way of naturally taking action.  

Just like a strong team needs a wide variety of skills and viewpoints to thrive, successful organizations need a group with diverse instincts and problem-solving approaches in order to overcome roadblocks and reach their full potential. 

In this episode of Powered by Instinct, host David Kolbe welcomes Shelley Moore. Shelley is the Founder and President of Insight Strategic Concepts, and a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant for 24 years. The two discuss why it’s essential for executives to identify each employee's MO early on and how they can fully optimize the strengths of their team members to take their business to the next level.  


Host: David Kolbe (8273)

Guest-at-a-Glance 

• Name: Shelley Moore (9571)
• What she does: Shelley is the Founder and President of Insight Strategic Concepts. 
• Company: Insight Strategic Concepts 
• Noteworthy: Shelley has been a Kolbe certified consultant since 1998.  She is the 2020 Kolbe Professional Award winner.
• Where to find Shelley: LinkedIn 

Podcast Insights 

🎙️ Kolbe helps us understand that different approaches to doing things strengthen a business. Companies comprise members with different talents and skills. However, while executives know they need to hire people with different areas of expertise, it's often challenging for them to understand that even people in the same departments approach the same tasks differently. But once they acknowledge that — and Kolbe plays a significant role in this — they can take their business to the next level. ''The collaborative aspect of everybody working together with different modes of operation and knowing how to do that started to take hold. And there became less of an attitude about it and more of an appreciation of how energy works and how you get things done.'' 

🎙️ Transparency is critical in business. Shelley has been a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant for almost 25 years. Her job is to help companies upgrade their business by understanding and embracing everyone's talents and strengths. To do that, she generally connects with each member separately. ''It's one of those things where connecting with people individually, hearing what their challenges and struggles are, and oftentimes, the misinterpretations they have about themselves or other people and their intentions — which can be explained by talking about the three parts of the mind. So when people bring up their issues and their challenges, you're able to show them how that's an attitudinal thing, or you have differences in how you're operating, and you're turning [it] into something that it's not." 

🎙️ Kolbe helps us work on the personal aspects of life. The results of taking a Kolbe assessment are mind-blowing for many. They want not just their coworkers, but also their family members and friends to take it, as it can change the way they approach every connection in their life, whether business or personal. 

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Find the freedom to be yourself by taking the Kolbe A™ Index or Kolbe Y™ Index for the youth in your life. Many successful companies work directly with a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant — find one in your area.

Today, it’s not enough to hire the job candidate who interviews the best. If you want a long-term answer, you need to find the best fit for your company and the best fit for the role.  

It helps to examine a candidate's resume (education and experience) and evaluate their personality to ensure that the company's values match the candidate's values. But there's a third piece, a dimension often overlooked but as vital as the previous two: how a candidate naturally does things, approaches tasks, analyzes, and completes assignments — the conative part of the mind. 

In this episode of Powered by Instinct, Amy Bruske, the President of Kolbe Corp, joins our host Eric Herrera to discuss the role Kolbe plays in successful recruitment, hiring strategies, and onboarding, and how to successfully implement the hiring cheat code to reduce the many costs of turnover. 


Host: Eric Herrera (5392)

Guest-at-a-Glance 

Name: Amy Bruske (3583)

What she does: Amy is the President of Kolbe Corp. 

Company: Kolbe Corp 

Noteworthy: Amy is one of the company's three Senior Master Consultants. She is also in demand for executive coaching and team building for a wide range of businesses worldwide. 

Where to find Amy: LinkedIn 

Podcast Insights 

🎙️ Avoid building a team of like-minded individuals. As our relationships revolve around common interests, we focus on surrounding ourselves with people who have the same values, habits, and behaviors. The business world is no different. ''Leaders clone themselves in hiring all the time. And, as you said, sometimes you need someone who's the complete opposite of who you are. [...] Likability can't be the only piece just because you're attracted to the way they get things done, or they're just like you. But we human beings are attracted to certain kinds of behavior and the way people do things, and that might lead you astray.'' 

🎙️ When hiring, examine a candidate's education and experience, pay attention to their personality, and familiarize yourself with their unique talents/capabilities (their natural way of doing things). ''We first screen for skills. We look at the resume. We do a phone screen. We ask some questions and see if they are going to be able to do the job. Then we do this Kolbe piece — how they most naturally solve problems. We get a pool of candidates, and then we interview them. And that's when we screen for cultural fit, values fit, personality type — all of those things that go in that affective part of the mind. That's the best way to screen for all three parts of the mind because Kolbe is one piece of the puzzle. It's fundamental because it's the most predictive of long-term success in a role, but you want to take this three-parts-of-the-mind approach where you're doing all three.'' 

🎙️If a candidate is not a good fit for a particular role, it doesn't mean they're not suitable for a different role in the company. For example, you may come across an individual whose education and experience blow your mind, but once they take the Kolbe Assessment, you realize they would not be such a good fit for the role. However, just because someone wouldn't succeed in that position doesn't mean they should not be part of your team. ''One thing I want to say to all the leaders out there is that if you can focus on the end result you need to get out of a role and then give people the freedom to get there in whatever way is most natural for them. There's a lot of flexibility in most of our companies. I always joke that if you're running a nuclear power plant, maybe there's not a lot of flexibility in some of those positions — it has to be done a certain way. But, for most of us, we can do some minor tweaks and adap

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Find the freedom to be yourself by taking the Kolbe A™ Index or Kolbe Y™ Index for the youth in your life. Many successful companies work directly with a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant — find one in your area.

There is power in knowing your own strengths and the strengths of those around you.  

This is true in any industry, as it is true in life. But one space where there is often a particularly large need is in the legal profession, where many business owners become so nearly by accident. 

Crisp is an award-winning company that specializes in helping legal firms grow their businesses, and they use Kolbe with every client that they coach…because they value the power behind understanding strengths.  

In this episode of Kolbe – Powered by Instinct, Jessica Mogill, the Head of Coaching Strategy at Crisp and Kolbe Certified™ Consultant, joins our host David Kolbe. The two discuss when she first heard about Kolbe, how she uses it internally and externally (with employees and clients) to improve hiring practices, optimize teamwork and align people to the right roles, and how the Kolbe assessment can help businesses in any field where team dynamics matter.  


Host: David Kolbe (8273)

Guest-at-a-Glance 

Name: Jessica Mogill (8733)

What she does: Jessica is the Head of Coaching Strategy at Crisp, an award-winning law firm growth company. 

Company: Crisp 

Noteworthy: Jessica is a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant. Prior to joining Crisp, Jessica worked as a trainer at a company, and her role required her to be certified by Kolbe. That's the first time she came across Kolbe.  

Where to find Jessica: LinkedIn 

Podcast Insights 

🎙️Kolbe helps you hire the right people and, if necessary, move your existing employees to more appropriate positions. Crisp uses Kolbe to make the right employment moves and bring the top talent into the company. However, they also use it to determine their existing employees' strengths to help them reach their full potential and contribute to the company's growth. ''It's helped us to not disqualify candidates ever. It is actually to get them interviewed. And, I would say, a quarter of our company has interviewed for one position, and we've put them in a different position because we have had them take the Kolbe assessment.'' 

🎙️We ask our clients to take the Kolbe assessment. Crisp is a consulting company with a mission to help clients grow professionally and personally. Therefore, they approach potential collaborations the same way they approach new hires. ''Part of our onboarding for every single coaching client that we bring on is that they must take the Kolbe assessment. And we take that very seriously in terms of matching them up with which Crisp team members they're going to work with. We want to make sure that there's going to be as good of a communication as possible. And part of their package is for us to go out and do a Kolbe onsite training with their team. And we recommend that we do it sooner rather than later because it is so enlightening and it changes so much.'' 

🎙️Kolbe helps take professional and private communication to the next level. Jessica's husband, Michael, is also her business partner. But even before they started working together, she asked him to take the Kolbe assessment. In addition, the two have inspired their parents to do the same. Now they understand each other better, and taking the assessment has helped them improve their communication. ''Even with my mom — she is an initiating Follow Thru — knowing those things [really helps]. I'm an initiating Follo

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Find the freedom to be yourself by taking the Kolbe A™ Index or Kolbe Y™ Index for the youth in your life. Many successful companies work directly with a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant — find one in your area.

Episode Summary 

The ideal work setting involves people getting along and working towards a shared goal. But not everyone approaches tasks the same way — even people in the same roles. Many businesses succeed because their management knows that diversity is vital. You don't want to form a team of look-alikes; you want different perspectives and personalities to drive your business growth. 

 It's often challenging, especially for employees, to collaborate with people who don't use the same work methods. But just because someone approaches a task differently than you doesn’t mean their approach is wrong. It probably just means they have a different working style.  

 In this episode of Powered by Instinct, Kolbe Corp VP of Sales Eric Herrera chats with Stephanie Clergé, the VP of Training and Consulting at Kolbe Corp. The two discuss the Kolbe Comparisons: A to A™ report and how it helps organizations understand their workforce and coworkers understand each other. This allows them to establish and compare each other's strengths and make the most out of them.  

Eric and Stephanie use real-life examples to illustrate this. They compare their coworkers' Kolbe A™ indexes and explain why these individuals are in their particular role, what the result says about their strengths, and how they all — despite being more or less different — work with each other successfully.   


Host: Eric Herrera (5392)

Guest-at-a-Glance 

Name: Stephanie Clergé (8363)

What she does: Stephanie is the VP of Training and Consulting at Kolbe Corp. 

Company: Kolbe Corp 

Noteworthy: Stephanie works with Kolbe Certified™ Consultants — individuals who are trained to work with Kolbe solutions. ''What I love doing and get a chance to do every day is training for some of our clients. My goal is to make sure that folks using Kolbe have the information they need to do it well and apply it to whatever they care about the most.''  

Where to find Stephanie: LinkedIn 

Podcast Insights 

🎙️  Kolbe Comparisons: A to A™ reports help identify potential conflict. The purpose of running a comparison report is to help us understand our and other people's strengths. It is particularly beneficial in the workplace, where people with different approaches to working have to collaborate. Therefore, the Comparisons: A to A report helps avoid conflict in a healthy and meaningful way and drives productivity in the office. ''A lot of times, people will try to solve these conflicts they have at work by doing some of the traditional stuff. But this isn't about not liking each other. It's just about two different ways of taking action.'' 

🎙️ Major differences ask for a different approach. Yes, some people can collaborate and bring good results even if they are different in every sense. But, unfortunately, sometimes that's not the case. ''Maybe these two shouldn't be working collaboratively. Maybe they need to work independently more often so that they don't drive each other completely crazy because there's only so much self-awareness and tips and whatever that can help. Sometimes you have to do things separately and then come together,'' says Stephanie.  

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Find the freedom to be yourself by taking the Kolbe A™ Index or Kolbe Y™ Index for the youth in your life. Many successful companies work directly with a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant — find one in your area.

Episode Summary

Kathy Kolbe's vast experiences led her to believe a simple yet profound statement: 

Every person on this planet is unique and capable of achieving incredible things.

So she developed a theory. And then, she proved it. 

Kathy is an acclaimed theorist, bestselling author, entrepreneur, and educator. She's also the creator of the Kolbe A™ Index, the only valid and reliable assessment tool for measuring an individual's method of operation (MO) within the conative faculty of the brain.

In the first episode of the Powered by Instinct podcast, Kathy Kolbe and host Amy Bruske discuss the Kolbe A™ Index, its Action Modes, the benefits such an assessment brings to
businesses and schools, and how it can improve our personal and professional lives.

Take the Kolbe A Index at Kolbe.com


Host: Amy Bruske (3583)

Guest-at-a-Glance

💡 Name: Kathy Kolbe (2684)

💡 What she does: Kathy is the Founder of Kolbe Corp and CEO of Dynamynd Inc.

💡 Company: Dynamynd Inc

💡 Noteworthy: Kathy Kolbe is an acclaimed theorist, bestselling author, entrepreneur, educator, organizational strategist, consultant, and speaker. Her groundbreaking assessments and performance strategies are used worldwide by businesses, schools, families, and individuals. This includes the Kolbe A™ Index, the only valid and reliable assessment tool for measuring an individual's method of operation (MO) within the conative part of the mind.

💡 Where to find Kathy: LinkedIn and Twitter

Key Insights

⚡ Managers should avoid inertia. As Kathy explains, the mistake most managers or leaders make is trying to hire people who naturally act as they do. Although it may be the winning formula for some teams – like sales - it will not be effective for teams comprised of individuals who have to collaborate to bring desired results. ''Avoid the inertia of being stopped in your tracks by having too many people who are alike. That's the biggest mistake hiring managers and line managers make. A line manager will say, 'Bring in more people like Joe.' No, not conatively. It may be in terms of enthusiasm and affect, maybe in intelligence and skill. Conatively, all managers should be looking for synergy.'' 

⚡ Allow employees to do the job their way. Every role within an organization requires a specific set of skills and experience. Job duties focus on the employer's expectations, but every company should also nurture a culture of employee self-expression and the ability for jobholders to approach assignments their natural way. ''The role of management always has to be, 'Do it your way.'  As long as you have the right strengths that are necessary, conatively, do it the way that works for you.''

⚡ Aim for equality. The Kolbe A™ Index is not only for adults. A version of it can also be used in schools to help children determine their strengths. The Student Aptitude Quiz has proven highly beneficial for teenagers (high school kids). Once they take the quiz, they receive tangible proof showing they are all unique, worthy, and capable of doing many amazing things based on their natural abilities. ''What happens when we do that is self-advocacy goes up. [...] I want them to feel that. I want them to feel equal, not better. I don't want arrogance. I want equality. What we're teaching is not going off with arrogance because you're not better than anybody else. I don't want to hear the stupid stuff about ‘you're not any good.’ I'v

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Find the freedom to be yourself by taking the Kolbe A™ Index or Kolbe Y™ Index for the youth in your life. Many successful companies work directly with a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant — find one in your area.