By Stacy Kahan, CLU®, RFC®, President, Lang Financial Group
With the increasing competition and complexity of various business activities, there is a rising need to identify, hire, and manage the right talent. Certified, experienced, and skilled consultants help in matching the right talent with suitable job opportunities, and managing them. They’re committed to delivering reliable services to both clients and candidates. They also leverage the latest professional and scientific methods to recognize the talent of candidates and help organizations improve employee performance, engagement, productivity, and retention.
A few months ago, we hired a Kolbe Certified Consultant. Kolbe Certified Consultants are trained to identify people’s natural talents, their conative abilities, and help organizations use them productively. We have found the process and the results highly beneficial and wanted to share our experience.
What Is a Kolbe Certified Consultant?
A Kolbe Certified Consultant’s unique approach to improving performance and productivity stems from a solid base of practical application and research. Most Kolbe consultants focus on people’s natural problem-solving skills and work toward improving their performance. They help organizations build, manage, and implement employee infrastructure and processes. They also help in recruiting and coaching employees to maximize their productivity and contribution.
Kolbe Certified Consultants are trained to:
- Boost team productivity
- Increase employee retention
- Improve individual performance
- Compare and interpret Kolbe indexes
- Help organizations grow by leveraging the Kolbe system
The training comprises a dynamic mix of presentations, discussion of Kolbe concepts, learning activities, and applications and productions for individual use. Participants learn about the science behind conation, getting more done by maximizing their strengths and minimizing stress, and helping organizations increase employee engagement, reduce turnover, and boost morale.
What is the Kolbe System?
The Kolbe System helps organizations improve the productivity of their staff.
Organizations typically select, manage, and train people using assessments that measure their cognitive efficiency (IQ) and personality traits. While this is helpful, as we’ve discovered first hand, it’s not the best way to measure to gauge an individual’s full potential. IQ scores can be greatly influenced by an individual’s exposure to learning opportunities. Also, being smart doesn’t guarantee success! Personality traits can greatly vary from one individual to another, and individuals who seem agreeable don’t always help in accomplishing team goals or complete a task assigned to them.
The Kolbe System emphasizes the importance of the “conative” or “instinctive” portion of the mind. With this system, organizations should combine cognitive efficiency, personality traits, and conative skills to hire the right candidates and maintain a stress-free and productive work environment. The first step of the Kolbe System is measuring an individual’s instinctive traits.
Important Data Organizations Should Track
Most organizations regularly monitor key business metrics — customer retention rates, profits, losses, revenue, and so on. However, they should also track data tied to their employees to improve employee engagement and retention, and boost productivity.
Here are some critical examples of “people data” organizations should track before and after recruiting employees:
- Conative or instinctive: Some organizations track this data as “behavioral” data. They use instinctive assessments to identify natural drives and preferences. Organizations should track instinctive data to hire the right candidates for the right job profiles. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report, only 15% of employees are engaged in the workplace. This implies that the majority of employees are either viewing their organization negatively or only doing the bare minimum to make it through the day, with little to no emotional attachment.
- Cognitive: Cognitive assessments should be used to evaluate a candidate’s agility and ability to learn. How quickly can they adapt to change and learn new things? This will help organizations employ candidates whose cognitive skills are well suited to the organization.
- Employee performance: This data can help you gauge how employee performance is impacting organization growth.
- Employee engagement: This data showcases how employees feel about their organization. Engagement-related data can help organizations identify a mismatch between employees and job roles, understand the feelings of employees toward their managers and peers, and so on.
- Employee sentiment: This data captures the experiences of employees with their organizations. It’s typically collected during exit interviews and performance feedback.
Working with a consultant such as a Kolbe Certified Consultant helps employers ultimately better understand employee engagement, retention, and productivity. They make collecting data about employees easy, too.
We recently worked with a Kolbe Certified Consultant and the insights we gained were invaluable. If you’d like to hear more about the process or you’d like to be introduced to our Kolbe consultant, please let us know.