Episode 42: Enhancing Team Collaboration: Leveraging Individual Strengths with the Kolbe Assessment with Carly Clark Zimmer
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Alyssa Lang interviews Carly Clark Zimmer, the Director of Leadership Development for When You Lead, Coaching & Consulting. They talk through the importance of utilizing the Kolbe Assessment as a way to strengthen your team, understand yourself better and maximize all individuals on your team.
In this episode you’ll hear:
What the Kolbe Assessment is and how it can transform the way you understand yourself and your team
How to utilize the Kolbe Assessment and analyze the information
How to use the Kolbe Assessment during onboarding of new team members
How to migrate the team to be in their strengths in business
Resources mentioned in this episode:
🎙 The Updated Leadership Podcast
☎️ Kolbe Interpretation with Certified Kolbe Consultant
💻 FREE class on how to break up with Disappointment
💻 Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants
Listen to the Full Episode here 👇🏼
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Since the beginning of time, I've been obsessed with anything related to personality assessments and learning more about myself. It’s truly a passion of mine, to understand why I do the things I do and how to leverage those innate strengths to move my life forward.
In my experience, this info has made a HUGE impact on my businesses and my team members’ success! Which is why I brought Carly Clark Zimmer onto the podcast this week to help us decode HER go-to strengths assessment. She’s the Leadership Director for a company called When You Lead Coaching & Consulting and is currently living in Ireland, so yes I’m completely jealous!
Carly uses the Kolbe A Index to analyze the strengths of her clients and coach them on how to become better leaders. But it doesn’t stop there, because they can also use the Kolbe to assess their team members to make sure they're in the right roles (and so much more!).
In this episode, we’re exploring:
The different ways you can use the Kolbe A Index for your own business
How your team can benefit from the assessment
An example of how the results tell the story of you
This interview could have gone on and on because it was just SO interesting to find out the how/why Kolbe can support us as CEOs, so let’s get into it!
What Exactly IS the Kolbe A Index?
This is directly from kolbe.com:
“The Kolbe System does not measure your personality type or how smart you are. Kolbe Indexes are based on conation — the part of the mind that governs how you actually get things done when striving. Think of it as your instinctive strengths.”
So what’s great about this assessment is that you can’t “try to get better” at any of the 12 strengths once you learn your results. Instead, you simply learn how you’re naturally hard wired, which makes most people feel so validated!
Because here’s the thing. When we’re working in a way that’s unaligned from how we’re meant to operate, it leads to burn out and stress — which leads to a ton of other issues down the road!
And when you take the assessment, it’s so easy to get an accurate report because the questions are forced-choice style, which basically means it’s not about how you feel the day you take it. Instead, you’ll answer based on who you are at your core.
Over time, your values, goals, and desires could change, but your instincts won’t. This is a tool that is super grounding so you always know you can go back to it when you’re in doubt. The point is NOT to get the “right” answers — it’s about learning what you’d do if you were 100% free to be yourself. Once you understand the results of your assessment, you can start to align your life with being your best self!
How to Use Kolbe in Your Business
You can use this assessment in your business a million different ways, but the top two are: To be a better leader/CEO and to help your team members thrive in their roles.
Using Your Kolbe Results as a CEO
If you decide to take the assessment, it’s highly recommended you work with someone like Carly to help you maximize your results! One of the ways you can do this in your firm is by understanding which actions you should take to level up your business based on your strengths. I love this concept because it’s one thing to know what you’re “good” at, but another thing to know the WHY behind it.
For example, Carly told me that my Quick Start number (8) means that I can have ideas all day long. So because I’m really good at brainstorming ideas, I never have a shortage of things to say when I’m helping clients come up with solutions during our Breakthrough coaching calls. But I also have to be cautious about letting all of the ideas out at once, because the person on the receiving end might not be able to process them all at the same rate, and could get overwhelmed easily.
Using the Kolbe Assessment with Your Team
Your team members don’t know what they don’t know. Which means that when you’re a business owner, you need to fully and clearly communicate what their job consists of to them before they accept it! Sometimes, this is kind of hard to do — especially when the team member has been in the same role for a long time OR you’ve changed their responsibilities along the way.
What happens when team members aren’t in alignment with their role is that they’re more likely to burn out at work. And I know you don’t want that for them! So what you can do to help them is bring Kolbe into the picture and use the assessments to gain clarity.
One example Carly gave looked like this:
If your team member isn’t thriving in their role, it might be because they aren’t interpreting the role correctly. You might have one idea of what they’re supposed to be doing, and they have another. So how do you fix it?
The team member would fill out their own Kolbe assessment for themselves. Then they would fill out a different assessment for their role/job description. Finally, YOU would complete one for the role and a qualified Kolbe consultant would help you compare the three. What’s SUPER surprising is the possible differences you’ll find between the three reports!
And it probably has nothing to do with the quality of the team member. Sometimes they just don’t understand what the role requires or how to approach the work to meet expectations. But sometimes they can be moved to another role that better suits their strengths. I’ve done this with team members in my own business and it worked out great!
If you’re interested in taking the Kolbe A Index assessment, I highly recommend it! There is a fee to take the text but Carly says that it has changed so many people’s lives for the better — it’s not like a quiz you take and forget about forever.
About our guest:
Carly Clark Zimmer is the Director of Leadership Development for When You Lead, Coaching & Consulting. Their mission is to help companies experiencing growing pains revolutionize and update leadership models from toxic top-down, productivity-at-all-costs culture to strengths-centered, equity-centered, and humanity-centered culture.
Because when you center humanity and give people the agency to use their strengths within the company, the results are sustainable profits and a foundation for unlimited growth!
Carly’s training includes a Professional Coach Certification from the ICF, Somatic Coach certification in the BodyMind Coaching Method™
And studied with the Institute For Equity-Centered Coaching®. She’s also a Certified Kolbe™ Consultant and loves sharing how this simple tool can open all kinds of doors for improving communication not only on teams but in families!
She’s a native New Yorker who loves traveling the world, and currently lives in Galway, Ireland where you can find her at sunrise taking a dip in the icy Irish Atlantic with the locals!
Connect with Carly Clark Zimmer:
Check out their website: www.whenyoulead.com
Follow her on Instagram: @carlyclarkzimmer
Send her an email: carly@whenyoulead.com
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