Understanding you and your team with Kolbe

Understanding yourself is good, where you fit with your team is better.

Personality profiles are fun, at least for me. They have been an introduction to personal development for many folks as we grow from being self-centric to being self-aware. There are many profile systems that are out there, we’ve used a lot of them. DISC, MBTI etc.

As a company, we enable all of our Rocketeers to complete their DISC profile. DISC is a simple way to understand some of your tendencies and natural/default/instinctive responses to situations. Over time though, we gravitated to using Kolbe. As of now, we do both.

What is Kolbe?

It is an assessment that measures your instinctive ways and gives you an understanding of your problem-solving instincts and your personal decision-making process, to help you harness your full potential.

We integrated our profile results into our core systems and propagate our profile information so fellow Rocketeers can start to learn more about others.

Why did we pick it?

One of the main reasons why we picked Kolbe was the capabilities beyond the individual profile and tools to combine many profiles together to see the full picture of your team.

You can pick out blindspots and also start to see where your team might be susceptible to group-think or bias.

We went one step further and integrated the comparison reports directly into our HR System (NetSuite SuitePeople) so that any Rocketeer can compare their profile with another Rocketeer.

Using this tool, I’m able to type in the name of any Rocketeer in the company and compare my profile to theirs. Why do this? using this tool helps our teams learn more about others, as well as themselves.

Some examples of using this tool are:

• I am a manager that has a new Rocketeer joining my team, I want to know about their natural instincts

• I work really well with specific team members, I want to see if I can work out why

• I get triggered or confused when working with a particular team member, let me see if there’s something I can do to make to reduce anxiety and friction.

Here’s an example of a part of the comparison report between our Chief Customer Officer, Peter and myself. The report gives me a heads up to where we might have some natural conflict, areas that I might want to be deliberate and more careful around.

There are also ways you can use Kolbe during the recruitment process to assist you with identifying appropriate candidate behaviors for the role that you are looking for, and these can be manager specific.

So check out Kolbe and see what you can learn. You can also see if your company can implement and integrate it into their core systems to help enable everyone to learn and grow, so that you can make the biggest impact.

Update!

In 2024, I was interview by Stephanie Clerge from Kolbe about our use of the Kolbe system. You can watch it on YouTube