Kolbe Corp Helps Entrepreneurs Build Their Businesses Around Instinct and Strengths

For decades, conventional workplace wisdom has urged people to identify their weaknesses and work relentlessly to fix them. David Kolbe believes that advice is backwards.

As CEO of Kolbe Corp, Kolbe has spent the past 15 years challenging the assumption that people unlock their potential by becoming someone they are not. Instead, he believes lasting success comes from recognizing the instinctive ways people solve problems and capitalizing on those natural strengths.

Kolbe Corp doesn't just preach this—they practice it, starting with Kolbe himself. When he peppers colleagues with questions, they use a playful shorthand for calling him out. To an outsider, it might sound like a criticism. To Kolbe, it is proof that his team understands his instincts well enough to work and thrive with them.

It is the same insight that his mother, Kathy Kolbe, built the company around more than 50 years ago. Today, the Phoenix-based firm helps Fortune 500 companies, universities, startups, and small businesses better understand their teams through its flagship assessment, the Kolbe A Index. Rather than measuring intelligence, personality, or motivation, the test identifies the intuitive methods people reach for when they face a problem.

A third part of the mind

Most well-known assessments, such as Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram, cover the affective part of the mind, measuring preferences and values. A separate territory, the cognitive, covers reasoning and knowledge, like the bar exam. Kolbe Corp measures a third, called conation, an idea that traces back to Plato and governs the instincts behind how you actually take action.

"That's why we describe them as 'instinctive strengths,'" Kolbe said. "They seem to be something that you just have. They don't change over time."

Keep the goals hard, change the path to get there

Kolbe believes leaders often misfire by focusing on improving areas where they’re not particularly strong. While that logic holds for knowledge gaps, it does not for instincts. 

His point is not to lower the bar. He is an advocate for pursuing big dreams and pushing hard to reach them—but not by adopting someone else's idea of discipline. Instead, he encourages people to build a working style around how they’re actually wired to get things done.

“Set really hard goals and then make it as easy as possible to achieve those very difficult goals,” he said.

Why a team of clones falls apart

The same logic scales up. Kolbe Corp's own research with university partners found that teams with a mix of instinctive strengths outperform monocultures with more uniform abilities. 

When a department is made of people who approach problems the same way, conversations become comfortable, and progress comes to a grinding halt. Similarly, like-minded problem solvers often mistake agreement for effectiveness. As a result, the possibility of mold-breaking conversation is limited without new ideas.

"We're not all the same," Kolbe said, "and thank goodness for that, because there are times where that's what we really need." For example, an organization set up entirely of people like him, he added, "is not likely to be a long-term successful organization."

Leadership starts with self-awareness

For small business owners, Kolbe believes the first responsibility is not to change employees—it is to understand yourself. Having that understanding helps leaders to make better hiring decisions, delegate more effectively, and configure teams where people can succeed without being pigeonholed.

The payoff shows up in a line Kolbe said he and his team constantly hear from new clients: “I wish I knew this earlier.”

That kind of clarity, in Kolbe's view, comes from pairing confidence in how you solve problems with the humility to bring in people who solve them differently. When people work in ways that align with their instincts, performance improves, collaboration gets easier, and there is more energy left over for everything else that matters.

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