One of the biggest challenges to any clinician and small business owner is the blending of individuals together to make a team.

These are the same challenges that can afflict larger businesses and corporations too.

• Do you recruit people then find they aren’t quite what you thought?
• Are you beset with problems retaining staff?
• Do have difficulties integrating the individuals into a team?
• Is your hygienist outside the wire?
• Do your associates fail to embrace your vision for the future?

The KOLBE Wisdom™

• Identifies the striving instincts that drive natural behaviours.
• Focuses on the strengths of your team.

The KOLBE A Index is a 36-question survey that reveals the individual mix of striving instincts; it measures individual energies in:

• Fact Finder – Gathering and sharing of information.
• Follow through – Sorting and Storing Information.
• Quick Start – Dealing with risk and uncertainty.
• Implementation – Handling space and intangibles.

The results are a serious of ‘scores’. Mine for instance is 6/3/8/3, this isn’t the place to give full analysis, my partner’s is 8/8/1/4 which means we work together well.

Hence the question: What’s your KOLBE?

Some background. Kathy Kolbe is a well-known and highly honoured author and theorist who has been working in the field of human behaviour for nearly 40 years. From her scientific studies of learning differences between children she devised The Kolbe Wisdom™, which has been used by such businesses as Kodak, IBM and Xerox and many others around the world. It is now available to be used with smaller teams.

The Kolbe Wisdom™ is based on the concept that creative instincts are the source of the mental energy that drives people to take specific actions. This mental drive is separate and distinct from passive feelings and thoughts. Creative instincts are manifested in an innate pattern (modus operandi, or MO) that determines each person’s best efforts.

These conative or instinctive traits are what make us get things done. They should be differentiated from the cognitive (knowledge) or the affective (feelings). As Kathy Kolbe has written, “The conative is the clincher in the decision making hierarchy. Intelligence helps you determine a wise choice, emotions dictate what you’d like to buy, but until the conative kicks in, you don’t make a deal – you don’t put your money where your mouth is.”

Conation doesn’t define what you can or can’t do, rather what you will and won’t do.

A person’s MO is quantifiable and observable, yet functions at the subconscious level. MOs vary across the general population with no gender, age or racial bias.

An individual’s MO governs actions, reactions and interactions. The MO also determines a person’s use of time and his or her natural form of communication. Exercising control over this mental resource gives people the freedom to be their authentic selves.

Any interference with the use of this energy reduces a person’s effectiveness and the joy of accomplishment. Stress inevitably results from the prolonged disruption of the flow of this energy. Others can nurture this natural ability but block it by attempting to alter it.

Individual performance can be predicted with great accuracy by comparing instinctive realities, self-expectations and requirements. It will fluctuate based on the appropriateness of expectations and requirements.

When groups of people with the right mix of MOs function interactively, the combined mental energy produces synergy. Such a team can perform at a higher level than is possible for the same group functioning independently.

Team performance is accurately predicted by a set of algorithms that determine the appropriate balance and make up of MOs.

Leaders can optimise individual and group performance by:

• Giving people the freedom to be themselves.
• Assigning jobs suited to individual strengths.
• Building synergistic teams.
• Reducing obstacles that cause debilitating stress.
• Rewarding committed use of instinctive energy.
• Allowing for the appropriate use of time.
• Communicating in ways that trigger the effective use of the natural, universal and unbiased energy of creative instincts.

Any (dental) team is as good as:

• The conative fit each individual has with his or her individual role.
• The members are, in accurately predicting the differences between each other.
• The management of the team is, in using the talent available.

In dentistry the use of Kolbe does not only help build the right teams. When the concepts are understood and applied to clinical situations or ones of patient choice and treatment planning then resistance can be handled and the correct way of presentation used.

There are only four fully trained and accredited KOLBE Consultants in the UK.

There is only one experienced in working with Dentists and their teams.

If you would like to find out more about using these fantastic tools in your practice or if you would be interested in a presentation to your study group or society contact Alun at alun@alunrees.com or on 07778148583.

First published in Apex the on-line Dental Journal from the Dental Learning Hub.

Andrew Carnegie (Attributed)

I was made aware of this quote by Seth Godin’s blog Losing Andrew Carnegie

Carnegie apparently said,  “Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors……Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.”

Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this?

Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual… that’s king. In fact, shareholders demand it.

It turns out that success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.

Catching up on email this morning I came across the most recent film from Nic Askew. Nic’s films have been a source of thought and inspiration to me for several years and I recommend them regularly. This chimed so perfectly with the way I’m feeling I felt I wanted to share it. For more of Nic’s work take a look at www.soulbiographies.com or www.leadershiponfilm.com or follow Nic’s Blog

‘MORE’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

What one can be, one must be.”

Abraham Maslow

]]> http://www.alunrees.com/blog/the-monday-morning-quote-57/feed/ 0 http://www.alunrees.com/blog/the-monday-morning-quote-56/ http://www.alunrees.com/blog/the-monday-morning-quote-56/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:02:38 +0000 alun http://www.alunrees.com/?p=1794 I am grateful to my friend Kathryn Thomas for sending me this week’s quote.

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

—Unknown

Sometimes it’s the stories about the little people that, more accurately than any number of polls or policy research papers, illustrate exactly the kind of society we live in.

So let me tell you the desperately sad tale of a man named Brian Gilfillan, a 36-year-old medical records supervisor. Mr Gilfillan, a quiet, blameless soul, who lived with his parents, worked all his adult life in the records department of NHS Fife.

He cared about his job and the smooth running of the department, to the extent that he regularly worked extra hours and took work home to correct errors made by others. In other words, he was one of the sons of Martha — those who toil as anonymous, dedicated backstops for the rest of us.

One of his jobs was to ensure that there was sufficient stationery, even when his line manager, Anne Starkie, was absent. One day, however, Mrs Starkie discovered that, while she was away, he had signed her name on an order for maternity forms.

Mrs Starkie, being sadly representative of a certain type of NHS middle management, decided that this was a breach of trust. She contacted human resources, who advised her to hold an investigatory hearing. At this and a subsequent hearing, Mr Gilfillan admitted that he had “forged” her name 11 times to make sure enough stationery was available for the department.

Time, surely, for a mild rebuke, an apology and an end to the matter. But oh, no, not Mrs Starkie. It was time for a witch-hunt. She decided that his actions were fraudulent, although there was no question of personal gain. The hearings continued, and her own line manager decreed that, since it had taken “a lot of probing” to get Mr Gilfillan to accept fraud, his actions amounted to serious misconduct.

Perhaps, with a sinking heart, you can guess the rest. The wheels of the NHS disciplinary juggernaut began to turn. The hearings — during which Mrs Starkie was, variously, a complainer, a judge and a prosecutor within a short space of time — increased. Six months later Mr Gilfillan received a letter that, for the first time, raised the possibility that he could be dismissed and asked him to attend another hearing.

The day before the hearing, he gave his parents money for his digs and left for work. He never arrived. The next day, October 28, 2008, his body was found hanging from a tree in the hospital grounds in Kirkcaldy. Killed, one is entitled to conclude, at least in part, by a culture of institutional zealotry within an organisation colonised by some insensitive people.

At the inquiry into his death, NHS Fife was accused by the Crown of acting “shoddily” — which I suspect may yet prove the understatement of the year. If the matter had been dealt with rationally and proportionately, the Crown said, none of this would have happened.

Under questioning, the NHS jobsworths conceded that if Mr Gilfillan had signed his own name, or placed the letters “pp” before his lamentable line manager’s name, he would not have broken any rules. They also conceded that there was no written protocol for ordering stationery when Mrs Starkie was absent, nor had they taken legal advice on whether Mr Gilfillan’s actions constituted fraud.

In a judgment this week, after the inquiry, the presiding sheriff spoke caustically of procedural failings, fundamental errors by managers and lack of training. Mr Gilfillan’s actions, the sheriff said, were neither serious misconduct nor fraudulent, and a first warning should have sufficed.

So what does this story tell us? A depressing amount, for a start, about the NHS where bullying is prevalent — according to figures in the Health Service Journal, the problem costs the organisation more than £325 million a year — but rarely exposed like this. Many of us will know people employed in some capacity by the NHS who have been fingered by Stalin.

If Britain is broken — and I’m not altogether sure that it is, not in the way that the Conservatives would have it — then part of the fracture is because we have created a world so full of systems and structures that these things have taken on a life far more important than the people who inhabit them. We have become locked into doing process and utterly rubbish at doing humanity.

Even more worrying is that rules disempower people to the point where the human race becomes genetically weakened. The ambition is no longer to get the job done; it is to make sure that the ten commandments of management are not defiled. Stupid people can do this, so stupid people are hired.

Such attitudes are toxic to any kind of entrepreneurialism, and probably the reason why few good brains go into the public sector and too few young people, raised in such a culture, start their own businesses. In the private sector, where journalists are among millions who spend their lives “forging” line managers’ signatures to obtain stationery or short-circuit trivial red tape, we would not last ten minutes if we did everything by the rules.

But we must watch out. Mr Gilfillan’s fate should serve as warning that initiative is now officially rated as a dangerous vice.

Are these things related?

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7213118/NHS-managers-numbers-rise-at-twice-rate-of-doctors-report-finds.html

Numbers of senior managers in the NHS have almost doubled in a decade compared with a 35 per cent increase in doctors and nurses as ‘fixation’ with the market means health service is bogged down in red tape, a report said….

Say customer service and the one organisation that springs to many minds is John Lewis. The retailer pipped other retail rivals to the top slot in a recent poll by the Institute of Customer Service for customer satisfaction, closely followed by grocery stablemate Waitrose.

Called the UK Customer Satisfaction Index, the poll found four out of the top ten brands recognised for customer service were retailers, prompting the researchers to assume the sector as a whole had redoubled its efforts to serve their customers well in an attempt to stave off the effects of the economic downturn. Certainly John Lewis has done better than most.

What is also interesting is six out of the top ten places have been shared by three companies – JLP, Marks & Spencer and Virgin, suggesting there may be a relationship between strong brands and the perception of good service. These three brands have been well known for good customer service in the past and it’s possible there is a self-fulfilling prophesy at work here. Customers expect these brands to give good service and so they receive it.

Nonetheless, there’s no real substitute for a strong basic philosophy for good service at ground-level, as Victoria Simpson, development manager for customer service at John Lewis confirms.

She explained the retailer’s reputation for good customer service is built on the concept being a core part of its corporate culture. It’s not delivered from the top-down, she said. Front line staff are expected to make decisions affecting customer service by themselves. They are encouraged to come up with ideas to improve customer service, which are fed back up to managers.

Crucially, John Lewis is also known for its employee satisfaction as well and Simpson explains this goes hand- in-hand with the service partners (JLP does not use the words staff or employees. Every member of the company is also a shareholder and they are given a yearly dividend out of the company’s profits) give to customers. A happy and engaged workforce passes that satisfaction on to customers.

Just as anywhere else, John Lewis’ corporate culture on customer service has to be taught to new joiners, who are paired with more experienced staff to learn the retailer’s way of treating customers. This buddy system is supported by an ongoing training programme, which is continually updated as staff develop their customer service approaches.

Simpson has a few words of advice to other retailers and other businesses. They may seem obvious, but she’s not certain they are followed as rigorously by John Lewis’ rivals. As it’s John Lewis at the top of the pile and not some other retailer, she may have a point.

1. Ask customers what they want and listen to their response. Get their feedback through a multiplicity of channels, including the shop floor.
2. Actually do something with the information about that is fed back. It’s tempting to feel that once the information has been gathered, the job is done. Your processes and culture need to be altered as a result.
3. Talk to front-line staff. They have insights no one else can form. It makes them feel good too and hopefully they will pass that feeling on to customers.

George Bernard Shaw – Man and Superman