Episode 40: David Kolbe

Most assessments tell you how smart someone is or what they prefer. This one measures something neither of those captures, and it changes how you hire, lead, and scale. Harry Nalbandyan sits down with David Kolbe, CEO of Kolbe Corp, to break down the the instinctive action patterns that stay fixed throughout a person’s life and can’t be trained away. David explains why the cognitive part of the mind is the piece most leaders never account for, and why ignoring it creates the kind of friction that looks like a performance problem but is really a fit problem. Harry shares what happened when his firm ran the Kolbe Index firm-wide during a growth phase: 80 to 85% of their staff scored as initiating fact-finders. For a law firm, that made sense, until Harry, a strong quickstart, couldn’t understand why his ideas weren’t gaining traction at the speed he expected. The assessment didn’t just explain the gap. It gave the team a shared language to work across it. David walks through how to actually use the Kolbe system inside a service business, starting with individual self-awareness, moving to role design, and then team dynamics. The conversation covers why assessment scores don’t shift over a career, what does change, and how leaders who understand their own instinct profile stop fighting their team and start building around them.