Our leadership team is starting to crack under the emotional weight of due diligence and deal structuring. How do we use conative profiles like the Kolbe Index to keep them productive and focused on their Rocks?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The due diligence phase of a transaction is an intense, emotionally draining experience that can easily cause your leadership team to lose focus and burn out. To keep your team aligned and executing their quarterly Rocks, you must understand their conative profiles.

Leveraging Conative Strengths

Using a tool like the Kolbe Index, you can analyze your team members' natural problem-solving instincts. Aligning diligence tasks with each leader's hardwired conative strengths reduces friction and prevents operational paralysis.

Consider these examples:

• Some leaders are natural Fact Finders who will thrive on gathering and analyzing the massive amounts of data required for diligence.
• Others are Follow Thru personalities who excel at building the temporary systems needed to manage the deal workflow.

Understanding these profiles helps in assigning roles effectively, as discussed in [how do we use the Kolbe A Index to diagnose why our Sales and Operations heads are constantly in conflict over project handoffs](/qa/kolbe-sales-operations-conflict-handoffs). If you have a visionary leader and an Integrator with different conative profiles, you can also leverage this understanding to keep your [AI strategy back on track](/qa/kolbe-profiles-ai-visionary-integrator).

Protecting Time and Focus

It is critical to protect your team's time. Use your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ to identify, discuss, and resolve transaction-related issues quickly, keeping them separate from your core operational discussions. This separation ensures that your team remains focused on running the day-to-day business and hitting their targets. Managing your team's conative energy and maintaining your EOS® meeting pulse helps keep the business healthy and preserves your [valuation throughout the transaction](/qa/why-buyers-pay-more-for-eos-run-businesses).

AI plays a crucial support role in this process:

• AI never sits in the room.
• It works before the Level 10 Meeting to prep the data.
• It works after the meeting to capture and track what was decided.

The 90 minutes of the Level 10 Meeting stay human, focused on your leadership team, the scorecard, the issues list, and the IDS conversation. This focus helps avoid common pitfalls, such as [spending half of your Level 10 Meeting arguing](/qa/how-to-review-scorecard-under-five-minutes) rather than solving problems. It also prevents your Integrator from becoming overwhelmed, as they often [struggle to participate objectively](/qa/should-integrator-facilitate-level-10-meetings) while facilitating.

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• [How do we use the Kolbe A Index to diagnose why our Sales and Operations heads are constantly in conflict over project handoffs?](/qa/kolbe-sales-operations-conflict-handoffs)
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