Our newly promoted Head of Customer Success is a great culture fit and gets and wants the seat, but her Kolbe A profile shows she is a high Quick Start and very low Follow Thru, while the seat roles require meticulous CRM management and structured client onboarding systems. How do we resolve this without demoting her?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic conative mismatch. Your leader has the passion and the intellectual capacity (affective and cognitive alignment), but her natural instincts (conative) are wired to resist detail-oriented systems and repetitive processes. If you keep her in this seat as currently structured, she will eventually burn out from conative stress, and your client retention will suffer.

To resolve this without a demotion, you must restructure the seat or the department to support her natural method of operation. One effective approach is to pair her with an assistant or a direct report who has a high Follow Thru score. This person can own the structural implementation, CRM updates, and system maintenance, while your Head of Customer Success focuses on client relationship building, high-level troubleshooting, and strategy.

You must update her Accountability Chart seat roles to reflect this change. Remove the roles that require deep, detailed execution and replace them with roles focused on relationship strategy, team leadership, and client engagement. If your organization is too small to hire a supporting seat, you must recognize that she does not have the capacity for the seat as it is currently defined. You cannot change a person's conative wiring, so you must either adjust the seat roles or find a different seat on the Accountability Chart where her high Quick Start instincts are a competitive advantage.