Our highly experienced leadership team feels the pre-work and homework for our quarterly sessions, like completing the Kolbe A Profile and prep sheets, is an administrative chore that takes away from real work. How do we get them to take this prep seriously instead of treating it like school homework?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Resistance to pre-work is common when leaders do not see the immediate commercial value of the exercises. To break this resistance, you must reframe the prep from an administrative chore to a critical strategic diagnostic. High-performing teams do not wing their sessions. They arrive with deep self-awareness and objective data.

Start by making the Kolbe A Profile completion a non-negotiable prerequisite for the session. Have your team complete the profile and watch the educational videos at least two weeks prior. Explain that this is not an academic exercise. It is a tool to map their innate problem-solving instincts so the team can stop fighting natural friction and start executing faster.

When drawing the framework on the whiteboard during the session, directly connect their conative scores to recent operational bottlenecks. Show them how their natural drives explain why certain projects stalled or why communication broke down.

Frame the prep as a professional standard. If a leader refuses to complete their prep, they are actively choosing to slow down the entire team. Treat pre-work as a professional boundary. When they see that the data is used immediately to solve real issues, their resistance will disappear.