We just hired a brilliant VP of Sales who matches our core values, but he is already causing friction on the leadership team because his working style is incredibly chaotic compared to our highly structured processes. How do we resolve this stylistic clash using conation?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Stylistic clashes are rarely about competence or personality; they are usually about conation, which is how people naturally take action. Your new VP of Sales is likely a high Quick Start on the Kolbe Index, meaning they thrive on risk, rapid experimentation, and working without a map.

Meanwhile, your established operations and finance leaders are likely high in Follow Thru or Fact Finder, meaning they need systems, data, and order to function effectively.

To resolve this friction, you must get the entire leadership team to complete and share their Kolbe A Profiles. Draw their individual scores on a whiteboard during your next quarterly session. This visual mapping takes the emotion out of the conflict. It shows your team that the new VP of Sales is not trying to disrupt their work out of malice, but is simply operating from their natural instinctive strengths.

Once everyone understands each other's conative profiles, you can design workflows that leverage these differences. Your Quick Start VP of Sales can generate the ideas and close the deals, while your high Follow Thru team members can build the systems to support that growth.