Conative Cloning is a common problem that can hurt a company’s growth and productivity. People tend to relate best with others who have similar conative strengths, so it’s not uncommon for people to hire others who approach problems or a job similarly. That is conative cloning which results in gaps in the conative strengths of an organization.
One of our clients is a fast-growing, successful, company with annual revenue well over $100 million. They have had two CEOs in the last five years. They did not know what was going wrong.
In learning the conative strengths of their leadership team, we learned that they were experiencing conative cloning. All of them had “long” Quick Start and “short” Follow Thru conative strengths. So, they excelled at innovating, moving at a fast pace, and moving forward in the midst of uncertainty, but they struggled at seeing projects and ideas through to completion and laying out all of the necessary steps for success.
We identified that they needed a leader who could fill the gap in their Follow Thru action mode. They needed an Accommodating – and potentially Initiating – Follow Thru to balance their strengths.
In my financial-advisor coaching program, I worked with an advisor who wanted to hire a junior advisor to take the lead on some of his clients. One of his top candidates was intelligent, experienced, and very personable. But she had a short Follow Thru strength. She was going to struggle to follow multi-step processes and consistently follow systems related to meetings and follow-up action items.
He hired her and saw this play out in the very first client he delegated to her. It damaged the client relationship and required more work from him to fix the systems she had not followed. In this situation, she was ready and willing to do the job. But she was like a fish swimming upstream when it came to following systems and processes.
Identifying conative strengths and filling conative gaps is important in any role in a company – from the CEO to the project manager to the Administrative Assistant.
To learn more about how we can help you identify conative cloning and fill gaps on your team, contact our team.