A founder I’ll call Dr. John ran a practice that, by every visible measure, was working. Their revenue and patient flow was steady. He invested in the latest technology which made his practice stand out in the industry. If you walked through the door on a Tuesday afternoon, you would have seen a busy, seemingly well-run office. From every account, this practice was doing fine, everyone pulling their weight and making it work. But, when Kolbe stepped in and had the opportunity to measure the team’s conative data the results were shocking. 100 percent of them were sitting in high conative stress. He had no idea. Neither did his office manager who BTW, didn’t want to measure anything.
You may be asking, what is conative stree and why is it a big deal?
It’s the hidden strain wearing down your team while every dashboard you trust says they’re fine, and that gap between looking healthy and actually being healthy has a dollar amount attached to it draining your budget every single quarter.
Sit with that gap for a second, because it’s the whole point of this piece. There was a wide distance between what Dr. John believed about his team and what was really going on inside it. That gap was wide enough to cost him his back up plan, Dr. Laura. And he never saw her exit coming until she was gone.
Let’s talk about why that happens, because the part everyone glosses over is the part that should keep you up at night. Dr. John didn’t run these assessments because he thought something was wrong in his practice or on the teams. He ran it because he went to an event and the speaker suggested it and it sounded like something fun for the team to do. He’s the kind of leader who loves a new idea and says yes without thinking too hard about where it might lead. He wasn’t bracing for bad news. He wasn’t planning to fix anything either. In his mind, this was just a great little exercise. And that small detail matters more than it looks, because the trouble under his practice was truly invisible to him, for a reason that has almost nothing to do with how sharp he is. Conative friction is like a carbon monoxide leak in your house, it’s colorless, odorless but highly dangerous and destructive if not uncovered or dealt with swiftly.
The thing you can’t measure by looking harder
Most leaders judge their people on two things without ever giving those things names.
The first is how smart someone is. The fancy word for this is cognitive, and it just means what a person knows and how well they think. It’s the sharp hire with the good credentials.
The second is how someone seems to feel. The fancy word for this is affective, and it just means what a person cares about, values, their attitudes and wants. It’s your read on whether they look motivated, happy to be there, glad to have the job.
Those two things feel like the whole picture, because they’re the two we have words for and the two we can pick up on in a hallway chat.
But there’s a third thing, and it’s the one quietly running everything. It’s called conation. Conation is the natural way a person takes action when they’re free to be themselves. It is not about how smart they are. It isn’t about how they feel about the work. It’s about how they’re naturally wired to solve problems, make decisions and strive. It’s how they get things done. Some people need to dig into the facts before they’ll move. Some need a clear system and a set standard before anything feels safe to start. Some, like Dr. John, are built to jump in, take the risk, and figure it out as they go and some need to get concrete tangible and hands on. Not one of these is better than another.
And here’s the trap hiding inside that. You can’t see conative stress by watching someone work. Conative stress is the strain a person carries when their job forces them to work against the way they’re built, day after day. The hard part is that a person under that strain still shows up. They still do good work. They still smile in the staff meeting. They just burn a little hotter inside every day, until the wiring finally gives out.
This is not the same as a motivation problem, or a bad attitude, or someone who won’t take coaching. Those things live in that feelings space we talked about, the affective one. And those are the reasons leaders reach for, because they’re familiar. When a leader says “she just wasn’t the right fit” or “the chemistry was off,” what they’re usually describing, without the words to name it, is a job that was built against the way that person works from the very first day.
Why the person in charge is the last to know
Here’s the elephant leaders are avoiding. A leader sees their whole company through their own wiring. And the view from the top is the most skewered view in the building.
Dr. John is built to move fast, switch directions, and run on a little chaos. In Kolbe, that fast-moving, jump-right-in instinct has a name. It’s called initiating Quick Start. When we mapped the whole practice, Dr. John turned out to be the only initiating Quick Start in the building. Everyone around him was built for facts, systems, and risk avoidance. He was the one person whose instincts were fully fed by the way the place ran. The constant pivoting and improvising that made his day great was the exact thing wearing everyone else down a few feet away. What he saw as a normal, busy pace was, for a clinician built for systems and order, a daily fight just to get through. He wasn’t looking at a broken team. He was looking at his team through a lens shaped to fit only himself. And through that lens, everything looked fine, because it really was fine, for him.
This is why having his office manager agree with him wasn’t the comfort it sounds like. She told him everything was running smoothly. And when a leader hears that from the person who knows the daily grind better than anyone, he hears proof that he’s right. But here’s what the data actually showed. The office manager who swore the team was fine was carrying some of the highest strain on the whole staff. She wasn’t lying to him. She either couldn’t name the weight she was under, or she’d quietly decided that keeping the peace was safer than saying it out loud. That’s the trap hiding inside agreement at the top. Sometimes it means two people share the same blind spot. And sometimes it means a team has learned that looking fine is the safest thing it can do, while a confident leader mistakes that act for good health.
So when you tell me your team is doing well, my first question isn’t whether you’re right. My question is how do you know. And whether the way you know is anything more than your own gut read, running through your own instinctive glasses. Because the friction that drains the most money is invisible to the exact person with the power to fix it.
When the data is bigger than you bargained for
When the results came back, Dr. John was truly surprised. He hadn’t expected to see his whole team sitting in high conative stress. And the bigger problem was that he had to make a decision he didn’t plan on having to make now that he was holding the data.
Seeing the data is one thing. Preparing to move a whole team back into alignment is a completely different one, and it’s real. It looks like redesigning roles so the work fits the people, shifting who’s responsible for what, and having a few uncomfortable talks about who sits where and why. None of that is a weekend project. And none of it was anything he’d signed up for when he agreed to a fun experiment he heard a speaker share about.
So he did what a lot of leaders do when the data turns out to be heavier than they expected. He found a reason to set it back down. Sometimes that reason sounds like being too busy to deal with it right now. Other times it shows up as a quiet hope that a problem this big can be fixed with something small and cheap. A lunch and learn or maybe a team-building afternoon, possibly inviting a motivational speaker to come fire everyone up for a week. Those gestures feel like action, and they let a leader tell himself he handled it. But they change almost nothing. The mismatch is built into the shape of the jobs themselves, and you can’t cater or pep-talk your way out of a seat that was designed against the way a person is built.
Here’s where the math turns devastating. Every few months that data sat untouched, the losses kept stacking up. Dr. Laura couldn’t take it any longer, she saw the data too, she knew the collapse was coming and she didn’t want the burnout to happen to her next. So she left. She was a seasoned clinician who showed up energized and ready to build something real. She walked out because the gap between the practice she thought she was joining and the one she actually found was too wide to keep absorbing. Replacing someone at her level runs well into the six figures once you count recruiting, paperwork, lost production, and the months her seat sits empty. That’s the number you can see. The number you can’t see includes all the redo work nobody wrote down in the months before she quit, the staff who stayed but quietly checked out, and the growth that never showed up, because a practice running on this much friction can only keep itself afloat. It can’t grow.
He saw all of it on the page. He set it down anyway, because doing the real work felt more expensive than living with the leak. It almost always does. Right up until the quarter your most valuable person hands you a resignation you never saw coming, and walks a six figure hole in your bottom line straight out the door.
The question worth sitting with
I’m not writing this to tell you your team is secretly miserable. Yours might be in genuinely good shape. What I’m asking is whether your confidence that things are fine is built on something you’ve actually measured, or just on the fact that nothing has visibly broken yet.
And if you have measured it, or you decide to, the harder question comes right after. What will you actually do with what you find? The leaders who lose the most here are rarely the ones who never looked. More often they’re the ones who looked, felt the weight of what they saw, and then grabbed the cheapest thing on the shelf so the discomfort would go away. Knowing and then choosing to do nothing is a more expensive place to stand than never knowing at all, because now the clock is running, and you’re the one who started it.
So let’s say your people are working hard and the needle still isn’t moving the way it should. Or there’s a friction in the building you can feel but can’t quite name. Or you’ve already lost someone important and never fully understood why. If that’s you, what you’re looking at is not a people problem and this is what should change how you see your own team, because when we looked at Dr. John’s practice, the raw makeup was basically sound. A balanced mix of instincts was there. The talent was real. The right wiring was sitting in the building the whole time. What was missing was the design that connected the work to the way those people were actually built. That disconnection is what created the strain. And it has a dollar amount attached to it every single quarter.
The most dangerous place to be is certain. Dr. John was certain right up until the data proved him wrong. And even then, the certainty cost him before he was willing to let it go.
If any of this landed a little too close, that’s worth paying attention to. The good news is you don’t have to guess, and you don’t have to live with a leak you can’t find.
We have an amazing opportunity for you to uncover the leak, it’s our 14-Day Strategic Alignment Audit. In just 14 days, we map your team’s natural execution styles, the way each person is actually built to get work done, against the projects that matter most to you right now. Then we pinpoint the friction that’s quietly stalling your progress and show you exactly where it’s coming from. You walk away with a clear Go/No-Go roadmap, so every seat on your team is set up to win, whether you’re rescuing an initiative that’s slipping or taking the risk out of a major launch.
You can start the conversation by reaching me directly at support@aliciacouri.com. Let’s find the leak while it’s still a leak and not a resignation.