The Profit Leak Blog

Every leader has had the conversation. The high performer walks into the office, hands over the resignation, and the leader's first thought is: "I didn't see this coming." They didn't see it coming because they were watching the wrong indicator. The resignation is the lagging indicator. By the time it lands, the top performer has been mentally gone for an average of six months — talking to recruiters, updating their LinkedIn, taking calls during lunch. The decision was made l

Every leader believes they’re doing a good job. Most of them are right — partially. But there’s a gap between what leaders think is happening on their teams and what their teams actually experience. And that gap has a cost. At SKOR, we measure this gap directly. Leaders and Individual Contributors answer matched questions about the same team dynamics — recognition, goals, feedback quality, communication, accountability. When we compare the answers, the pattern is remarkably c

How a 1-800-GOT-JUNK franchise found — and fixed — the blind spot engagement surveys missed. Drew Trautman is the kind of leader who pays attention. As president of Lions Environmental Services, a 1-800-GOT-JUNK franchise based in Northern New Jersey, he’d invested in his team, built a strong culture, and ran engagement surveys twice a year through the franchisor. But something wasn’t adding up. "We realized we were trying to solve the problem by doing more of the same stuff.

Every company has a line item for compensation. For benefits. For office leases, software licenses, travel budgets, and coffee subscriptions. But there’s a cost that dwarfs most of those line items and appears nowhere on the P&L: The profit leaking from how teams work together.

The pattern is predictable: January resets, February grinds, March accelerates — and every friction point that got managed around for three months is now loud. Missed handoffs. Accountability that existed in theory. The feedback nobody gave in Q1 because there was always something more urgent.

This weekend, everyone loses an hour of sleep and spends the next week complaining about it. Nobody talks about the other hours. The ones leaking out of your teams every single week — quietly, invisibly, without ever showing up on a report.

We spent the first two months of the year doing something most companies never do. We slowed down and looked at the actual mechanics of team performance.

Your team isn't listening to your all-hands speech about "long-term thinking" or "innovation." They're watching who got promoted. Who got the bonus. Who got called out. And they're adjusting accordingly.

Think about the worst boss you ever had. You already know where this is going.

Most leaders think their teams are adaptable. The data tells a different story. When we measure Adaptability across hundreds of companies, the average score is 5.8 out of 10. That's not just a "room for improvement" number. It's a profit leak.

Here's what most leaders miss: a growth mindset isn't a nice-to-have cultural value. It's a profit driver. And when it's missing, you're hemorrhaging money in ways that never show up on a P&L.

You've built a team that gets along. No drama. No arguments. Everyone's nice to each other. Meetings are pleasant. People nod in agreement. You're proud of the harmony. But here's what you might be missing: that "harmony" could be hiding your biggest performance killer.