Your Managers Are the Strategy

In most organizations, the manager is the difference between a team that thrives and one that quietly underperforms. And yet, most leadership teams have no real system for measuring how managers lead.

We track revenue. We track customer churn. We track NPS. But when it comes to the effectiveness of the people who directly shape day-to-day culture, clarity, and execution — we mostly rely on anecdote.

According to Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace Report, global manager engagement has dropped to 27%. That’s a problem on its own. But it gets worse: Gallup also found that 70% of the variance in team engagement is directly tied to the manager. Which means when a manager checks out, the team almost always follows.

Think about the ripple effect — lower productivity, rising turnover, disengagement, missed goals, even safety and compliance issues in some industries. If managers are disengaged, misaligned, or ineffective, your strategy stalls in execution. Culture degrades. Momentum dies slowly.

It’s not that organizations don’t care about leadership — most do. The issue is that leadership performance is rarely measured with the same rigor as other business-critical functions. Instead, it’s often inferred from lagging indicators (retention, team morale) or loosely gathered through annual surveys.

That’s not enough. Especially now.

At SKOR, we’ve seen firsthand how culture and performance are deeply intertwined — and how much of that comes down to the manager. That’s why we built a framework to assess culture through the lens of leadership. Not just whether people are “engaged,” but whether leaders are building environments where people can thrive.

Our approach uses a 50-question assessment — one version for People Leaders, another for Individual Contributors. This lets us measure how leaders lead, and how their teams experience that leadership. The goal isn’t to point fingers — it’s to bring clarity, so leaders know exactly where they’re doing well, and where they need to grow.

We break it down into three core ingredients of workplace culture:

• Cohesion – Is the team aligned on purpose and values?

• Clarity – Are expectations and goals clearly defined?

• Courage – Do people feel safe to speak up, take risks, and learn from failure?

Beneath that are seven critical indicators of team performance — like accountability, adaptability, recognition, and growth mindset — all measurable and benchmarked across teams, departments, and even industries.

Clients are increasingly using this data as part of manager performance reviews and team scorecards. Because if you can measure how a team is functioning, you can coach toward better outcomes.

You don’t need more opinions about your culture. You need better visibility into how your leaders are shaping it.

That’s what SKOR provides — a standardized, data-driven way to measure culture at the team level. If NPS is the benchmark for customer experience, SKOR is becoming the benchmark for workplace culture — with one key difference: it doesn’t just reflect sentiment. It reveals leadership impact.

So ask yourself:

• Do you know which managers are creating high-performing teams?

• Can you spot early signs of leadership breakdown?

• And do you have a system to track it over time?

If not, it may be time to treat leadership like the strategic asset it is — and make it measurable.

🔵 Start with a free SKOR Preview and see how your leaders stack up.