What training for a half marathon with newborn twins taught a working mom about the muscles high-performing teams use when there's no extra time. After I had my twins, I wanted to get back in shape and feel like myself again. So I signed up for a half marathon. 13.1 miles. Click to watch the video At the time, I was a three-to-five-mile runner. On a good day. My goal wasn't a fast time. It was simple: cross the finish line without walking. I knew where I was starting. I knew where I wanted to finish. What I didn't have was the plan in between, or the time to follow one. I was a working mom with two babies at home. There were no extra hours in my day. The run home Every workday, I commuted home from Midtown to the Upper East Side. One day it hit me: that trip was already in my schedule. So I stopped taking the subway and started running home through Central Park. I couldn't make more time. But I could use the time I had differently. Then came race day. Mile 12 is where everything hurts and walking starts to sound reasonable. That's exactly where my kids were, cheering on the side. I didn't walk. I finished. Looking back, it wasn't willpower that got me there. It was the same handful of muscles we measure in teams, showing up one run at a time. Here's how they played out. The muscles behind the finish line Adaptability: Changing the route, not the clock The standard advice assumes you can carve out long training blocks. I couldn't. Instead of waiting for a lighter season, I changed how I used time I already had. The subway ride became the training run. Nothing was added to my calendar. One habit was swapped for another. Goals & Rewards: A goal that fit where I was I didn't set out to qualify for anything or beat a time. My goal was to finish without walking. It was specific, I could measure it, and it fit my starting point and my life. A goal borrowed from an elite runner would have set me up to fail by week three. Accountability: Showing up for the plan A plan only works if you follow it on the days you don't feel like it. The commute made that easier because the run was built into something I had to do anyway. I didn't have to find motivation to get out the door. I just had to get home. Growth Mindset: From five miles to 13.1 I started as a three-to-five-mile runner and aimed for more than double that. That only works if you believe the gap can close with steady effort, and you accept that some runs will feel worse than others. Progress came one run home at a time. Recognition: Mile 12 Seeing my kids at mile 12 changed the race. Being seen at the hardest moment gave me what I needed to keep going. Teams are no different. Recognition at the right moment is often what turns "almost" into "done." What this means for your team Most teams know their finish line: grow revenue, keep good people, scale without chaos. What they usually wait for is time. A slower quarter. A new hire. A free month to work on how the team operates. That month rarely comes, and the profit leak keeps running. Start with an honest starting line Every good training plan begins with a baseline. For teams, that baseline is often off. Leaders tend to see the team at mile 10 while the team knows it's closer to mile 3. That perception gap is the blind spot, and it's where profit quietly slips away. SKOR measures the 7 Muscles across leaders and teams, shows where those gaps are, and puts a dollar figure on what they cost. Find the right coach Knowing where you stand is only half of it. Like any race, you need a plan built for your team's readiness, not a bigger company's plan copied over. That's why we work with great partners, like Wowledge, who help teams build a plan that matches their readiness and where they want to go. Use the time you already have The best plans don't add more meetings. They change what happens in the ones you already hold: the weekly check-in, the one-on-one, the project kickoff, the way a win gets recognized. Same hours, different plan. Change the route, not the clock I didn't get to the finish line because I found more time. I got there because I knew my starting point, set a goal that fit, and used the time I had differently. Your team can do the same. You don't need more time. You need to know where you're starting, and a plan that fits the time you have. .Find your team's starting line: Get your Profit Leak Number.

Most leaders defend a bad call. Here's what happens when one doesn't. Three words, said out loud, at a podium, in front of the media and everyone who follows the team. Not by a player. By the head coach, about his own decision. Most leaders never say that sentence about themselves — they say it about the market, the timing, someone on their team. Aaron Glenn said it about a call only he had made, and then he did something rarer still: he reversed it, in public, and staked his second season on the reversal. Click to watch the video To understand why that moment matters, you have to know where the New York Jets were standing when he said it. In 2025, the Jets went 3-14. They opened the season 0-7. Over their final five games, they were outscored 188-54. They carry the longest active playoff drought in North American professional sports — 15 years and counting. That's not a bad month. That's a system with a leak in it, and it had been leaking for a long time. The decision Glenn walked back…publicly Glenn was hired for one thing above everything else: he's a defensive mind, four years running a top unit in Detroit, the thing he calls his "superpower." But in year one as a first-time head coach, he made a call — he'd step back from play-calling and hand it off, so he could focus on the bigger picture. The result: the defense finished 31st in the league in points allowed. This offseason, he didn't reframe that decision or quietly work around it. He named it as the mistake it was and took the play sheet back himself. That's Growth Mindset and Accountability working together, and it's worth sitting with — because it's genuinely hard to fake. It's the kind of behavior that rarely shows up in a normal performance review, but it's exactly what our diagnostic is built to surface. Week 1: The first data point New York opened the season with a 23-10 win over Tennessee — their first season-opening win since 2023. Geno Smith went 19-of-24 with zero turnovers, and the offense controlled the ball for nearly 38 minutes. For a team that opened the previous year 0-7, that's not a fluke. It's the first visible evidence that something structural had actually changed. Week 2: The real test, and the honest result Then came Green Bay — a legitimately good team. For three and a half quarters, the Jets looked like a different organization. They built a 17-7 lead in the fourth quarter. Not backed into it — in control of it. Then it slipped away, and it's worth being precise about how. The offense got sacked twice in overtime and stalled on third-and-long, punting from poor field position. That gave Green Bay the ball in Jets territory, and a penalty handed them an easy game-winning field goal. Final: 20-17, Packers, in overtime. It would be tempting to say the defense blew it, or the offense blew it. Neither is true. Two different units broke down in two different ways in the same fifteen minutes — which tells you the work is real but unfinished, on both sides of the ball. The team built enough structure to take a 10-point lead into the fourth quarter against a good opponent. It hasn't yet built the muscle that closes games out under maximum pressure. Progress over perfection: What last year's team couldn't do Run the comparison and the gap is stark. A team that got outscored 188-54 down the stretch of 2025 does not build a double-digit, fourth-quarter lead against a playoff-caliber opponent in Week 2. That team wasn't in the position to blow a lead — it wasn't building leads at all. This year's Jets are in a different conversation entirely: not "can they compete," but "can they finish." What this means for your team (off the field) Here's the honest translation to a workplace, because that's the whole point of measuring this stuff. Most organizations don't lose because they're building nothing. They lose because the thing they built holds up right up until the moment it matters most — the big client call, the tight deadline, the leadership transition — and then two different parts of the business break down in two different ways, and everyone walks away arguing about whose fault it was instead of what actually happened. The Jets' Week 2 loss isn't a story about a bad team. It's a story about a team mid-repair, with real, measurable progress and a real, specific gap still costing them wins. That's precisely what a Profit Leak Number is designed to find in a business: not "are we good or bad," but where, specifically, is the leak — and which of the seven muscles, if strengthened, closes it. Glenn made his bet. The correction already showed up. The next step is finishing what it started — and that's true on a football field, and it's true in every team we work with. Curious how your team scores in Growth Mindset and Accountability? Get your Profit Leak Number.

What a late night 4-hour delay taught me about the seven muscles that separate high-performing teams from everyone else. At 6pm, the first redeye home got cancelled. Not delayed — cancelled. Scrambled to rebook on another airline for an 11pm flight instead. Felt like a win. That didn't last. At 8pm, a text: pushed to 2:40am. An hour later, another text: pushed again, to 3:45am. Anyone who has spent a night like that in an airport knows what usually happens next. People get nasty. They get rude to gate agents who didn't cause the problem and can't fix it. Strangers stop being polite to each other the second the floor becomes a bed. That's not what happened. What happened instead was one of the more impressive displays of teamwork I've seen — from an airline crew and a terminal full of exhausted strangers who had never met each other and had every excuse to fall apart. It wasn't because everyone was too tired to be a jerk. It was the seven muscles of high-performing teams, showing up in real time, at 3am, with no one in the building calling it that. Here's how it played out. Someone told us the truth, every 30 minutes Starting around 11pm, the airline had a person stationed at the gate giving live updates — not just that the flight was delayed, but why: weather up the chain, a late inbound aircraft, crew scheduling. Every 30 minutes, another update, delay or not. That's Transparency and Accountability doing the heaviest lifting of the night. Nobody was left refreshing an app and guessing. Nobody was left to assume the worst. The airline owned the situation out loud, on a schedule, instead of going quiet and hoping people would calm down on their own. A terminal full of people can tolerate almost any delay if someone keeps telling them the truth about it. No food, no beds, no complaints By midnight, most of the food and beverage options were shuttered. People were stretched across chairs and floor space trying to sleep. It was, by any normal measure, a miserable few hours. And yet the mood held. That's Adaptability — the muscle that shows up not as a plan, but as a willingness to adjust to a bad situation without demanding someone fix your discomfort first. Nobody was pretending it was fine. They just adjusted and kept going. The ultimatum that could have gone badly, and didn't When the inbound plane finally got close, the gate agent leveled with everyone: this would need to be a fast turnaround, or the crew would time out on their hours and the flight wouldn't go anywhere that night. To make the numbers work, they needed about 25 carry-ons gate-checked — no time to pull bags back off the plane if they didn't fit. This is the moment that usually goes sideways on an airplane. It didn't. People understood the assignment and did it — quickly, without arguing about which bag was "essential." That's Accountability and Goals & Rewards working together: a clear ask, a clear reason, and a group that treated the shared goal as more important than their individual preference. Everyone knew their role The plane boarded fast and orderly. No shoving, no confusion about zones, no one holding up the line. The crew and every passenger in that jet bridge had the exact same goal — get this plane on its way to New York— and it showed in how cleanly everyone executed their part of it. That's what Goals & Rewards looks like when it's actually shared: not a poster in a break room, but a hundred strangers moving in sync because they understood the stakes were the same for everyone. The pilot didn't skip the apology Once we were seated, the pilot came on and explained, plainly and in detail, why the flight had been so delayed — and apologized for it. Not a vague "thanks for your patience." An actual explanation, from the person actually flying the plane. That's Accountability and Transparency again, closing the loop the airline had opened back at the gate. The story was consistent from the first update to the last. Four hours late, and people were just glad to be moving — because the whole night, they'd been told the truth about why. The applause at the end When we landed, the pilot came back on and asked us to thank the co-pilot and crew — they'd flown well past their scheduled hours to get everyone home. The plane erupted in applause. That's Recognition, and it's the muscle that's easiest to skip when everyone is exhausted and just wants off the plane. Nobody skipped it. A crew that went out of its way got acknowledged for it, out loud, by the people they'd done it for. No one had trained for that night By the time we landed, nobody was less tired, but four hours in, a gate agent had kept talking instead of going quiet, a terminal full of strangers had adjusted instead of complaining, two hundred people had done what was asked without arguing, boarding had run like a drill, and a plane had clapped for its own crew — with no playbook and no team-building retreat behind any of it. The muscles were just already there, or they weren't. That night, they were. Most teams never find out which muscles they actually have until something breaks. The difference between a crisis that brings out the best in a team and one that brings out the worst usually isn't the crisis itself. It's whether Accountability, Transparency, Adaptability, Recognition, and Goals & Rewards were already strong before it hit. Your team probably won't get tested in a jet bridge at 3:40am. But it's being tested somewhere, every week — in a missed handoff, a deadline that slips quietly, feedback that never gets said out loud. The only question is whether you can see it before it costs you. Curious where your team would land at 3am? Get your Profit Leak Number.

It's back-to-school season. Somewhere between graduation and the first job, learning quietly became optional, unmeasured, and self-funded. Nobody decided that. It's costing more than anyone has calculated. Nobody questions the September machine Right now millions of parents are buying backpacks, checking supply lists, and taking first-day photos on the porch. Nobody asks whether it's worth it. Nobody demands the ROI on a fourth-grade curriculum. We spend thirteen years and an extraordinary amount of money on a system built around a single assumption: a person's job is to get better, and someone has to be responsible for making sure they do. Then at 21 or 22, that entire machine switches off. Permanently. Without an announcement. We hand someone a laptop, a login, and a set of quarterly targets, and learning becomes optional, unmeasured, and largely self-funded for the next forty years. What school has that your company doesn't Strip away the sentiment and look at the mechanics. School works because it has four things in place at once. A curriculum. Somebody decided, in advance, what this person should be able to do by June. Someone accountable for progress. A teacher, by name, whose job is that child's development. A report card. Measured, written down, twice a year. Someone who reads the report card. A parent who will absolutely ask about the C in math. Now go through that list for anyone on your payroll. Most companies have none of the four. Some have a course library and an annual review, which is not a curriculum and not a report card. And nearly all of them describe themselves as places that value learning and growth. Here's the uncomfortable version. For most of the people reading this, the last person formally accountable for whether you got better at anything was a high school teacher earning a fraction of what you make now. You didn't stop learning because you graduated. You stopped because nobody has been responsible for it since you were seventeen. The gap, in numbers This isn't a philosophical complaint. It's measurable, and the measurements are brutal. Seventy-one percent of organizations say they recognize the need to reskill and upskill their people. Thirty-one percent are actively investing in doing it. Forty points of daylight between what leaders believe and what leaders fund. And the return isn't in dispute. Gallup and Bersin research puts organizations with a strong learning culture at 11% higher profitability and twice the retention. Run that against your own payroll instead of someone else's case study. A 250-person company carrying $25M in payroll has roughly $2.75M of annual performance sitting inside that 11%. Add the turnover you're currently writing off as a cost of doing business. Nobody budgets for that. Nobody reports it. It never appears on a P&L, because a leak never does. It shows up as a number that was always slightly lower than it should have been, in a business that looked fine. The part that will make people uncomfortable Our diagnostic data keeps surfacing something harder to hear than the 40-point gap. That 31% is self-graded. When we ask People Leaders whether they encourage their teams to try new approaches, including ones that might not work, they score themselves high. When we ask their teams the matched question, in the same words, the number comes back materially lower. Same with feedback. Leaders believe the feedback they give helps people improve. Their teams rate its usefulness well below what the leader assumed. Growth Mindset is one of the most consistent blind spots we measure. Not because leaders are lying. Because intention feels like behavior from the inside, and only behavior is visible from the outside. Which means a real share of the companies counting themselves in the 31% belong in the 69%. They bought the licenses. They ran the program. They have the completion report. Their people never experienced any of it as growth. They haven't asked. So they don't know. The same situation, the opposite diagnosis Watch what happens when a nine-year-old stops progressing in math. We look at the classroom. We ask about the teaching, the materials, whether something changed at home. The child is not written off at nine. Watch what happens when a 34-year-old stops progressing at work. We decide they've plateaued. We put them on a plan. We manage them out and backfill the role at a premium. Same situation. Opposite diagnosis. One of those two responses is expensive, and it's the one we've normalized. I'm not arguing every underperformer is a coaching problem. Some people are in the wrong seat and both parties know it. But if you can't distinguish a person who has stopped growing from a person nobody has invested in for six years, you will keep firing the second one and calling it a performance decision. Seven subjects. Seven muscles. Your kid comes home in November with a card that grades seven subjects. Imperfect, occasionally unfair, but written down, comparable to last term, and impossible to argue with in the abstract. Your team has seven things that determine whether it performs: accountability, transparency, healthy conflict, growth mindset, adaptability, recognition, and clarity on goals and rewards. Almost no team has ever been graded on any of them. We're comfortable measuring a child's progress twice a year and comfortable never measuring an entire department's. Then we express surprise when performance drifts. Why this specific budget always loses There's an honest reason learning gets cut first, and it's worth naming. Learning is the only investment whose return lives inside a person who can leave. A machine can't resign. Software can't take the upgrade to a competitor. So leaders treat capability building as generosity rather than capital allocation, and generosity gets cut without anyone having to defend the decision. The research answers the objection directly. Strong learning cultures don't lose people at twice the rate. They keep them at twice the rate. The fear of investing in someone who might walk out the door is one of the largest reasons they walk out the door. Three moves worth making this quarter Audit the calendar, not the budget. How many hours last month did your leaders spend in conversations that changed how someone works? If that's unclear, that's the answer. Spend is easy to point at. Time is what actually got invested. Measure the gap, not the intention. Ask your leaders how well they develop their people. Ask their teams the identical question. Put both numbers side by side. The distance between them is the most useful figure you'll see this year, and no engagement survey will hand it to you. Fund the manager before the platform. Most learning budgets buy content. Almost none buy manager capability. Nobody learns from a course library. They learn from whoever runs their one-on-ones. A learning management system is not a learning culture. It's a compliance receipt. The question worth sitting with Growth mindset has become the cheapest thing a leader can claim. Say it in an all-hands, put it in the values, and you've spent nothing. The 40-point gap between 71% and 31% is what happens when belief costs nothing. In November, your kids will bring home a card that says exactly how they're progressing, and you'll read every line of it. Your team will bring home nothing, because nobody wrote it. If your people were asked how well you develop them, would their number match yours? Most leaders are confident it would. Our data says otherwise, and the difference has a dollar figure attached. Not a feeling. Not a score you file away. A Profit Leak Number you act on.

Guest Post by Michael Perrino, SKOR's summer intern and junior at Lehigh University What a summer inside SKOR taught one intern about the most expensive problem in business: it's the same one that costs teams championships. A few weeks into my internship, I sat in on a client meeting and watched a business owner see his Profit Leak Number for the first time. It was in the millions. The room went quiet in that specific way rooms go quiet when something abstract suddenly becomes very real. And the strangest part? Sitting in the corner taking notes, I wasn't thinking about business at all. I was thinking about my high school lacrosse team. We had talent. We had experienced players and a real shot at a strong season. What we had underneath that was quieter: guys who wouldn't hold each other accountable, frustrations that never got said out loud, effort that went unrecognized until people stopped giving it. Nobody could point to any of it on a stat sheet, so nobody fixed it. We underperformed, and to this day most of us would struggle to explain exactly why. That lacrosse team had a leak. It just didn't have a number. The thirty-second version of what SKOR does SKOR is a Profit Leak Diagnostic. It measures how a team actually behaves across the seven drivers of performance we call the 7 Muscles: Accountability, Transparency, Healthy Conflict, Growth Mindset, Adaptability, Recognition, and Goals and Rewards. Then it compares how leaders believe the team is performing against how the team says it is performing, surfaces the blind spots between the two, and converts the gap into a dollar figure. Not a feeling. Not a score you file away. A number you act on. I spent my summer on the growth and operations side: building partner onboarding, writing the newsletter, producing videos, and sitting in on client meetings. My responsibilities changed almost weekly. What never changed was the pattern I kept seeing, in clients and in my own work. The dysfunction is the same. Only the jerseys change. Here is what surprised me most in those client meetings. The companies varied in industry, size, tenure, and success. The dysfunction didn't. The same accountability gaps, the same conversations nobody was having, the same effort going unrecognized. The exact patterns that held back a high school lacrosse team in New Jersey show up inside established, profitable companies run by serious professionals. Being successful, it turns out, doesn't mean you're not leaking profit. It usually just means you can afford not to notice. There was no moment where it clicked. That was the lesson. The hardest stretch of my summer was a month spent on video production. I put weeks of work into one audio generation tool after another, one editing workflow after another, and got nowhere. Every time we found something we thought was the one, it wasn't good enough, and we changed strategy again. I kept waiting for the moment it would all click. It never came. What came instead was a version that finally matched what we had envisioned, built out of every attempt that didn't. That is what a growth mindset actually looks like up close. Not a breakthrough. A tolerance for being uncomfortable long enough to earn the result. SKOR practices this constantly: we are always testing new tools and rebuilding workflows as capabilities improve, and staying ahead of the curve means regularly abandoning things that still feel familiar. At a small company, honesty is the quality control Here is something a classroom can't teach you. At a small company, there aren't many sets of eyes between your draft and the finished product. That makes transparency and healthy conflict operational necessities, not culture-deck words. The feedback I got all summer was direct, because the priority was always the quality of the work, never the comfort of a safe response. It stung sometimes. It also made everything I produced better, faster. I now understand why those two muscles sit in SKOR's framework: teams that can't be honest with each other are quietly paying for it. The finance major's take I'm a finance major, so I'll end with the thing that convinced me most. A line item is powerful because it's inarguable. It's black and white in a way that most conversations about teams and culture never are. That is exactly what the Profit Leak Number does for team dysfunction: it takes the most persistent, hardest-to-see drag on performance and gives it the one format every business owner takes seriously. I watched that number land on real leaders this summer, and the reaction was never a shrug. It was a plan. My lacrosse team never got a number. Most teams don't. If yours hasn't, the question worth sitting with is the one I watched land in that client meeting: what is the gap between how you think your team is performing and what your team would say? There's a dollar figure attached to the answer. Find out what your's looks like. Try the Profit Leak Calculator.

I started 7 companies, 3 of them failed. It all led me to this. Last week SKOR turned 3. The honest story of why it exists starts long before that. I spent 25 years building companies before this one. Eddie's Internet Solutions (at 21 years old, helping people get on the information superhighway 🙂 — that was 1996), Unique World (at 24), Unique World Software, Tinybeans (co-founder), LayPay (co-founder), TurboViz (co-founder), and now SKOR. Different industries, different markets, different decades…the same thing quietly drained profit from all of them. And it wasn’t something you could see on the P&L. In my personal life, I played a lot of team sports growing up — cricket (I’m Australian in case you didn’t know), basketball — so I learned a ton about teams. On top of that I was always one to measure things, monitor, set goals, review goals. I was one of those dads who sat with their 12 year old and encouraged them to set their goals and look at them daily. It’s no different in business. My time at Unique World and Tinybeans is where I learned the most about teams in business and their connection to performance and profit. At Tinybeans we used to do a ton of engagement surveys and 360s to measure the team and our business. What I learned through both those tools was that they were ineffective when it came to driving performance. The engagement surveys were interesting, and we got a lot of qualitative data, but we struggled to really understand the root cause of what was holding teams back. We had lots of comments and frankly spent half the time in results review meetings, focused on who said what and how they said it, etc. Whereas what we should have been focused on is what was the cause of the team challenges, what was holding them back from accelerating their performance. The recommendations were generic too. Improving communications. Well, that's easy to say but difficult to do, because I could give you 10 different approaches for improving communications. Sometimes communications turned up as a recommendation, but the root cause was people not understanding their accountabilities and their goals. Very different lenses for action. We would often complete the recommendations and then the engagement score was the same. There was often very little correlation between engagement and performance. Why are we measuring engagement again? Another pet peeve of mine was that the engagement score was a lagging indicator. ENPS, also lagging. Trust surveys, happiness surveys, vibe surveys — all lagging. The problem with lagging is that you're looking at the past, and when you're looking at the past it leads you to symptoms. The 360s were worse. Exhausting, time-consuming, difficult to really execute against. Rotate the leaders, get many people involved in the feedback. And when we got to the feedback part and people were listening, it often came with a sense of defensiveness and very little actioning. As I was beginning to think about this area, I must have spoken to 50+ CEOs about teams and driving high performance and how you get the most out of your people. The biggest struggle I heard was that although they said their people were important, they really didn't back it up by the investment. Few had leadership programs, manager training, employee development. When I asked where people and culture turned up in their investment pool, few had it high on the list, some, not at all. Ironically many said they had a great culture and low churn. That's like saying we have an incredible all-star team but don't need the coaches and people are so comfortable that they never want to leave. This led me to the core problem I was looking to solve with SKOR: connecting team behaviors to dollars. The first year or two I had a very different value prop to what we have today. Different positioning, different product delivery. I won't bore you with the early stages. Where we landed after much iteration and feedback from clients and partners was that the biggest driver of action was identification of profit leakage. The name SKOR comes from wanting a leading indicator. It's a SKOR of behaviors added up — a score out of 100, benchmarked internally and externally, and the vision is that every team and company has a SKOR. The reason why we call it SKOR is literally in the conversation: you say, "What's your SKOR?" Depending on what they answer, you know straight away how they're treating their people and how those people relate to the performance and profits of the organization. Then we connected that score to the dollars leaking out of the dysfunction. Not knowing your accountabilities. Not knowing your goals. Rarely getting feedback. Lack of team and org alignment. Or one of the worst and most common, not enough recognition. After all an organization is a team of teams. Made up of lots of small teams. I'm very proud to get to three years, and it's with great gratitude that I have an amazing team that's been on the journey with me. Some for most of it, some for some of it. So far in 2026: $12.3MM in Profit Leak uncovered through the SKOR diagnostic (org + team only) Over 2,700 employees have taken the SKOR diagnostic Over 300 companies have tried the Profit Leak Calculator And we're just beginning. The partners we've signed to resell SKOR are consultants and leadership coaches — they were already the antidote, they just didn't have the number. We find the leak, they help recover it. Thanks so much to everyone who's been part of this journey so far, it's still very early days.

Every layer of hierarchy filters bad news. By the time it reaches the top, the picture is unrecognizable — and the gap is structural, not personal. There's a moment every CEO has lived. The quarterly review goes fine. The VPs report "a few headwinds but tracking." The board materials show momentum. Then a top performer resigns, a customer churns unexpectedly, or a project that was "on track" misses by six weeks. The CEO's first thought: "How did I not know this?" They didn't know because of how information flows up a hierarchy. Every layer between the CEO and the front line filters, softens, and reframes. By the time the picture reaches the top, the friction has been smoothed and the red flags have been reframed as yellow ones. This isn't a character problem. It's a structural one. And it has a measurable cost. Why Filtering Happens Middle managers face a rational set of incentives: Protecting their boss's view of them — "I can handle this" is what gets promoted; "I need help" rarely is. Protecting their team's view of them — escalating problems too quickly signals weakness to the people they lead. Buying time to fix it themselves — "I'll surface it once I have a solution" is a defensible posture. Avoiding the cost of being wrong — escalating a problem that resolves itself is more reputationally expensive than not escalating a problem that gets worse. None of these are dishonest. All of them are filtering. And the filter compounds with every layer. What the Filter Costs The SKOR dataset shows the perception gap between leaders and teams averages 3.8 points on a 0–10 scale. In organizations with more hierarchy, the gap is wider — closer to 5 or 6 points between the CEO and the front line. The cost of that gap shows up in three places: Late problem discovery. Issues that could have been fixed at $50K of cost get fixed at $500K because they surfaced six months later. Wrong-priority investment. The CEO funds initiatives based on the filtered picture, not the actual one. The teams that need investment don't get it; the teams that don't, do. Regrettable departures the CEO doesn't see coming. The top performer's exit interview happened six months earlier — in a 1:1 with their manager that never made it up the chain. How SKOR Breaks the Filter SKOR asks leaders and teams the same questions, separately and in parallel. The data flows from the team to the diagnostic directly — bypassing every layer of softening, reframing, and protective filtering. When the CEO reads the Profit Leak Report, they're reading what the team actually said, not what survived the trip up the org chart. For most CEOs, the first time they read a SKOR report is the first time they've seen unfiltered data from their own teams in years. The reaction is usually some version of: "This is what I suspected, but couldn't prove." The Structural Fix Beyond the diagnostic, the structural fix is to create at least one channel where information flows directly from the team to the top, bypassing the middle layers: Quarterly skip-level conversations — CEO with team leads, no VPs in the room. Diagnostic data shared transparently across all levels — same Profit Leak Number visible to the CEO and the team that generated it. Action commitments published, not just stored — when the leader commits to a 90-day fix, the team that surfaced the problem sees the commitment. None of this replaces middle management. It supplements it with a second channel that the filter can't operate on. How to Find Your Filter Cost The SKOR Diagnostic surfaces the perception gap between every layer of your organization and quantifies the cost as a dollar figure. The teams that close the filter typically recover 30–50% of their Profit Leak in 90 days. Calculate your number

Most leaders treat profit leak with a six-month wellness program. The top 10% treat it like surgery — targeted, recovered from, followed up on a precise schedule. When a doctor identifies a serious medical problem, they don't open with a generalized lifestyle overhaul. They identify the precise issue, schedule a focused intervention, manage the recovery on a defined timeline, and confirm the fix with a follow-up. That's exactly what the top 10% of teams do with their Profit Leak. The bottom 90% do the opposite — they prescribe themselves a six-month transformation, change their diet, start a new exercise plan, redesign the kitchen, and book the surgery for "sometime next quarter." "When you're a CEO, you only have two things: you got time and you got capital. How you deploy that time and how you deploy that capital will equal your results." —Brad Jacobs, founder of 8 billion-dollar companies Brad Jacobs is right about the two assets. SKOR measures the third: the team friction that silently destroys both. Capital wasted on the wrong priorities. Time wasted on the wrong initiatives. The top 10% protect both by doing less, on purpose. Action 1: Diagnose. Then Cut A surgeon doesn't operate on every organ that looks suboptimal. They operate on the one causing the most damage. The Profit Leak Report ranks the seven muscles by dollar impact. Most leaders see seven things to fix. The top 10% see two. "Do one thing and do it better than anyone else. Don't try to be all things to all people or you're going to be nothing to anybody." — Todd Graves, founder of Raising Cane's Graves built a multi-billion-dollar restaurant chain by refusing to add menu items. The top 10% of SKOR teams apply the same discipline to their Profit Leak recovery: pick two, ignore the rest. Action 2: One Procedure Per Muscle. Weekly Recovery. For each of the two muscles, the team commits to one new practice. One. Not a new framework, not a new tool — one repeatable behavior, run weekly, untouched. Examples from the dataset: Accountability — daily after Action Review, 10 minutes. Recognition — weekly written acknowledgement, by name, by leader. Goals & Rewards — bi-weekly performance conversation, three-question structure. Transparency — monthly all-hands with results shared honestly, including misses. The practice runs for 90 days untouched. No tweaks. No additions. The discipline is the mechanism. Action 3: The 30-Day Follow up. Non-Negotiable. Every surgery has a 30-day post-op check. Not to redo the surgery — to confirm recovery is on track. At day 30, the team takes a 5-question pulse on the two muscles. Not a full diagnostic — a check on whether the new practice is showing up in behavior and whether the perception gap is closing. Most teams skip this step. The top 10% never do. The pulse is what converts a 90-day initiative into a permanent muscle. The Four Traps That Derail Everyone Else Picking five priorities instead of two. Five priorities is no priority. The surgeon who operates on every organ kills the patient. Adding a new system before fixing the behaviour. Tools amplify behavior; they don't replace it. Outsourcing it to HR or to a consultant. The leader has to own the cadence. Delegated, it dies. Measuring at 90 days only. By then, the practice has either become a muscle or been quietly dropped. The 30-day pulse is the post-op visit. How to Run the Cadence SKOR provides the diagnostic, the prioritization, the 30-day pulse, and the partner support to keep the cadence in place. The leader provides the discipline. Book a 15-minute call: getskor.com/contact

A disconnected team is a disengaged team. And disengagement? That's a tax no leader can afford to pay.​ Cohesion is a cure for disengagement. Are you and the leaders in your organization intentionally building and constantly reinforcing cohesion? When employees feel like they’re working toward something meaningful together, engagement skyrockets—and so do results. Cohesion happens when people feel aligned, valued, and invested in a shared vision and mission. When teams lack cohesion, employees feel isolated, misaligned, or undervalued, and their enthusiasm for work diminishes. Silos form, collaboration suffers, and the organization's overall energy declines–disengagement has arrived. This isn't just a cultural issue—it's a performance problem.​ The Hidden Cost of Disconnection Cohesion differentiates a high-performing team from one that merely coexists. According to Gallup's 2024 report, only 77% of employees worldwide are not engaged in their work. This lack of engagement leads to decreased productivity and increased turnover. When teams lack cohesion, the cracks start to show in performance, culture, and retention. At its core, cohesion starts with shared values—but when those values aren’t clearly defined or reinforced, alignment crumbles. Here’s what that looks like: Silos & Poor Communication: Teams operate in isolation, hoarding information instead of collaborating. Without a shared foundation of core values, departments prioritize their own goals over the greater mission, reducing innovation and efficiency. Low Trust & High Turnover: Employees who don’t feel connected to their team or the organization’s values struggle to find purpose in their work. The result? A revolving door of talent as people leave in search of a workplace where they feel they truly belong. Missed Opportunities & Stagnation: When people aren’t aligned around a strong cultural foundation, engagement plummets. Employees hesitate to contribute new ideas or take initiative because they don’t see how their work ties back to something bigger. Cohesion doesn’t happen by chance—it’s built through deliberate leadership, clearly defined values, and a workplace culture that reinforces them every day. The SKOR Solution: Building Cohesion Strong leaders don’t wait for cohesion to happen—they cultivate it. By leveraging SKOR to measure the cohesion within your organization, you can create an environment where employees feel connected, motivated, and engaged. Here’s how: Establish a Shared Purpose: Employees need to see how their work connects to the bigger picture. Align teams around a mission that inspires action. Foster Trust & Recognition: People who feel valued work harder and stay longer. Recognize contributions that align with core values as a way to reinforce ideal behaviors. Break Down Silos: Promote open communication across departments. Cohesive teams innovate faster and solve problems better. Cohesion isn’t just about making people feel good—it’s about driving real business results. When employees feel part of a united team, engagement skyrockets, productivity soars, and the Disengagement Tax starts to decline. Don’t let disconnection derail your business and increase your share of the Disengagement Tax. Strengthen team cohesion and start reclaiming lost potential today. Next week, we’ll explore how Clarity—the second C of SKOR—reduces uncertainty, aligns efforts, and empowers employees to take ownership of their work.

Accountability isn't consequences. It's the muscle nobody trains — and these are the three reps that build it fastest, in the order to install them. Of the seven muscles SKOR measures — Accountability, Transparency, Healthy Conflict, Growth Mindset, Adaptability, Recognition, and Goals & Rewards — Accountability shows up as the lowest score across 73% of teams in the dataset. That number surprises most leaders. They expect Healthy Conflict or Recognition. Accountability seems easy. Set the expectation. Measure the outcome. Hold the line. That's not what the data shows. And it's not what accountability actually is. Why Most Leaders Get It Wrong Ask a hundred leaders to define accountability and 80 will say some version of "holding people responsible." The implication is consequences — performance plans, hard conversations, exits. In gym terms, that's a one-rep max attempted after six months of inactivity. It's the heaviest possible lift, with the weakest possible preparation, in front of an audience. It rarely ends well — and even when it does, it doesn't build anything sustainable. Strong accountability isn't the willingness to deliver consequences. It's the daily structure that makes consequences almost never necessary. Three reps build that structure. Run them in this order. Fix #1: Install a Daily After Action Review (AAR) The single highest-leverage rep in the dataset. 10 minutes at the end of every day, sprint, or major project. The structure is three questions: What did we ship today? What didn't work? What will we change tomorrow? That's it. No deck. No template. No project management software. The discipline is the mechanism. Drew Trautman, CEO of a 1-800-GOT-JUNK franchise, installed daily AARs after his SKOR Diagnostic surfaced Accountability as his biggest blind spot. His bottom line improved 10 points in 12 months. In his words: "Those two things immediately had an impact to move the performance of our business." You'll know Fix #1 is working when team members start surfacing problems before you ask about them. Fix #2: Write Definition-of-Done Agreements For every meaningful deliverable, a one-line written agreement: "This is done when X happens, by Y date, validated by Z." — The definition-of-done format Not a project plan. Not a Notion doc. A contract. Captured in the 1:1 it was discussed in. Reviewed in the next 1:1. That's it. This is the squat of accountability training — unglamorous, foundational, builds everything else. It eliminates the most common cause of weak accountability in the dataset: ambiguous expectations dressed up as collaborative discussions. In teams without definition-of-done agreements, leaders and team members walk out of conversations believing different things about what was decided. By the next check-in, both parties feel disappointed, and neither can articulate why. You'll know Fix #2 is working when status updates get shorter and disagreements about "what was actually agreed" disappear. Fix #3: Replace Annual Reviews with Weekly Performance Contracts The largest perception gap in the SKOR dataset — 4 full points — sits on one question: "How often do you have meaningful performance conversations with each team member?" Leaders rate it at 8.5. Teams rate it at 4.5. The fix isn't another annual review. It's a standing weekly 1:1 with a fixed structure: 25 minutes. Same time every week. Not optional. Three questions: What did you ship? What's blocking you? What does success look like in the next two weeks? Written record. Team member captures the answers. Leader reviews before the next 1:1. This is the mechanism that converts a conversation into a contract. It's also the only way to close the 4-point gap at the scale that matters — every team member, every week. You'll know Fix #3 is working when top performers stop quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles. The Order Matters Install the three fixes in order. AARs first — they create the daily rhythm. Definition-of-done agreements second — they install the contract format. Weekly performance contracts third — they extend the contract format into the 1:1 conversation. Trying to install all three at once is the most common failure pattern. The team gets overwhelmed, none of the practices land, and the leader concludes "accountability training doesn't work." It does — but only in the right order, with one rep installed at a time. How to Find Your Score The SKOR Diagnostic measures Accountability across role clarity, expectations, ownership, and feedback. It compares leader scores against team scores and surfaces the gap as a dollar figure. If your team is in the 73% — and the math says they probably are — your Profit Leak Number is sitting on this muscle. The good news: it responds quickly to the right training. Calculate your number: getskor.com/profitleakcalc