Seven conditions set the ceiling on what your people can produce. Leadership owns all seven.
Structure, process, resources, information, innovation, training, engagement. I call them SPRIITE, and I score them, 1 to 5, with leaders and their teams scoring separately. The number that matters most is usually the gap between the two.
The first article explains the method. The ones that follow take the seven conditions one at a time: what each means in practice, how it fails, what the failure costs, and how to score your own company honestly against it. Read them in order.
This series is the deep version of one article in The Well-Run Company: Check What You Handed Them First. That article asked seven questions. This one turns them into seven scores.
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1
Your Best People Are Working Inside Something You Built
Seven conditions set the ceiling on performance. Most owners have never scored a single one.
Read article -
2
When Two People Own It, Nobody Does
Structure is the first condition, and its failures cost you money that never appears as a line item.
Read article -
3
Your Process Has a Name and a Phone Number
When the method lives in one person's head, every vacation is an operational event.
Read article -
4
Standards Drift Down to What Is Achievable
Chronic under-resourcing rarely shows up in the budget. It shows up in what your team quietly stopped doing.
Read article -
5
Late Information Makes Rational People Look Wrong
A team working from stale numbers makes decisions that look indefensible from the corner office and completely rational from where they sit.
Read article -
6
The Third Time, Nobody Says Anything
You rarely lose good ideas all at once. You lose the willingness to offer them, one person at a time.
Read article -
7
You Promoted Your Best Technician and Called It Development
Then you handed them nothing, and a year later you diagnosed a leadership problem.
Read article -
8
Engagement Is the Score You Cannot Fix Directly
It is often a reading of the other six conditions, which is why engagement programs so often change nothing.
Read article
Score your own company
The free assessment takes about 3 minutes: 14 questions across the seven conditions, scored 1 to 5, with your results as soon as you finish. Take it yourself, then have your leadership team take it without seeing your answers and compare. The gap between the two is usually the most useful thing it produces.
If you want another set of eyes on the result, the next step is a conversation.