Well, I can’t believe it’s been one year since founding SKOR!
The ideas and concepts of what I thought SKOR might be a year ago has certainly evolved.
I always had this concept around performance with respect to teams and alignment. I was reflecting a lot about how people inside companies worked in teams, and how teams collaborated with other teams, and in turn supported the companies’ goals/strategy. This focused-on alignment and the “cascade”.
I originally thought SKOR may become a platform that supports teams/companies delivering high-performance but then after doing a ton of research, realized that there are dozens of systems that help organizations align on goals and performance.
But then after doing further research and speaking to over 75 CEOs, I came to realize that when I was asking questions that related to alignment and performance, the responses always came back to people. And when I asked about priorities with these CEOs, their people would rarely, if ever, come up. It was always something else like sales, marketing, distribution, etc…
So, this got me thinking even more. How can these leaders not prioritize their people as the number one priority? Why wouldn’t their ability to achieve greatness be their number one? If their people were their number one priority and they were succeeding, wouldn’t in turn their companies also flourish?
When I dug deep into the elements of culture, which is really what connects people within organizations, I realized that so many leaders had it wrong. The challenge, how do I convince leaders to prioritize their people over anything else?
I also realized that to change thousands and hopefully one day millions of workplaces, I wouldn’t be able to do it one project at a time. I would need to create a value proposition that persuades and has impact. And the only way to convince anyone to do anything is with data. Plus, if that data was able to measure my company and compare it to others, it would be a huge motivator.
So, there it was, SKOR was born. A platform for measuring culture where all organizations get a Culture SKOR (out of 100) and within that platform they could see how they compared to their industry, and whether or not they are a leader or a lagger.
On top of this, you then realize that there is no universal definition for culture and if you ask anyone about their corporate culture, you’re likely hearing things like, “oh it’s awesome”, or “Our holiday parties are fantastic”, or “our people have unlimited time off”, etc…
And not only is there no standard, but there is also no universal measure for it. And no, eNPS or employee engagement surveys are not a measure of culture.
Based on my 25 year's experience in building teams and driving successful cultures and outcomes, culture can be broken down into 3 ingredients.
COHESION - People are connected with the organization's mission, vision, and core values, sharing common beliefs in their approach to work.
CLARITY - People understand the organization's strategy and goals, align as a team, and focus their energies on achieving them.
COURAGE - People aren't afraid to fail and are inspired by the organization’s leaders to do their best, with rewards given accordingly + objectively.
We won Best Place to Work at Unique World (my first company) and Tinybeans (my second company), not because we were trying to win, but because we created the environment where people could do their best work through these 3 ingredients.
Fast forward to today, we’ve had more than 200 leaders take our Culture SKOR Snapshot assessment and recently built out a small team to take the company forward. We’re also hiring more in the coming months. Plus, companies (and their people leaders) committed to our Culture SKOR Subscription product, where they will get their verified SKOR, benchmarked and ability to invest in improving it. We’ve also signed up partners who believe we need an independent measure for culture that can provide benchmarks too.
I’m beyond excited about our future.
Our vision is for SKOR to become the standard for culture measurement, where organizations from all over the world measure their culture using SKOR, and through that lens create an opportunity to be benchmarked against other companies in their industry.
And not only determine where they are against the benchmark, but then commit to the roadmap of projects internally to then elevate their people through the culture and in turn their financial results.
A huge thanks goes out to all my amazing close friends that I’ve annoyed and challenged in this area, who not only were candid and curious, but did whatever they could to support my vision.
Special thanks go to my YPO mates inside NY Liberty, they have been incredible.
I am so excited about the future and if the last 12 months were anything to go by, the next will be so much more. I can’t wait for people to be using SKOR as their barometer for culture to determine whether they want to work at a company, want to do business with a company or invest in them.
What is your Culture SKOR?