Until you see your organization through the eyes of your people, you’re leading blind. -Karen Zeigler, Human Score CEO
A Ball Cap and a Bigger Picture
I once had a moment in my kitchen. I found myself staring at one of my husband’s ball caps, which he often leaves lying around everywhere. In that moment, something mundane became a metaphor. That ordinary cap, perched haphazardly on the counter, reminded me of a visit to our favorite mountain bike shop, where the caps weren’t just merch; they were employee-designed. The staff didn’t just sell products; they created, promoted, and wore them with pride. It was a reminder that the soul of a business lives in the people who make it real.
SMB Leaders: Your Real Edge Isn’t Tech—It’s People Empowered by Tech
Small and mid-sized business owners are under tremendous amounts of pressure. You’re wearing multiple hats (pun intended), from sales to strategy to staffing. And in the whirlwind of AI promises, economic uncertainty, and constant change, it’s tempting to think people problems are in the past and tech is the future. But here’s the thing: your people are still your greatest accelerator or your biggest brake.
Seeing Beyond the Metrics
We live in a time saturated with dashboards, KPIs, and OKRs. And while these tools are essential, they come with a catch. As Michael Harris cautioned in Harvard Business Review, “The mental tendency to replace strategy with metrics can destroy company value.” (Source: HBR, “Are Metrics Undermining Your Business?” by Michael Harris and Bill Tayler). Too often, we start managing the numbers instead of managing performance.
That’s why the Human Score™ matters. It’s a dashboard, yes, but one designed to focus your attention not just on outputs but on people. You know the ones responsible for performing? It’s not about data for the sake of data. It’s about clarity, context, and connection. We don’t just need to measure; we also need to understand. We need to see. We need to know how people experience the reality of work: the moments that motivate them, the systems that hinder progress toward their goals, and the choices that either empower or exhaust them. More importantly, we need to see through the eyes of the people doing the work because when their experience is clearly understood, businesses gain more than just empathy. They gain alignment, resilience, and results. Human Score™ connects these dots and applies them to today’s most pressing challenges, like AI implementation and the waves of change management it demands. It ensures those initiatives don’t just get rolled out from the top but are co-created with the people who will make or break their success.
Human Score™: Your C-Suite Accelerator
The Human Score™ isn’t another HR tool. It’s a C-suite accelerator. Absolutely, HR can use it to improve people practices and foster healthier teams, but its impact goes far beyond that. CIOs can use Human Score™ to co-create AI implementations that land where it matters most, on the front lines, radically lowering transformation failure rates. CFOs can leverage the insights to uncover hidden inefficiencies and drive sustainable value. Even CMOs, like in the ball cap story, can harness internal creativity and engagement to amplify brand authenticity.
The Human Score™ isn’t about feel-good initiatives designed to placate concerns without leveling the playing field. It’s about building a workplace where everyone, not just a few, gets to play a meaningful role in the company’s success.
As Deborah Kops put it in her article on Sourcing Change, “Designing and implementing a slick portal that orchestrates suboptimal processes is not only a waste of time, but it can also further denigrate the experience by frustrating the user.” Human Score™ isn’t here to decorate dysfunction—it’s here to expose and revolutionize it.
It’s a diagnostic lens for operational clarity. It shows you how aligned your vision and your business model are with the people executing it. It makes visible the human infrastructure that holds your systems together—or strains under the weight of them.
You Don’t Have to Do It Alone
The Human Score™ becomes your guide; it doesn’t just pose the questions – it sharpens your focus so that, together with your teams and our human-centered consultant collective, you can ask and explore the ones that move the needle.
If you’re leading change right now, any change, let me leave you with this:
Change doesn’t begin with a Gantt chart. It starts with seeing. So before you fix, rebrand, or transform: pause.
See the people.
See their reality.
And start there.
See Work Clearly, Changes Everything
Because when you see work clearly, you don’t just change outcomes; you also change the way you work. You change the trajectory of your business and the people within it. You unlock intrinsic motivation, align energy with vision, and invite your team into a shared journey of purpose and progress.