You promote your top rep. Six months later the territory is soft, the team is unsettled, and so are they — and nobody can say exactly what went wrong, because nothing on the leaderboard predicted it.
The missing information is the same every time: what the role actually demands of the person doing it.
That layer is measurable. Most organizations have simply never measured it.
Why this, from me
I know what an unmeasured promotion costs, beacuse I was one.
I was promoted to Ad Director at IndustryWeek and handed a sales team of twelve. I was good at the work. I had no idea how to lead the people doing it, and nobody had measured whether I was ready — because nobody measures that.
I did learn it: Ad Director to Executive Vice President of a $40 million business. Three decades doing well the job I’d once had no idea how to do.
The report is the starting point. What I build is what someone does with it on a Monday morning.
More on how I got here →
Before the promotion. Is this seller ready to lead sellers, and what will they need? We make the demands of the role visible before the title changes. → The Six Shifts
→ Role Capability Profile
Before they leave. Quota attainment tells you what happened last quarter. It tells you nothing about whether this rep is still here in twelve months. The Sustainable Work Profile™ surfaces the experience behind the number, while it's still a conversation and not a resignation. →
→ Sustainable Work Profile
On performance, leadership, and the work beneath the work.
Latest thinking · 2026
Who Does the Work?
Tony D’Avino — Founder
I was promoted to Ad Director at IndustryWeek and handed a sales team of twelve. I was good at the work. I had no idea how to lead the people doing it.
Nobody had measured whether I was ready, because nobody measures that. So I went looking — Drucker, Bennis, Ted Levitt. I read at night and struggled during the day. The reading was real, but it wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t have told you why.
Years later, studying with Tim Gallwey at the Inner Game Institute, I understood: learning inside the work beats learning about the work. I’d been trying to study my way into a job that could only be learned in it.
I did learn it. Ad Director to Executive Vice President of a $40 million business — three decades doing well the job I’d once had no idea how to do.
That search kept going — Predictive Index, TTI Success Insights, DISC, Hogan, and eventually Six Seconds, where I certified in EQ assessments and Brain Profiles.
Certification is the easy part. The instruments are validated, globally normed, and available to anyone willing to take the training. What they can’t do is tell you where in a person’s actual week the work happens. A profile can show that a talent is running in the background — it can’t tell you that the five minutes before a status meeting is where framing gets practiced, or that the moment a deadline slips is exactly when reading people matters most and is least likely to happen.
That part didn’t come from an assessment. It came from thirty years of doing the job.
The report is the starting point. What I build is what someone does with it on a Monday morning.
WHO DOES THIS WORK
Tony D’Avino — Founder
