You promote your strongest engineer, seller, or analyst. Six months later the team is struggling and so are they — and nobody can say exactly what went wrong, because nothing on the résumé predicted it.
The missing information is the same every time: what the role actually demands of the person doing it. How they process complexity. How they carry emotional load. How they decide under pressure, and what they do when the plan breaks.
That layer is measurable. Most organizations have simply never measured it.
Why this, from me
I know what an unmeasured promotion costs.
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 role is written — Most job descriptions describe a person and the tasks. Almost none describe the job. We analyze what the role's work and outcomes actually demand, have your team answer independently, and show you where you agree and where you don't — before the posting goes up. We define the role. We don't assess the candidates.
→ Role Capability Profile
Before your best people leave — Performance reviews evaluate what already happened. By then the conditions that produced it have been in place for months. The Sustainable Work Profile gives managers and their people a structured way to talk about the experience behind the performance, 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
