The People Scorecard

Is it your managers, or the system around them?

If people problems keep landing on your desk, one of them isn't working. 21 questions. 5 minutes. Two scores. Find out which one to fix first.

21 questions 5 minutes Two scores Free

For founders, CEOs and people leaders in businesses of 15 to 150 people.

Sound familiar?

The problems are different. They all end up with you.

Someone has been underperforming for months and nothing's happened. A manager needed to have a hard conversation, and you ended up having it for them. A hire you were excited about didn't work out. Someone you'd have fought to keep left, and nobody saw it coming. Pay rises happen when someone asks, or threatens to leave.

Each one feels like a one-off. They usually aren't. They come from one of two places.

Two problems, not one

Your managers and your structures. Fix the wrong one and nothing changes.

Score one

Your managers

They were promoted for being good at the job, and nobody showed them how to manage. 1:1s slip. Hard conversations get avoided. Problems reach you late, or not at all. So everything comes back to you.

Score two

Your structures

There's no shared standard for who you hire, no written criteria for progression, no proper first 90 days and no fair way to decide pay. Even good managers struggle without those, because they're making it up each time.

Most businesses reach for one fix. Train managers without the structures, and they go back to a business with no progression criteria and no review process to use their training on. Build the structures without training the managers, and you get policies nobody follows.

Most businesses need some of both, in the right order. The scorecard shows you which one is costing you more right now.

⏱️ 21 questions. 5 minutes. Two scores.

What you get

Two scores, a clear starting point, free.

No fluff. A straight read on where the gap is, and where to start.

Your managers scoreHow well your managers handle 1:1s, performance, hard conversations and bad news, and how much of it still ends up with you.
Your people structures scoreHow you hire, onboard, review, promote and pay, and whether that runs as a system or as one-off decisions.
What to fix firstWhere the bigger gap is, and the first step to close it.
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Why the questions are hard to fudge

It asks what happens, not what you'd like to think.

No "rate your culture out of 10". The questions ask how many hires didn't work out last year, who dealt with the last underperformer, and how pay decisions actually get made. It's hard to score yourself generously, and that's the point.

Who built this

Built by Arran Russell. 15 years building management teams.

I spent 16 years at one business, 15 of them in leadership. I built the management team beneath the CEO, grew to around 60 people across five countries, and stayed on the exec team through a private equity cycle.

I've trained managers who then had nothing to work with, and I've written processes that managers ignored. This scorecard asks the questions I wish I'd asked earlier.