The People Analyzer: scoring people against your values

The People Analyzer® is a grid. Names run down the left, core values run across the top, and each cell gets one of three scores: plus, plus-minus or minus. The bar sits underneath, agreed by the room before a single name goes in. The grid does not produce a verdict. It produces the short list of conversations somebody has been avoiding.

Names go down the left side and values go across the top. Five values and eleven people make fifty-five cells, usually about forty minutes of argument. Out of it comes a column of scores per person and a line across the sheet, with most names above it and, on a first run, one or two below.

In EOS® it sits in the people component, next to the seat questions and the quarterly one-to-ones. Nothing stops a company from borrowing only this piece. What it needs first is a values list clear enough that you would let somebody go over one. Score people against three words nobody can define and you get a sheet of pluses and a wasted afternoon.

The number worth reading is not any individual score but how many names sit under the line. One or two is normal the first time a company does this. If a third of the room falls underneath, the values probably describe an ambition. The people already in the building are the test, and the honest fix is to go back and rewrite the list.

The bar is the standard, and it gets set while the sheet is still blank. A common bar is a plus in every value with one plus-minus allowed. Set it afterward and the line will happen to save whoever you already like, which everybody can feel. Agree it first, and the scoring stops being a negotiation about individuals.

A lower bar is not kinder. It is a statement about the values themselves. If a team decides two minuses are survivable, it has said out loud that two of its values are decorative. That finding belongs on the Issues List, not inside the bar.

Some teams try to weight the values so the important ones count double. It rarely survives contact with a real sheet. Weighting is usually a way of admitting that two of the five were never values at all, and cutting the list is a cleaner answer than scoring it with arithmetic.

Put the bar somewhere visible before the first name goes on the screen. Say it out loud too. Six months later, when a manager argues that somebody's second middle score does not really count, the line the room agreed in advance is the only thing that settles it.

Start with the leaders, because a scoring tool aimed downward first becomes a weapon and everybody below can see it. They sit in one room, score each other on a screen, and read the numbers out loud. It is uncomfortable for about twenty minutes. That discomfort buys the right to ask a supervisor to do the same next quarter without being laughed at.

Do it live. A survey collects the same numbers, but none of the argument. Each person scores the others privately for five minutes, then the sheet goes on the screen and the disagreements get worked one cell at a time. A founder who reads a middle score next to their own name and asks what it was about has done more for the tool's standing than any explanation of the method.

This most often breaks at the founder. Plenty of leadership teams score everybody except the person who signs the checks, and the exercise quietly turns into the thing it was meant to prevent. If the owner will not be scored, run it anyway and be honest about what you now have: a management report, not a shared standard.

Three scores are enough, and the middle one carries most of the weight. A plus means the person lives the value nearly all the time. A minus means they do not. The middle score means most of the time. It is where the useful conversations sit, because it names a pattern somebody can still change, not a verdict about who they are.

Read the middle column as a frequency, not a grade. The question is never whether somebody is a good person. It is how often the behavior shows up when it is inconvenient, which is the only time a value costs anything.

This is our version of the grid, not the official form. Set the bar first. Then type your values across the top, add people down the side, and score each cell plus, plus-minus or minus. The result column sorts people into Above the bar, Below the bar and Not fully scored. Copy the grid as CSV, or email it to yourself so someone here can read it too.

Put it on a shared screen. Let one person type while the room argues about each cell. Start with the leadership team, for the reason the leadership section above gives. The two dropdowns come before the first score goes in, because once the names are up the bar gets easier to bend.

Nobody is fired on the strength of a grid. Say that out loud at the start. What follows is a short series of honest conversations, usually a month apart, so the person has time to change something and the manager has time to notice. The first names the value and the last two times it went missing. The third is where it turns into a different conversation.

The gap between the conversations is what separates this from a manager who has already decided and is now building a file. One week is too little time for anyone to prove a change. Wait a quarter and both sides have forgotten the first conversation. About a month is where most teams land, so three of them take a season.

Say the stakes plainly the first time. People hear a gentle conversation as feedback and are then genuinely shocked at the third. The sentence that does the work is a dull one: this is about a value, here are the two times it went missing, and if it does not change we will be talking about whether this is the right place for you.

It becomes a firing when the behavior has not moved and the manager has run out of new things to say. Fewer people end up there than most owners expect. In the ordinary case the person does not know, changes what they do, and by the following quarter the row reads differently without any of this being dramatic.

Picture a commercial HVAC contractor. The name under the line is the service manager, and the value is covering for other departments: every request from dispatch that year turned down, each time for a reason that sounded fair on the day. The first conversation names the value and the two most recent refusals. By the second, a technician is going over to dispatch on Mondays.

This is a values tool, not documentation. The grid records one manager's judgment on one afternoon, in shorthand nobody outside the room can read. Keep it apart from the employment file, which needs dates, specifics and the employee's own account. We are not lawyers, and the rules where you operate are the ones that decide.

A sheet of minus signs makes a poor exhibit and a good prompt. If a conversation is heading toward somebody leaving, write the record the way you would have written it without the grid: what happened, when, who was there, what was said, and what the person said back. The scores can inform that record. They cannot be the record.

When the two get mixed together, it is usually because the grid was the first honest thing anybody had written down about a long-running problem. That is worth noticing on its own. It means the conversations were about a year overdue. The tool did not cause the problem. It only made it impossible to keep ignoring.