This episode breaks down Google’s Project Aristotle and the surprising finding that team performance depends less on star talent than on how people interact. It explores psychological safety, why silence can hide problems, and the practical habits leaders can use to build stronger, more effective teams.

In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire and Edwin move from theory to execution with a clear 90-day roadmap for measuring teamwork without turning your culture into a surveillance state. Building on the foundations of what to measure and why, they walk through a practical rollout plan that busy HR leaders and line managers can actually implement.

Across three chapters, they cover how to define "team success" in your context, pick a small set of meaningful metrics, and stand up a simple dashboard that leaders and teams will actually use. They then dig into the operating rhythm that makes metrics matter—weekly check-ins, pulse surveys, one-on-ones, and retrospectives that focus on decisions and experiments instead of blame. Finally, they show you how to tune and simplify your system by week 12 so it becomes a boring, reliable part of how you run the business, not another short-lived initiative.

If you're tired of dashboard theater and want a measurement system that improves delivery, quality, and team health at the same time, this episode gives you a realistic, science-backed path to get there in 90 days.

This episode of The Science of Leading tackles a blind spot many HR leaders and executives share: we celebrate "strong culture" and "great teams," but rarely measure whether teamwork is actually driving results. Claire and Edwin unpack a practical, behavior-based framework for evaluating teamwork that goes beyond vibes, personality labels, or annual performance rituals.

They explore why high engagement scores and positive team sentiment can still coexist with missed deadlines, rework, and stakeholder frustration—and how to fix that with clear outcome and process metrics. You’ll learn how to connect teamwork evaluation to real business goals, define observable teamwork behaviors, and build simple KPIs for communication, collaboration, problem solving, and time management.

Drawing on organizational psychology research and real-world examples, they walk through specific criteria, data collection methods (from surveys to stakeholder feedback and objective KPIs), and a step-by-step method to turn evaluation into coaching, redesign, and better decisions. Along the way, they show where tools like OAD can reduce bias in performance reviews by separating personality tendencies from actual teamwork behaviors.

If you’re an HR leader, people manager, or founder who’s tired of culture theater and wants a repeatable system for building high-performing teams, this episode gives you a concrete, science-based playbook you can start using immediately.

Most leaders have tried a personality test at some point. But when it comes to real decisions—who to hire, how to coach, why a team keeps clashing—those colorful types and labels don’t give you enough to actually change anything.In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire Monroe and Edwin Carrington unpack the OAD Survey: an adjective-based, workplace-focused assessment that separates who someone is from how they feel they must behave at work. Instead of one static profile, OAD gives you two matched lenses—baseline traits and perceived job behaviors—so you can see where a role is creating healthy stretch, unsustainable pressure, or outright conflict.Claire and Edwin explore how leaders and HR teams can use this data to sharpen hiring decisions, design better roles, and run more honest leadership and team conversations. They walk through practical workflows for selection, coaching, and team diagnostics, and show how aggregated OAD patterns can reveal deeper organizational issues like role overload, unclear decision rights, or misaligned incentives.If you’re ready to move beyond gut feel and generic personality labels, this episode will show you how to turn structured behavioral signal into everyday decisions. And if you want to try it on your own roles and teams, you can test OAD for free at OAD.ai.

In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire and Edwin dive into why so many leadership performance reviews feel like vague narratives—and how HR and People Ops can replace them with a structured, defensible leadership review template.

They unpack what a strong leadership evaluation sample should include, from role context and business priorities to concrete outcomes, observable leadership behaviors, and culture impact. You’ll hear how to translate soft skills like communication, decision making, and emotional intelligence into specific, copy-paste-ready review phrases and examples that managers can actually use.

Claire and Edwin walk through an annual performance review checklist, explore when and how to use multi-rater feedback, and explain how calibration sessions keep ratings fair and consistent across teams. They also connect leadership reviews to real development by outlining how to turn feedback into measurable 30/60/90-day plans that improve team performance over time.

Throughout the conversation, they touch on how structured, science-based tools like OAD can strengthen leadership evaluation and succession decisions—and why testing OAD for free at OAD.ai can be a practical next step for teams that want less guesswork and more evidence in their leadership reviews.

In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire and Edwin walk through a practical, research-backed journey for boosting team performance that starts with better measurement—not louder pep talks.

They unpack what “team performance” really means beyond vibes, why many organizations don’t have a performance problem so much as a measurement problem, and how leaders can move from individual heroics to healthy, dependable teams. Drawing on research from Google, McKinsey, Deloitte, Gallup, and OAD’s own work with growing companies, they break the conversation into three stages: diagnose, focus, and experiment.

You’ll learn how to run a lightweight team health diagnostic, choose a small set of metrics that actually predict delivery, and separate team effectiveness, dynamics, and health. Claire and Edwin discuss what distinguishes high-performing teams (hint: it’s not just “top talent”), the human capabilities that matter most in 2026, and how tools like OAD’s behavioral assessments can de-risk hiring and team design.

Finally, they show you how to turn insights into action with short, 2–4 week experiments: picking one performance driver at a time, defining clear behavior changes, and using simple governance and rituals so improvements stick. Along the way, they weave in soft examples of how HR leaders, founders, and managers can use OAD to match people to roles, spot emerging burnout and disengagement risks, and scale a culture of high-performing teams without burning people out.

If you want a concrete playbook for going from gut feel to structured, scalable team performance, this episode is for you.

In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire and Edwin unpack why so many performance reviews feel unfair, political, or just plain useless—and what leaders can do about it.Drawing on OAD’s performance evaluation framework, they break down the most common pitfalls in team and individual reviews: recency bias and halo/horns effects, personality-based judgments disguised as "fit," confusing effort with real outcomes, and rating scales that mean something different in every department.Claire surfaces the real questions managers are wrestling with—how do you keep reviews consistent, avoid bias, and still move fast?—while Edwin offers concrete, research-backed practices: anchoring reviews to shared team goals, insisting on specific evidence and work artifacts, using simple rating scales with behavioral anchors, and running calibration sessions that turn "manager opinion" into a defensible system.If you’re an HR leader, people manager, or founder who wants performance reviews to drive clarity, accountability, and development instead of anxiety and politics, this episode gives you a practical roadmap for doing reviews fairly—and making them actually useful.

In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire Monroe and Edwin Carrington break down how HR and People leaders can move beyond political, vibes-based leadership reviews and design a fair, defensible evaluation system that actually improves leadership performance.Drawing on real-world best practices, they explore how to define a clear, role-specific leadership competency model, translate it into observable behaviors, and align it with your organization’s strategy and culture. They unpack how to combine tools like 360-degree feedback, validated assessments, performance reviews, and simulations without creating noise or burnout.Claire and Edwin also discuss how to protect psychological safety and DEI, ensure anonymity and trust in feedback, and turn assessment data into concrete development plans, coaching priorities, and promotion decisions. If you’re an HR or People leader tired of biased talent conversations and fuzzy ratings, this episode will help you build a leadership evaluation system your executives can trust—and your leaders will actually use.

In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire Monroe and Edwin Carrington break down how to turn job fit from a fuzzy, gut-driven concept into a scalable, data-backed hiring engine.

They explore why job fit—defined as the match between a person and the real demands of the role, the work environment, and the team context—is the hidden driver behind quality of hire, time-to-productivity, and long-term retention. Drawing on research and front-line experience, they unpack how structured methods like performance-based job descriptions, cognitive ability tests, skills assessments, and validated personality tools such as the OAD Survey can dramatically improve predictive power compared to unstructured interviews and intuition alone.

Across three segments, Claire and Edwin walk HR leaders and talent partners through a practical blueprint for building a repeatable job fit system: defining success outcomes for each role, selecting and sequencing assessments into a candidate-friendly flow, scoring and comparing candidates with standardized rubrics, and validating that your process actually predicts performance over time. They then extend the conversation beyond Day One, showing how 30/60/90-day check-ins, stay interviews, and ongoing manager feedback can feed back into your hiring model.

Whether you’re an HR leader under pressure to do more with less, a TA lead trying to standardize hiring across multiple locations, or a founder tired of expensive mis-hires, this episode gives you a concrete playbook for scaling a science-based job fit system. Stay tuned to the end for a clear invitation to test OAD for free at OAD.ai and see how a structured, psychometrically validated fit model can plug directly into your next critical hire.

In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire and Edwin unpack how team managers can use a simple, well-designed teamwork self‑assessment questionnaire to see what’s really happening inside their teams—and then actually do something about it.

They explore what great teamwork questionnaires measure (communication, listening, collaboration, flexibility, decision making, leadership, and problem solving), how to design and run them without creating a culture of blame, and why clarity around anonymity and data use is non‑negotiable for honest responses.

Then they walk through how to interpret the results and turn them into behavior change: reading patterns in subscale scores, linking them to real performance issues like missed handoffs or stalled decisions, and translating the findings into 2–3 focused team experiments over a 4–6 week period rather than overwhelming people with initiatives.

Throughout the conversation, Claire brings the questions and concerns of frontline managers—How do I introduce this without spooking people? What if scores are bad?—while Edwin connects the dots to research on team effectiveness, psychological safety, and leadership behavior. Together, they show how moving from gut feel to structured data can help managers coach more fairly, improve collaboration, and keep teams moving in the same direction without turning assessment into bureaucracy.