Making the unmeasurable, measurable!

Tactics and thought leadership to improve impact and innovation.

Hello data and measurement enthusiasts! It’s Saturday, December 20, and hope you’re getting into the season of giving and receiving! I’ve greatly enjoyed preparing my measurement case studies, helping you explore the many ways you can measure soft skills!

May you enjoy the next edition in the gift of case studies series… How Next Element transformed the perceived “unmeasurable” nature of soft skills into a quantifiable framework that tracks behavioral change and correlates it with business results.

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When Mental Health Meets Bottom-Line Results

Dr. Nate Regier co-founded Next Element in October 2008—three months into the Great Recession. As a clinical psychologist with 11 years of practice experience and a PhD from the University of Kansas, Nate brought a unique perspective to workplace consulting: the rigorous measurement culture of clinical outcomes combined with hands-on therapeutic expertise.

But launching a leadership development practice during an economic crisis presented an existential challenge. Companies were slashing anything deemed “unnecessary,” and professional development was always first on the chopping block. For Next Element to survive, they couldn’t just offer evidence-based practices—they had to demonstrate measurable outcomes that directly impacted business goals.

Nate identified two interconnected barriers threatening their mission of bringing behavioral health expertise into corporate settings:

The Mental Health Stigma In the early 2000s, workplaces rarely recognized mental health issues as legitimate business concerns. Stress, drama, and interpersonal conflict were dismissed as personal problems rather than organizational challenges.

The Soft Skills Measurement Myth Even more problematic was the prevailing belief that soft skills couldn’t be measured—and therefore didn’t warrant investment. The common refrain: “Soft skills aren’t as important as hard skills, and you can’t measure them anyway, so what’s the point?”

This created a vicious cycle. Without measurement, leaders couldn’t track improvement. Without evidence of improvement, soft skills remained undervalued. Without organizational value, companies wouldn’t invest. And without investment, the toxic workplace cultures that drove people to therapy would continue unchecked.

The Core Challenge To break this cycle, Nate and his team needed to accomplish three things simultaneously:

1. Normalize mental health and workplace stress as legitimate organizational concerns

2. Develop a methodology to measure observable soft skill behaviors

3. Correlate behavioral change with business outcomes executives cared about—revenue, retention, engagement, and innovation

The question wasn’t whether soft skills mattered (the research was mounting). The question was: Which specific soft skills could be defined, taught, measured, and tied to business results?

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Building a Measurement Framework: Heart, Head, and Hands

Next Element’s solution drew from multiple lines of research to create a coherent, measurable approach to soft skills development.

The Theoretical Foundation

Nate’s team anchored their methodology in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive learning theory and the concept of self-efficacy—a person’s belief in their capability to execute necessary behaviors to meet the perceived demands in front of them. The framework synthesized insights from across disciplines, identifying three universal aspects of human existence:

• Heart (emotional/affective)

• Head (cognitive/thinking)

• Hands (behavioral/doing)

This became the structural blueprint for identifying which soft skills to measure.

Selecting Measurable Behaviors: The Three Criteria

From this framework, Next Element identified three core skills:

1. Openness (Heart) - Empathy and caring for others’ feelings and lived experiences, willingness to be vulnerable, emotional accessibility

2. Resourcefulness (Head) - Collaborative problem-solving, adaptability in thinking, mental flexibility, and learning from mistakes.

3. Persistence (Hands) - Clarity about boundaries, follow-through on commitments, sustained effort despite obstacles, and consistent action

Why These Three?

Nate’s team applied a critical test: “If I got a group of people in a room and asked them to observe someone demonstrating this skill, could they all agree on what they’re seeing?”

This inter-rater reliability test ensured the behaviors were observable, definable, teachable, measurable, and correlated with business outcomes through research.

The Bright Side and Dark Side Framework

A crucial innovation was mapping both productive and counterproductive expressions of each skill:

Openness

• Bright Side: Empathy, emotional connection, self-worth.

• Dark Side: Compromising boundaries, over-accommodation, loss of self

Resourcefulness

• Bright Side: Collaboration, shared ownership, strategic thinking, innovation

• Dark Side: Helping without permission, rescuing, enabling.

Persistence

• Bright Side: Clarify, resilience, commitment, dependability

• Dark Side: Stubbornness, manipulation, rigidity, inability to adapt

This dual framework provided early warning indicators—teams could spot when positive skills were tilting into problematic territory. It acknowledged that too much of a good thing can become destructive and gave leaders specific language for coaching.

The Compassionate Accountability Assessment: Making It Quantifiable

The centerpiece of Next Element’s measurement approach became the Compassionate Accountability Assessment—a tool that quantifies how individuals and teams respond to workplace conflict and stress, specifically the tension between preserving relationships and pushing for results.

What It Measures: The assessment is a self-report measure of the frequency of 27 behaviors representing how people use conflict energy in either positive (Compassion), or negative (Drama) ways. The signature index from the Compassionate Accountability Assessment is the Drama Resilience Index, a ratio of Compassion to Drama. This one number gives a snapshot report of how conflict energy is being used for an individual, team, or organization.

From the 27 questions, the assessment also generates indices showing strength in three Compassion Skills (Openness, Resourcefulness, Persistence), risk in three Drama Roles (Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor), and a variety of other constructs that help people understand how they respond to conflict. The assessment can be completed as a self-report, an evaluation of others (ideal for 360-degree assessments), or an organization-wide culture assessment.

How It Works: Participants complete the assessment before training to generate baseline metrics that are incorporated into coaching and training programs, immediately after training to measure change, and optionally at a follow-up interval to track sustainment. Organizations can use the assessment to obtain annual benchmarking data.

The Methodology: Nate emphasizes starting with a clear end in mind. This isn’t about biasing results—it’s about designing measurement that can test specific claims. The approach includes:

1. Baseline establishment - Where are behaviors now?

2. Intervention delivery - Teaching the three core skills

3. Immediate measurement - Did learning occur?

4. Application tracking - Are behaviors changing on the job?

5. Outcome correlation - Are business metrics improving?

Key Innovation—Leading Indicators: Rather than waiting 6-12 months to see change, the Compassionate Accountability Assessment can track change within days or weeks, much like blood pressure. In addition, the assessment generates scores for three leading indicators for Drama, subtle behaviors that predict more damaging behaviors ahead. This insight gives people and teams the insights to make early behavior corrections and avoid more costly consequences in the future.

As Nate explains, “Drama resilience is like the canary in the coal mine. It’s an early warning system. When we see drama resilience scores improving, we know more significant behavioral and business outcomes are coming.”

The Story Before the Data

A critical lesson: define your story before collecting data, but remain open to what emerges.

Nate advocates for creating a loose framework articulating what behaviors will change, how they’ll impact team dynamics, and which business outcomes will improve.

This framework guides data collection without constraining discovery. As Nate notes, “Data shouldn’t prove a point. It should help us see where we are compared to where we thought we’d be.”

Keeping It Simple

Throughout Next Element’s measurement evolution, simplicity remained a north star. Complex validity and reliability work happens behind the scenes, but communication with clients stays crystal clear: three core skills, two directions (bright/dark side), one assessment tool, regular intervals, clear correlation to business goals.

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From Survival to Sustainable Impact: The Results

Next Element’s measurement-driven approach transformed not only their business survival during the recession but also created a replicable model for quantifying soft skills development.

Business Sustainability Despite launching during the worst economic crisis in decades, Next Element survived and grew by demonstrating ROI. Showing measurable outcomes relevant to client goals became the differentiator.

Normalizing Mental Health in Workplaces By creating measurable frameworks around stress, drama, and interpersonal conflict, Next Element helped legitimize mental wellness as an organizational priority. What was once dismissed as “soft” became quantifiable business data worthy of executive attention.

Breaking the “Unmeasurable” Myth Next Element demonstrated that soft skills can absolutely be measured when behaviors are operationalized into observable actions, multiple observers can reliably identify the same behaviors, and changes correlate with business metrics.

The Drama Resilience Assessment in Action Organizations using the assessment gained:

• Baseline data - Quantified starting points for drama resilience across teams

• Progress tracking - Regular measurement showing behavioral change trajectories

• Early warning systems - Identification of struggling teams before crises escalate

• Coaching specificity - Clear language for developmental conversations

• ROI evidence - Correlation between improved drama resilience and business outcomes

Leading Indicators That Matter Rather than waiting months to see results, clients observed measurable changes within weeks: increased comfort navigating difficult conversations, improved self-awareness about stress responses, higher confidence in conflict resolution, and early behavioral shifts in openness, resourcefulness, and persistence.

Sustainable Behavior Change The three-part measurement approach (pre, post, follow-up) ensures accountability for lasting change, not just post-training euphoria. Clients can document that improvements persist and compound over time as skills become embedded in team culture.

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Do One Thing Different

The journey from soft skills skeptic to measurement champion doesn’t require a PhD in clinical psychology—but it does require strategic thinking and methodological discipline.

Start Here:

1. Challenge Your Own Beliefs Before you can convince stakeholders that soft skills are measurable, examine your own assumptions. Do you believe they can truly be quantified? Or are you lingering in the “it’s too complex” camp? Your conviction (or lack thereof) will show up in your measurement design.

2. Choose Your Focus You can’t measure everything. Apply Next Element’s selection criteria:

• Is it grounded in research?

• Can it be operationalized into observable behaviors?

• Could multiple people agree they’re seeing the same thing?

• Is it teachable?

• Can change be measured?

• Does research suggest it correlates with outcomes you care about?

3. Build Your Framework Consider using the Heart-Head-Hands structure:

• What emotional/relational skill matters most? (Heart)

• What cognitive/thinking skill drives your goals? (Head)

• What behavioral/action skill creates results? (Hands)

4. Map Both Sides For each skill you select, define:

• Bright side: What does productive expression look like?

• Dark side: When does this strength become a weakness?

This gives you early warning indicators and coaching specificity.

5. Develop Your Story Before collecting data, articulate your impact framework:

• If we teach X skills...

• We expect to see Y behavioral changes...

• Which will lead to Z business outcomes...

This guides measurement design while remaining open to discovery.

6. Design for Leading Indicators Don’t wait 6-12 months to measure impact. Identify:

• What should change immediately? (awareness, confidence, intent)

• What should shift within weeks? (small behavioral experiments)

• What requires months? (sustained habit change, culture shift)

• What’s your “canary in the coal mine”? (early warning signs)

7. Balance Quantitative and Qualitative Use quantifiable questions to track predicted changes over time. Use open-ended questions to discover what you didn’t anticipate. Both matter.

8. Keep Communication Simple Your methodology can be complex behind the scenes, but your story must be clear:

• What are you measuring? (3-5 specific skills)

• Why do they matter? (clear connection to business goals)

• How will you know they’re changing? (observable behaviors)

• When will you see results? (timeline with milestones)

Resources to Explore:

• Visit https://www.next-element.com/ to learn more about their Compassionate Accountability Assessment and Skills Framework

• Explore their measurement tools and certification programs

• Albert Bandura’s work on social cognitive learning theory and self-efficacy

• Process Communication Model (PCM) for behavioral measurement

• Rob Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method for qualitative discovery

Your Next Step: Pick one soft skill initiative in your organization. Apply Nate’s inter-rater reliability test: Could five people observe someone demonstrating this skill and all agree on what they’re seeing? If not, you’ve identified where to start—defining observable behaviors before measuring them.

Remember: The goal isn’t perfection. It’s progress toward clarity, measurement, and evidence that soft skills drive hard results.

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“Drama resilience is like the canary in the coal mine. It’s an early warning system. When we see drama resilience scores improving, we know more significant behavioral and business outcomes are coming.” — Dr. Nate Regier

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Thank you for reading all the way down! Let us know what you think of this week’s resources! Inspiration and improvement is our goal here at The Weekly Measure :)

See you in your inbox next weekend!

~ Dr. Alaina