Moving Beyond Fragmented People Data: The EI3.0 Trust-based System of Extraordinary Performance
Abstract
The EI3.0 Trust-based System of Extraordinary Performance (T-SEP) transforms fragmented people data into strategic intelligence through a research-backed framework. Based on five years of study, T-SEP identifies trust as the foundation for extraordinary performance, organizing measurement around four interconnected levels that pinpoint precisely where organizations need to intervene to accelerate performance. The Cultural Dynamics Inventory assessment operationalizes this approach, enabling predictive performance architecture rather than reactive data collection.
Keywords
Organizational performance, Trust-based culture, People analytics, Cultural transformation, Employee engagement, Performance measurement, Return on Investment
Table of Contents Show
Introduction
In the age of big data and advanced analytics, organizations have unprecedented access to information about their people. Yet despite collecting mountains of data from engagement surveys, performance platforms, skills assessments, and wellness programs, most leaders still struggle to answer fundamental questions: What actually drives extraordinary performance? How do we move from average to remarkable? And why do our improvement efforts often fall short despite having all this data?
The answer lies not in collecting more data, but in collecting meaningful data with a clear strategic purpose. After five years of research into what separates high-performing organizations from the rest, I discovered that extraordinary performance isn't reserved for a select few—it's achievable by anyone willing to follow the path that leads to it. That path requires a fundamental shift from fragmented data collection to a unified framework built on trust.
The Problem with Scattered Data Collection
Most organizations are drowning in people data but starving for actionable insights. They cobble together engagement surveys from one vendor, performance metrics from another platform, and skills assessments from yet another system. The result? A fragmented view of human performance that creates more confusion than clarity.
This scattered approach creates several critical problems:
Data inconsistency across different tools and methodologies.
Incomplete employee profiles with significant gaps in understanding.
Administrative burden of managing multiple vendors and platforms.
Survey fatigue among employees facing redundant assessments.
Limited analytics due to incompatible data formats.
Compliance risks from multiple data security points.
But the deepest problem isn't technical—it's strategic. Most organizations collect data without a clear hypothesis about what drives extraordinary performance.
The Missing Strategic Framework
After five years of research on how to maximize and optimize leader, team, and organizational performance, one truth emerged: extraordinary performance is possible for everyone because extraordinary has no limits. You just have to know the path to get there.
That path isn't found in scattered metrics. It's found in understanding the cultural conditions that enable people to perform at their highest level.
The extraordinary organization balances people and profit. Both are important and both are necessary. And there is a clear development path.
The Research Foundation: Purpose-Led, Values-based Culture of Trust
A literature review informed my research, model building, and development path, where two distinct ideas collided: organizational trust and the purpose-led, values-based culture.
First, let’s examine the impact of high trust in the workplace. Great Place To Work® annually identifies America's top 100 employers through comprehensive employee surveys measuring workplace trust levels. Research comparing these organizations to broader market data revealed striking performance differences.
Analysis of Bloomberg, Morningstar, and S&P 500 data for 6,000 companies showed these elite employers generate an average revenue per employee of $883,928—significantly outperforming the typical public company figure of $104,030 per employee. This discrepancy emerged based on Aswath Damodaran's research, a professor and researcher at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
This difference represents an 8.5-fold advantage that persists across all industries and ownership structures.
The performance gap remains substantial when controlling for various factors. Public companies on the list achieve 9.4 times the market average for revenue per employee, while private companies maintain 7.7 times the typical rate. This consistency across sectors and business models suggests that workplace trust directly correlates with enhanced productivity and financial performance.
Long-term market data support this connection: over 26 years, these top-rated employers have collectively outperformed stock market returns by 3.5 times, demonstrating the sustained competitive advantage of high-trust workplace cultures.
The data is unmistakable: a foundation of trust unlocks productivity and performance.
Second, a review of data on organizational performance consistently revealed that the highest-performing organizations share this critical characteristic: Purpose-led, Values-based Culture (PLVBC). This isn't just feel-good language—it's the strategic framework that makes all people data meaningful and actionable.
The PLVBC consistently outperforms its peers across key business metrics. When trust forms the foundation of this cultural approach, it becomes the organization's North Star—the strategic thread that connects every decision, action, and measurement to a unified vision of success.
Without this unifying purpose, data collection becomes an exercise in measurement for measurement's sake.
Organizations end up with dashboards full of metrics that don't inform decisions or drive action. But when a purpose-led, values-based culture becomes your strategic thread, every piece of data serves a clear function: strengthening the cultural conditions for trust that enable extraordinary performance.
Why Trust is the Foundation
Trust functions as the cultural operating system that makes everything else possible:
Without trust, purpose becomes empty rhetoric.
Without trust, values become performative behaviors.
Without trust, there's no emotional and psychological safety as the nurturing ground for the creativity required by extraordinary performance.
Trust isn't just an outcome—it's the leading indicator that drives engagement, performance, retention, innovation, and business results.
Introducing the EI3.0 Trust-based System of Extraordinary Performance (T-SEP)
Based on this research foundation, I developed T-SEP—the Rolls-Royce of corporate culture frameworks (see Figure 1). This isn't just a measurement approach; it's the comprehensive performance architecture that organizations need to systematically create the conditions where extraordinary performance becomes possible.
Figure 1. The Emotional Intelligence 3.0 Trust-Based System of Extraordinary Performance.
Within this structural framework:
Trust serves as the foundational ingredient—without it, extraordinary performance is elusive.
Purpose-led, values-based culture represents the strategic destination—what high-performing organizations look like. Without the destination, data collection in organizations is haphazard.
The four-level diagnostic system and five organizational performance profiles within it show you exactly where your organization is on the journey toward extraordinary performance.
T-SEP organizes this structural approach around four interconnected levels, much like the precision-engineered systems in a Rolls-Royce:
🏗️ Level 1 - The Engine: Strategic & People Frameworks
The power source that drives everything
This level measures the maturity of your organizational foundations:
Strategic Framework Maturity: How well-defined and communicated is your organizational strategy?
People Framework Maturity: How robust are your people systems and processes?
These two pillars create the foundation of trust by providing clarity, consistency, and reliability in how the organization operates.
⚙️ Level 2 - The Transmission: Leadership, Collaboration, and Communication Systems
The levers you can pull to improve performance (operational constructs)
This level focuses on the mechanisms that translate strategy into action:
Leadership Effectiveness: How well do leaders model values, make decisions, and develop others?
Communication & Collaboration Styles: How effectively does everyone in the organization share information and work together?
These are the primary levers you can adjust to improve organizational maturity and performance.
📊 Level 3 - The Performance: Well-being, Innovation and Adaptability, and Trust
The signals that indicate how your system is performing
This level measures the outcomes of your engine:
Employee Well-being: Including engagement levels and stress indicators
Innovation & Adaptability: Both organizational and individual capacity for change and resilience
Trust Levels: The foundational signal that enables all other performance
These signals tell you whether your levers are working effectively and whether your power source is sufficiently energized.
🎯 Level 4 - The Driving Experience: Overall Cultural Reality
What everyone actually experiences and feels inside and outside the organization
This level captures the lived experience of your culture:
Above the Line: Cultures characterized by openness, accountability, and growth.
On the Line: Cultures in transition, with mixed signals and inconsistent experiences.
Below the Line: Cultures marked by blame, defensiveness, and fear.
The elements included in these four levels travel along a path of organic development. There are five phases of maturity for each element, which are captured in organizational performance profiles from least mature (turbulent) to most mature (extraordinary).
The Data Collection Strategy
With the T-SEP framework, you know exactly what data to collect and why:
· Foundation Data (Level 1): Assess the maturity and effectiveness of your strategic and people frameworks.
· Lever Data (Level 2): Measure leadership capabilities and communication/collaboration effectiveness.
· Signal Data (Level 3): Track well-being, innovation capacity, and trust levels.
· Experience Data (Level 4): Evaluate the overall cultural experience and its position above, on, or below the line.
This approach creates a coherent measurement strategy where every data point connects to your core hypothesis: building and maintaining a purpose-led, values-based culture of trust.
The Transformation Advantage
Unlike fragmented approaches that leave you guessing where to focus, the T-SEP framework pinpoints exactly what needs attention:
Identify Root Causes: Understand whether performance issues stem from foundational problems (Level 1) or operational issues (Level 2).
Focused Interventions: Build transformation projects that address specific organizational hotspots.
Measure Progress & Demonstrate ROI: Track improvements systematically across all four levels and prove projects drive business results across the organization.
Predict the Future: Transform leading indicators into tomorrow's extraordinary results.
Creating Change That People Own
Too often, employees experience change as external pressure rather than organic evolution. That's because it's rarely connected to a clear strategic thread—or if it is, that connection is poorly communicated. This creates resistance and skepticism that undermines even well-intentioned transformation efforts.
The T-SEP framework creates a different dynamic entirely. When you have a strategic thread that connects all actions, and it's based on data collected from the people you're asking to change, it generates a different type of momentum. Instead of change being something done to employees, it becomes something developed with them.
The message shifts from "we've decided to make these changes" to "our employees spoke, we listened, and now we're responding to your experiences." This transforms the entire change dynamic from compliance-based to ownership-based, dramatically increasing the likelihood of successful transformation.
The EI3.0 Solution
Organizations need more than scattered data points—they need a Cultural MRI that reveals exactly where to intervene for lasting transformation and increased performance. The Cultural Dynamics Inventory assessment, the centerpiece of the RIO◊360 data analytics platform that was created in response to the research, functions as this diagnostic tool, identifying performance hotspots and providing clear direction for strategic intervention.
Rather than guessing at culture change and business transformation, leaders can start with precise data that shows exactly where their organization stands and what requires immediate attention. This science-backed assessment measures the nine vital signs of organizational performance across the four levels of the T-SEP framework, creating a comprehensive view of cultural health and transformation readiness.
The platform transforms raw workforce data into reliable, actionable insights that eliminate guesswork, provided in a straightforward dashboard so your data is always in one place. Organizations gain real-time cultural intelligence that enables them to address today's opportunities while anticipating tomorrow's needs. This immediate visibility creates the agility to shift resources and make people-centered decisions that deliver measurable impact within months, not years.
See a sample dashboard.
Beyond Measurement: Building Trust Through Assessment
The assessment process itself becomes a trust-building exercise. When people understand that data collection serves the larger purpose of creating a culture where they can thrive, measurement becomes collaborative rather than threatening.
The Science Behind the System
The T-SEP model isn't theoretical—it emerged from rigorous research on extraordinary performance across individuals, leaders, teams, and organizations. The framework provides a science-backed approach to understanding what actually drives sustainable high performance.
Making People Analytics Coherent
This approach transforms people analytics from scattered data collection into strategic intelligence. You're no longer measuring everything, hoping something will be helpful. Instead, you're measuring the specific cultural conditions that drive business results and enable extraordinary performance.
Every assessment, survey, and metric ladders up to the same fundamental question: "How effectively are we building and maintaining a purpose-led, values-based culture of trust?"
When this becomes your organizing principle, people data finally serves its intended purpose: helping human beings and organizations reach their extraordinary potential.
Conclusion
The journey from fragmented data collection to strategic people analytics isn't just about better measurement—it's about creating the conditions where extraordinary performance becomes possible for everyone in your organization.
The EI3.0 Trust-based System of Extraordinary Performance offers more than a framework; it provides a roadmap for transformation. By anchoring your measurement strategy in the purpose-led, values-based culture of trust, you move beyond the noise of scattered metrics to focus on what truly matters: building an environment where people can authentically pursue shared purpose through lived values.
The science is clear, the framework is proven, and the path is defined. The question isn't whether extraordinary performance is possible in your organization—it's whether you're ready to measure and build the cultural conditions that make it inevitable.
Your people data should tell a story of trust, purpose, and values in action. When it does, extraordinary performance isn't just an aspiration—it becomes your organizational reality.
Like Rolls-Royce—trusted to deliver excellence—T-SEP provides the precision-engineered framework for cultural transformation that organizations can trust to deliver excellence in pursuit of achieving extraordinary performance.
Ready to move beyond fragmented people data? The EI3.0 Trust-based System of Extraordinary Performance provides the strategic framework to make your people analytics coherent, actionable, and transformative. Learn more about implementing T-SEP in your organization at the EI3.0 Assessment and Consulting Center: Bryan Insights.
References
Great Place to Work. (2025, April 2). Why high-trust cultures excel on productivity metrics like revenue per employee. Great Place to Work Blog. https://www.greatplacetowork.com/resources/blog/culture-drives-productivity-metrics-rpe
Santos, S. Make purpose real for employees. Harvard Business Review. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/insight/make-purpose-real-for-employees/
Society for Human Resource Management. Does culture really drive results? SHRM News. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/does-culture-really-drive-results
