Team Assessment
Maintenance and Specialist Team Health Indices
Generic engagement surveys were built for offices. These were built, validated, and benchmarked for industrial teams.
The research foundation
The Wayward Leaders Health Indices measure what generic engagement surveys miss: the actual drivers behind retention, productivity, and team performance in industrial environments. They are grounded in original peer-reviewed research and adapted from established psychometric scales used in workplace and organizational psychology. The methodology is documented, the benchmarks are anchored to published norms, and the findings are defensible to skeptical executives, internal HR partners, and external auditors.
The framework measures four dimensions the academic literature has spent decades validating: work engagement, turnover intention, psychological safety, and grit. The combination, the weighting, and the benchmarking are ours. The specific instruments and their integration are proprietary to Wayward Leaders.
- 431valid responses in the 2024 U.S. Industrial Maintenance Worker Study, cross-validated against a 4,270-sample dataset.
- 50,000+employees behind the published norms the benchmarks are anchored to.
- 4dimensions measured: work engagement, turnover intention, psychological safety, and grit.
- 3industrial reference benchmarks: maintenance teams at 67, technical specialists at 70, normal industry at 75.
- 28questions per instrument, about 10 minutes per participant.
- $7,500for a standard single-team assessment, up to 25 participants.
The three assessments
Each is a standalone engagement. The Dashboard combines the first two with performance and capability measurement.
Maintenance Health Index (MHI)
Built for. Plant managers, maintenance directors, and operations leaders who need to understand the actual workforce health of their maintenance and reliability teams. Especially valuable when turnover, knowledge loss, productivity decline, or generational transition is visible but not yet diagnosed.
What it measures. Engagement, retention stability, leadership trust, and psychological safety, scored on a 0 to 100 composite with sub-scores in each dimension. Benchmarked against maintenance-team-specific norms.
Team-level MHI Scorecard with Green, Yellow and Red zone interpretation. Five-page report covering overall score, sub-scores, benchmark comparison, and prioritized interpretation. One leadership calibration call to walk through findings.
Specialist Health Index (SHI)
Built for. Distribution executives, branch managers, OEM channel leaders, and corporate L&D leaders who need workforce health data on their technical specialist teams, including industrial distribution specialists, application engineers, and field technical sales personnel.
What it measures. Engagement, retention stability, leadership trust, and psychological safety, scored on a 0 to 100 composite with sub-scores in each dimension. Benchmarked against technical specialist norms.
Team-level SHI Scorecard with Green, Yellow and Red zone interpretation. Five-page report covering overall score, sub-scores, benchmark comparison, and prioritized interpretation. One leadership calibration call to walk through findings.
The Specialist Dashboard
Built for. Organizations that want comprehensive workforce diagnostic data across the three dimensions that determine team performance: retention stability, current performance behavior, and capability progression.
What it measures. Three integrated indices answering the three fundamental workforce questions. Are they staying? SHI or MHI, covering engagement, retention stability and leadership trust. Are they performing? ABS, Activity-Based Selling: technical consultation frequency, customer touchpoint patterns, solution development behavior. Are they growing? SCMI, the Specialist Capability Maturity Index: technical competency, knowledge transfer effectiveness, decision-making quality.
Integrated workforce diagnostic report including all three indices, cross-index analysis, prioritized findings, and recommended action sequence. Leadership readout presentation. 60-day follow-up calibration session.
Discovery Engagement
For clients who need a comprehensive workforce diagnostic, the Discovery Engagement combines validated Health Index scoring with structured qualitative interviews, leadership alignment mapping, personality and grit assessment, and field observation. The deliverable is a Discovery Brief covering the Cultural Baseline Assessment, the Health Index Scorecard, and prioritized findings with recommended next steps. From $32,500, by team size and scope.
- Qualitative interviews, n=10Reflexive thematic analysis of specialist or maintenance team member perspectives, challenges, and aspirations in their own words.
- Leadership interviews, n=3 to 5Readiness and alignment mapping to ensure executive support and strategic coherence.
- Health Index administrationMHI or SHI deployed to all team members, with sub-scores and benchmark comparison.
- Personality and grit assessmentBig Five-based personality assessment combined with a validated grit measure, revealing retention predictors and selection-relevant patterns.
- Field observation and TWOS workshopDirect observation and a collaborative workshop that draws out tacit knowledge and cultural patterns.
Ongoing monitoring
For organizations that want continuous workforce health tracking rather than a single point-in-time assessment.
| Program | What it is | Investment |
|---|---|---|
| Quarterly Health Index tracking | Re-administration of MHI or SHI on a quarterly cadence with trend analysis and intervention recommendation. | $4,500 per quarter, per team |
| Annual workforce health benchmark | Single annual assessment with year-over-year comparison and longitudinal analysis. | $9,500 per team, annually |
| Multi-site benchmark program | Coordinated assessment across multiple sites or business units with comparative analysis. | Quoted per program scope |
Why Wayward Leaders Health Indices
- Validated instruments, not opinion surveysEvery Health Index is built on established peer-reviewed psychometric scales with published reliability and validity.
- Research-grounded benchmarksBenchmarks anchored to published norms across cumulative samples exceeding 50,000 employees. Your team is compared to the right reference, not generic engagement averages from white-collar populations.
- Industrial context, not generic HRThe instruments were adapted, validated, and benchmarked specifically for industrial maintenance, technical specialists, and operations populations. We do not pretend a white-collar engagement survey works in a plant.
- Direct interpretationEvery engagement includes a leadership calibration call. The score is the start of the conversation, not the end. Dr. Carl Lee Tolbert walks your leadership through what the numbers mean and what to do next.
- Senior practitioner, not a delivery teamAll engagements are led directly by Dr. Carl Lee Tolbert. The researcher who built the instruments is the consultant who walks your leadership through the results.
- Credentials backing the workPhD with an active applied research practice, CMRP, faculty appointments at Truett McConnell University, University of Sioux Falls, and Columbia International University. Published industrial workforce researcher.
Start a conversation
Email carl@waywardleaders.com, or book a call. We respond within one business day.
Wayward Leaders® is a veteran-owned VFD training practice. We teach maintenance teams and plant electricians to install, commission, and troubleshoot variable frequency drives correctly, in person, at the plant that owns the equipment, anywhere in the United States.
Every class ends with a scored competency assessment. The plant gets a way to prove what each technician can do, not a roster of who sat in the room.
The instruction is field-trained. It is drawn from nearly 8,000 VFD, power, and motor documents and from more than 750 commissioned drives captured through personal field experience and data collection. Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP, and ATD Master Trainer® candidate, leads it. He has delivered more than 5,000 hours of VFD instruction across 30 years and trained 8,000 industrial professionals, from International Paper to the U.S. Navy.
The premise is simple: VFDs do not fail. Installations fail them. The curriculum is built backward from that.
Installation, commissioning, troubleshooting, and fault diagnosis guides are published openly at waywardleaders.com.