Attuned Skills began as part of my personal journey to become a leader of leaders — one that started over 40 years ago. Throughout my career, I actively sought out training, devoured books, and applied lessons learned directly on the job. Bit by bit, I built my leadership skill set, always trying to understand what made a leader not just effective, but complete. My passion is to build high performing teams.
About 25 years into that journey, I had a realization: many of the leaders around me were missing essential skills—but they didn’t know it. They were operating on effort and instinct, often getting by, but sometimes causing more harm than good without realizing it. There just weren’t many opportunities—especially for new or mid-level leaders—to grow in a structured, skill-based way. Leadership development, when it existed, was often too generic, too shallow, or simply unavailable. I kept asking myself how to help enable skill development in leaders like myself.
At the same time, I was leading a large, multi-site call center operation. I walked into a situation with high turnover and low quality. I started digging—into hiring processes, training programs, operational documentation, and the actual work being done on the floor. That’s when it hit me: nothing was aligned.
New hires were trained using materials that didn’t match what they were expected to do. The training manuals didn’t match the standard operating procedures (SOPs), and the SOPs didn’t match the reality of the work. To make things worse, process changes weren’t consistently updated across those tools. When I assessed agent knowledge, even the most tenured employees—some with over 30 years on the job—couldn’t score higher than 35 out of 100.
No wonder people were frustrated. How could anyone feel satisfied or confident in their work when the knowledge and tools they needed were incomplete or contradictory?
So we took action. Over the next six months, we realigned all the materials—training, SOPs, and job expectations—and created a system for keeping everything up to date. Then we retrained every single agent, with a personalized focus based on each person’s knowledge gaps. The results were dramatic: agent satisfaction climbed to over 85%, retention rose from 60% to 85%, and quality scores surpassed 90%. Most importantly, the agents felt confident—they knew their jobs, and they were proud to do them well.
That experience deeply reinforced something I had been observing in leadership for years. Just like those frontline agents, many leaders lacked the knowledge and skills they needed to feel confident and competent in their roles. And just like with the agents, that knowledge gap affected their results—and their teams.
This realization ignited a passion in me. I wanted to help other leaders—any leader—gain the tools they needed to grow, succeed, and lead with confidence.
Over the past 25 years, I’ve gathered everything I’ve learned and shared it widely: within my own organizations, through professional associations, at conferences, and with individual leaders who’ve asked for help. I’ve taught large groups, facilitated workshops, and mentored peers and up-and-coming leaders alike.
While I’ve always enjoyed fixing business problems and turning around struggling operations, I’ve discovered an equal joy in helping leaders grow. Watching someone step into their potential—seeing their confidence rise as they build new skills—is incredibly rewarding.
Helping others become more complete leaders isn’t just something I do. It’s something I love. That’s what Attuned Skills is all about. I hope the ideas and tools you find here help you grow, just as they’ve helped me and so many others.
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