What Is the TEEE Score?

Most career advice fails for one reason: you cannot measure it. "Be more professional" is not actionable. "Network more" is not a number. I built the TEEE Score because in twenty years of hiring and mentoring, I kept meeting talented young people who had no idea which part of themselves to work on. So they worked on everything, which is the same as working on nothing.

It became chapter five of Open Doors, and it is the framework readers write to me about most.

The four dimensions

Why self-scoring works

There is a measurable gap between how prepared graduates believe they are and how prepared employers find them. The National Association of Colleges and Employers has documented perception gaps of roughly 25 to 30 points on competencies including communication, professionalism, and leadership. Students consistently rate themselves higher than employers rate them.

A score forces the conversation. When you write a 5 next to Energy in your own handwriting, you have said something specific about yourself that "I should improve my soft skills" never says.

What the TEEE Score is not

It is not an IQ test and it is not a personality type. Personality tests tell you who you are and then leave you there. You are an ENFP, congratulations, nothing to do. TEEE is deliberately the opposite: three of its four dimensions are behaviors, and behaviors move.

It is also not a verdict. A 19 is not a sentence. It is a diagnosis, and diagnosis is the part that makes treatment possible. I spend my working life in medicine, and I have never once met a physician who thought naming a problem was the same as being defeated by it.

Why this matters beyond one person

Here is the part I care about most, and it is the reason I made the assessment free.

Some young people grow up with someone at the dinner table who tells them their Energy is low, their follow-through is slipping, or that they came across as uninterested in that meeting. That feedback is enormously valuable, and it is distributed almost entirely by accident of birth. If you had that person, you got a decade head start. If you did not, you found out at thirty.

A shared score changes what is possible in a classroom, a chapter meeting, or a mentoring relationship. It gives everyone the same four words and the same scale. A student can say "my Execution is a 4", and a professor, coach, or mentor suddenly has something specific to work with instead of "how's it going?"

Run across a whole cohort, it does something else again: it shows a program where its students actually are, rather than where the curriculum assumes they are. That is a conversation most institutions cannot currently have, because nobody is measuring it.

What to do with your number

1. Find your lowest single dimension. Not your total. The one number dragging the others.
2. Pick one habit that moves it. Only one. Most people attempt all four at once, move nothing, and conclude they are not the type. They are the type. They picked the wrong target.
3. Run it for fourteen days before you evaluate anything. Behavior changes on a slower clock than motivation does.
4. Work the chapter, not just the number. Chapter five of Open Doors walks through each dimension with the drills; the five other frameworks in the book handle what to do once you know your weak spot.
5. Ask someone who works alongside you to score you on the same four. The distance between your number and theirs is usually the real lesson. It is the uncomfortable instruction, which is why it works.