Stop Arguing About Meritocracy and Start Measuring It: A Practical Guide for Leaders + A Peek at Aleria’s Meritocracy Checkup Beta

✏️ Apply for the Meritocracy Checkup Beta.

Proper Identification

“Meritocracy” has become a weaponized word, thrown around in boardrooms, comment sections, and break rooms as if it’s a self-evident truth. But most organizations don’t have a meritocracy problem or a DEI problem first, they have a measurement and consistency problem.

The Diagnosis

If you want a workplace where people are hired, promoted, and paid based on skill and effort, you have to define merit in operational terms and measure whether your systems actually reward it. That’s why I’m paying attention to Aleria’s Meritocracy Checkup Beta (a program scheduled to run between February and April, 2026): it treats meritocracy as something you can diagnose, not debate.

Meritocracy As A Concept

The uncomfortable truth: “Meritocracy” is usually an aspiration, not a system.

I’ve spent my career in the business of employment, especially employment for people who’ve been underestimated, screened out, or simply forgotten. And here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: people love the idea of meritocracy right up until you ask a simple follow-up question:

“How do you know you have one?”

Most organizations can’t answer that cleanly. They can describe values. They can point to policies. They can show a performance review form. But when you look closely at outcomes and day-to-day experiences, “meritocracy” often turns out to be a story we tell ourselves, while informal rules, inconsistent management practices, and uneven access to opportunity do the real deciding.

Aleria puts it plainly: a true meritocracy requires well-defined rules and metrics. Without them, organizations create hidden losses through disengagement, unfulfilled potential, and attrition. Aleria even estimates those losses can reach 20-30% of net profits, not because people are lazy, but because systems leak performance.

If that number makes you skeptical, good. Skepticism is healthy. But don’t stop at skepticism, turn it into inquiry. Ask: Where do we lose performance today because we cannot reliably prove that recognition and rewards are tied to skills and effort?

Why The “DEI Vs. Meritocracy” Fight Is A Dead End

A lot of the noise we’re living through right now is framed as a tug-of-war: DEI on one side, meritocracy on the other. In my view, that framing is backwards.

Aleria’s approach resonates with me because it treats meritocracy as a practical operational question:

• Inclusion is about whether workplace experiences are consistently independent of identity traits.
• Merit is about whether recognition and rewards are consistently based on skills and effort, not demographics, social status, or personal connections.

That pairing matters. Because even if an organization believes in merit, it can unintentionally design systems where some people get more coaching, more visibility, more forgiveness, and more second chances than others. When that happens, you don’t get meritocracy. You get something else, usually dressed up in nice language.

And here’s the trap: when leaders argue about meritocracy at the level of ideology, they avoid the harder work of looking at the mechanics of how decisions actually get made.

Meritocracy Isn’t A Slogan. It’s The Sum Of Your Processes

When leaders say “we hire the best,” I want to know:

• Best according to what criteria?
• Measured how?
• Applied consistently by whom?
• Audited how often?

Meritocracy lives or dies in the boring places:

• Who gets stretch assignments.
• Who gets feedback that’s specific enough to be useful.
• Who gets introduced to decision-makers.
• Whose mistakes are treated as “learning” versus “proof”.
• Which roles have clear performance expectations versus shifting goalposts.
• Whether career pathways are transparent or tribal knowledge.

If those systems aren’t clear, “merit” becomes whatever the most powerful person in the room says it is.

A Practical Definition Of Merit (That Leaders Can Actually Use)

If you’re serious about meritocracy, start here: Merit must be observable.

That doesn’t mean every job is easy to quantify. It means your organization can articulate, role by role, what “good” looks like in ways that are concrete enough to guide decisions.

In practice, leaders tend to mix together four different things and call the mixture “merit”:

• Skills (what someone can do).
• Effort (what someone invests).
• Outputs (what gets produced).
• Outcomes (what results from those outputs).

All four can matter. But if you never separate them, you end up rewarding the easiest-to-see signals, often confidence, familiarity, or proximity, rather than actual contribution.

This is where inclusion becomes inseparable from merit. Because what people can show you depends heavily on whether the workplace is built to let them succeed.

I’ve heard the frustration, especially from people who rely on accessible technology to do their jobs, when organizations change systems without testing accessibility, and then act shocked when performance suffers. When you break the tools people need to work, you don’t get a meritocracy. You get an obstacle course.

“Inclusion Is What You Do; Diversity Is What You Get.”

One of the most useful lines I’ve heard in this space is: “Inclusion is what you do; diversity is what you get.”

It’s a reminder that outcomes are downstream from actions. If you want a meritocracy, the same logic applies: Meritocracy is what you design; trust is what you earn.

You can’t demand that employees believe promotions are fair. You have to demonstrate it through systems that are understandable, consistent, and measurable.

The Business Case Leaders Keep Missing: Dissatisfaction Is Expensive

Aleria’s framing is intentionally business-forward: you can “make more money by making your people happier.” Not happy as in pep rallies, happy as in able to succeed without friction that has nothing to do with the job.

Here’s what leaders underestimate: dissatisfaction doesn’t just sit quietly in an annual engagement score. It shows up as:

• Lower productivity.
• Higher attrition.
• Weaker collaboration.
• Slower execution.
• riskier errors

And attrition is not “just HR.” There are commonly cited heuristics, shared by Paolo Gaudiano, Chief Scientist at Aleria, that replacing an entry-level employee may cost 3-6 months of salary, while replacing a senior executive can cost 1.5-2 years of salary. Even if you debate the exact multiplier, the direction is not debatable: turnover is expensive, and avoidable turnover is a tax you pay for broken systems.

So What Should Leaders Do On Monday Morning? A No-Drama Guide

If you want to move from arguing about meritocracy to building one, here’s the pragmatic sequence I recommend:

1. Declare what decisions must be “merit-based”, and define merit for each.
2. Start with the decisions that shape careers: hiring, promotions, compensation, performance ratings, and access to high-impact work.

Then Define What “Merit” Means For Each Decision In Each Job Family.

If you can’t define it, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

3. Map where discretion lives, and where it shouldn’t.
4. Meritocracies fail in the gaps between policy and practice. Identify the points where managers have wide discretion:

• Performance review narratives.
• Nomination processes.
• “Tap on the shoulder” assignments.
• exceptions to policy

Discretion isn’t evil. But unmanaged discretion is where bias, organizational and individual, has room to operate.

5. Identify the friction that blocks people from showing merit.

This is where inclusion and accessibility stop being “nice-to-have” and become performance infrastructure. Ask:

• What prevents people from doing excellent work consistently?
• Which barriers are systemic (processes, tools, access), not personal?

If a high-performing employee is spending energy compensating for avoidable friction, your organization is wasting talent.

6. Collect structured input from the people closest to the work.

Most leaders don’t lack values. They lack visibility.

One of the most practical ideas in Aleria’s approach is to treat managers’ and employees’ lived experience as data, captured in a way that can be analyzed, not dismissed as anecdote.

7. Measure, act, repeat, and show your work.

If you want credibility, don’t just announce a commitment to meritocracy. Publish what you’re improving:

• Which processes you’re redesigning.
• Wwhat you’re measuring.
• What changed as a result.

Transparency builds trust, and trust reduces the cynical “this is all politics” narrative that fuels backlash.

A Peek At Aleria’s Meritocracy Checkup Beta: What It Is And How It Works

Now let’s get specific.

Aleria is offering a Meritocracy Checkup Beta Program aimed at a limited number of organizations, targeted at employers with 500+ employees, running between February and April 2026, with beta pricing set at $5,000.

At the center of the program is a 90-minute workshop with people managers across levels, from frontline supervisors to executives. The workshop is designed to:

• Teach the Inclusive Meritocracy framework.
• Share practical ways to define and measure merit.
• Guide managers through an activity analyzing policies, processes, and resources they control that may not be fully meritocratic.

After the workshop, participants submit qualitative and quantitative information through an online platform. They can anonymize responses to support psychological safety. Aleria then analyzes the data and delivers:

• A report with an overall assessment of opportunities to increase meritocracy and specific recommendations based on participant input.
• Access to an interactive dashboard to explore the qualitative and quantitative data.

Because it’s a beta, the deal is straightforward: Aleria provides preferred pricing and early access, and participating organizations are asked to provide feedback after final delivery (including a short survey and potentially a brief feedback call).

I like the premise for a simple reason: it pushes leaders away from ideology and toward operational clarity. It treats meritocracy the way a serious organization treats safety, quality, or cybersecurity, something you can assess, monitor, and improve.

A Limitation And A Tradeoff Leaders Should Acknowledge

Measurement is powerful, but it’s not magic.

Here are two realities leaders should be honest about:

• Merit is hard to define well. Aleria’s entire premise is that most organizations don’t have the rules and metrics they’d need for a true meritocracy. That means the work will surface ambiguity, especially in jobs where outputs are complex or team-based. The benefit of measurement is not certainty; it’s clarity about where you lack clarity.
• Psychological safety is fragile. Aleria allows anonymous participation to support safety, and that’s wise. But anonymity doesn’t automatically create trust. Trust is created by what leaders do next, whether the organization uses results to improve systems, or uses results to defend itself.

If leaders want people to speak candidly, they have to prove that candor leads to improvements, not consequences.

Practical Implications / What This Means

This conversation matters because “meritocracy” is not an academic abstraction. It shapes real outcomes:

For CEOs And Executives

If you can’t show that recognition and rewards are tied to clear, consistent criteria, you’re paying hidden costs, through attrition, stalled execution, and underperformance. Measuring meritocracy turns a culture war into a performance agenda.

For HR And Talent Leaders

This reframes the work. Instead of arguing about representation targets, you can focus on redesigning processes that block talent from thriving, and use measurement to prioritize what to fix first.

For Managers

Managers are often blamed for inequity while being handed vague standards and inconsistent systems. A structured checkup, especially one that captures manager insight, can turn managerial frustration into actionable change.

For Employees, Especially Those Who Are Routinely Underestimated

When merit is undefined, the burden shifts to individuals to “prove they belong.” That burden is heavier for people who face extra barriers, whether that’s inaccessible tools, uneven support, or informal networks that exclude them. Measuring meritocracy is a way to shift from personal coping strategies to systemic improvements.

For Organizational Decision-Making

If you treat meritocracy as measurable, it changes how you allocate resources:

• You invest in process redesign, not just training.
• Yyou test systems (including accessibility) before rolling them out.
• You prioritize fixes that reduce friction and improve performance for everyone.

Stop Arguing and Start Measuring

Meritocracy is a worthy ideal, but it doesn’t exist because we say it does. It exists when leaders do the hard work of defining merit, measuring whether their systems reward it, and fixing the leaks that turn talent into wasted potential.

My final takeaway is simple: stop arguing about meritocracy and start measuring it. If Aleria’s Meritocracy Checkup Beta helps leaders move from rhetoric to reality, through a practical workshop, structured data collection, and a clear report, then it’s exactly the kind of tool this moment needs.

” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “

Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation

Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI)
Executive Director
Strengthening individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.

Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here

American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.

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