The Manager Gap IndexYour team is in one of four states. Two of them look identical from where you sit.
The difference is not in your output. It is in what still reaches you: the blocker raised before it bit, the disagreement said out loud.
- Cruise Output holding, and the behaviours of a healthy team still reach you.
- Drift Output holding while the conditions underneath it slide. Nothing in the numbers says anything is wrong.
- Headwinds Output under pressure, with a real force outside the team acting on it.
- Stall Output has stopped moving, and the signals went quiet long before it did.
Twenty questions, about five minutes. Nothing is sent to you unless you ask for it.
Before you start: answer from memory of actual events. There are no wrong answers. But a guessed answer makes the result meaningless. “Can’t recall” is a valid and useful answer.
What you get
A reading of about a page. It names the state your team is most likely in and says how confident that call is, given how much of the team’s week actually reaches you.
It scores five areas on what has reached you recently, then picks the one worth your attention now and gives you something to do about it this week. There is no score out of ten and no league table.
What the first thirty found
Thirty managers have run this so far. For nineteen of them, their instinct going in and their own evidence coming out did not agree. Nine were in Drift, with output holding while the conditions underneath it slid.
This is for anyone who leads a team directly: managers, heads of department, directors, and founders with people reporting to them. Company size does not matter. It asks about one team, the one you lead now.
Your answers are private. Nothing individual is ever published. Anything this research reports is aggregated across everyone who takes part.
What happens to your answers
Your answers are stored so the cohort can be studied as a whole. Nothing individual is ever published. The research that comes out of this, including the Index and the book, reports patterns across everyone who takes part, never one person’s answers.
An email address is optional. Give one and your report is sent to you, and Clive may write to you once about your result. That is the only contact. Leave it blank and your report opens on a private link at the end instead, and nothing is sent to you at all. Nothing here is sold or passed to anyone else, and you can have your answers deleted at any time by writing to [email protected].
This page sets no cookies and runs no third-party analytics. It does record how far each visit gets through the questions, under a random number that is discarded when you close the tab and is never attached to your answers, your name or your email. That is used for one thing: seeing where the questions lose people.
Who is behind this
Clive Hays built this instrument. He is a co-founder of Clover ERA and co-wrote two books on why teams quietly stop performing: The Trillion Dollar Problem (2024) and Already Gone (2025). He is on LinkedIn.
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