The Manager Gap Index.
A diagnostic
for managers

What can’t you see about your own team?What state is the team in?

20 questions, about 5 minutes. Free. Research for Clive Hays’s next book, The Manager Gap.

Early data: for 25 of 40 managers, their gut feel disagreed with what the assessment showed.

  • Cruise
  • Drift
  • Headwinds
  • Stall

What the first forty found

Forty managers have completed a reading, as at 15 October 2026.

  • Instinct and reading disagreed for 25 of 40, and the lean is towards worry.
  • Challenge is the first thing to go quiet: 20 of 40 had not seen open disagreement in over a month. Nine could not recall it at all.
  • Output told them nothing. Output improved or held for 31 of the first 40 teams. 12 of those 31 were in Drift.
The four states
  1. Cruise Output holding, and the behaviours of a healthy team still reach you.
  2. Drift Output holding while the conditions underneath it slide. Nothing in the numbers says anything is wrong.
  3. Headwinds Output under pressure, with a real force outside the team acting on it.
  4. Stall Output has stopped moving, and the signals went quiet long before it did.
What you get

A reading of about a page. It names the state your team is most likely in, and 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.

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.

Output told them nothing. Output improved or held for 31 of the first 40 teams. 12 of those 31 were in Drift.

For anyone who leads a team directly. It asks about one team, the one you lead now.

Your answers are private. Nothing individual is ever published.

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.

At the end you are asked for an email address, ideally your work one, so your reading can be sent to you. Clive may write to you about your result. Nothing here is sold or passed to anyone else, and you can have your answers deleted at any time by writing to contact@cloverera.com.

Nothing from LinkedIn loads unless you accept the cookie banner. That tag is how a visit from an advert is counted, and you can change the choice at any time from Cookie settings in the footer. If you accept, the advert or link that first brought you here is also remembered in this browser for 30 days, so a later visit is credited to it. Choosing No thanks deletes it. The page also records how far each visit gets through the questions, under a random visit id. The visit id is stored with your answers, to understand how people found the assessment and where the questions lose people.

Who is behind this

Clive Hays built this instrument. He is a co-founder of Clover ERA and, with Neil Hays, co-wrote two books on why teams quietly stop performing: The Trillion Dollar Problem (2024) and Already Gone (2026). He is on LinkedIn.

This assessment is the research behind his next book, The Manager Gap.

He also co-founded RRIDA. RRIDA is a manager enablement and coaching tool that helps managers understand their teams, improve the outcomes they get and close the manager gap. It pairs a daily anonymous team pulse, which takes each team member 30 seconds a day, with Eran, an AI coach for managers.

Questions

How long does the Manager Gap assessment take? About five minutes. Twenty questions.

Is it free? Yes.

Do I need to give my email? Yes. Your reading is emailed to you, so the last step asks for a work email. A personal address works too.

What happens to my answers? They are stored for the research and used anonymised and in aggregate. Your name and company never appear.

What are the four team states? Cruise: steady, nothing needs fixing. Drift: something is slipping though the work still looks fine. Headwinds: the team is sound and the pressure is coming from outside. Stall: output and team are both struggling.

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Arrow keys to choose, Enter to continue

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Where should I send your reading?

Your work email, first name and team size are all it needs. Everything after that is optional, and skipping it does not change the reading.

Your reading is sent here, and Clive may write to you about your result.

Help the research optional, skip if you like

None of this is needed to open the reading. It places your answers in the cohort.

Your answers stay on this page until you press the button. The consent box is what allows them to be stored. The research step is separate: skip it and the reading is the same.

Your reading

Your answers are being read.

The full reading is emailed to , with a link that opens it. The link does not expire.

Nothing else is needed from you.