The Manager Gap Index.
A diagnostic
for managers

Cruise or Drift? Find out which state your team is really in.

20 questions, about 5 minutes. Free, no email needed. 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.

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 contact@cloverera.com.

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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? No. Your reading opens on a private link. Email is optional.

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

Twenty of twenty

Your first name opens the reading.

Team size is the other thing it needs. Everything after that is optional, and skipping it does not change the reading.

Help the research optional, skip if you like

None of this is needed to open the reading. It places your answers in the cohort. An email, if you leave one, is also where the reading is sent, and Clive may write once about your result. Leave it blank and the reading opens on a private link, and nothing is sent to you.

Leave it blank and your reading opens on a private link. Give an address and the reading is emailed to you. That, plus one note from Clive about your result, is the only contact.

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.