Somewhere in your organisation right now there is a slide with a number on it. Engagement is 71. Or 64. Or whatever it is. Somebody will be asked what they are doing about it.
I have been that somebody, standing at the front of a room, looking at a number I didn’t know how to move. I nodded a lot. Nodding is not a strategy.
The trouble with a score on its own is that it tells you where you are and nothing about why. So a few years ago I stopped asking teams for a score and started asking for gaps. Three of them.
Aspiration. The distance between where the team is and the standard it set itself. A big gap here isn’t bad news. It might mean big ambition. It might mean a behaviour nobody has started on. Either way you know where to look.
Perception. Your read against your team’s. This is the one that stings. When a leader scores a behaviour higher than the team does, and it happens a lot, that difference is the gap most leaders never see, and it is the one that costs trust. Not because the leader is lying. Because the leader sees the intent and the team sees the result.
Spread. How much the team varies. An average of 7 can be a team of sevens or a team of tens and fours. Those are two completely different rooms, and they need two completely different conversations.
What I like about the three gaps is that they aren’t new things to measure. They are three ways of reading the same conversation. Take any behaviour your team has agreed to and you can ask all three questions about it. How far are we from what we said? Do I see it the way they see it? Are we all in roughly the same place, or is it a few people carrying it?
And it turns out this is what the research was telling us all along. Asked whether culture is the outcome of lots of little decisions made over time, 95% of people leaders agreed. Little decisions don’t show up in a big number. They show up in gaps, if you look for them.
You don’t need a tool for this. You need a behaviour, a bit of honesty, and the willingness to ask your team how they see it before you tell them how you do.