Conversation Cost Scorecard
Where is your strategy leaking between what gets agreed and what gets delivered?
Companies deliver just 63 per cent of the performance their strategy promised. The missing 37 is not lost in planning. It is lost in the gap between what leaders agree and what their people actually do.
Twelve honest questions about how your leadership team actually behaves, not how the away-day poster says it should. You get your result on screen, including the one conversation your team is most likely avoiding.
Which team are you scoring?
Hold one specific team in mind and answer everything about that team. If you lead it, score it as you see it rather than as you would like it to be.
Score how your team actually behaves. Go with your first instinct, it is usually the honest one. Read each one carefully, because some are worded the other way round.
Answer both to continue.
B E A C O N
Belonging, Engagement, Alignment, Communication, Ownership, Nurturing growth. Each is scored out of ten. The pattern across the six tells you more than the total does, because two teams can score the same forty and have completely different problems.
Whether people speak, and whether it is safe to.
Whether people care, and keep growing.
Whether agreement actually becomes delivery.
Ask your team to score it too
You have scored the team as you see it. The people in it will score it differently, and that gap, between your read and theirs, is the single most revealing output of this whole exercise. Send them the same twelve questions, have them answer privately, then compare. Do not debate who is right. Where you diverge is precisely where the unsaid lives.
These are not soft measures
Each condition has a measured, published cost when it is missing. The figures below are from independent research, not from us.
Get the written breakdown
Your full result by email. What each letter means for your team, the conversation your lowest letter points at, and how to sequence the fixes rather than storm them.
Bring your lowest letter to a conversation
The most expensive conversation is the one your team keeps avoiding. If the pattern is bigger than one letter, or you have seen it before and it keeps coming back, that is usually the sign it will not resolve from inside the team.
Twenty minutes, no pitch and no slides. If I cannot help, I say so by minute five.
This is rarely a capability problem. It is almost always a conversation problem.
Sources: Mankins and Steele, Harvard Business Review 2005. Gallup 2024. BetterUp 2019. Kaplan and Norton 2005. Grammarly and The Harris Poll 2022. Partners in Leadership. LinkedIn 2019.