The Gap

The Gap.You don't feel it. That's the problem

Ask a parent how their kid is doing and you'll get an answer. Not a guess. An answer.

"She's good. Busy. Stressed about exams. But she's good."

Ask a manager about the person who sits ten feet away from them. Same confidence. "He's solid. Bit quiet lately. Nothing I'd worry about."

Ask a CEO whether people in their company feel safe speaking up, and watch how fast the answer comes.

Nobody in that group is lying. That's the part worth sitting with. They're all answering honestly, from the only place any of us can answer from, which is what we've seen.

The trouble is that what we've seen was curated.

Somebody decided what you'd get

Every person you're responsible for is making a decision about you. Quietly. Constantly. How much of this do I hand over?

They're usually not deciding whether they trust you. Most of the time they do. They're deciding something harder. What happens to you if I tell you?

Kids run this math. So do employees.

If I tell my mom, she'll worry, and she's already carrying enough.

If I tell my manager, it goes in a file somewhere and follows me around.

If I say what I actually think in this meeting, I'll be the difficult one.

So you get "I'm fine." You get "all good." You get a shrug and a closed door and a status update that says nothing.

And you file it away as information. It isn't. It's a decision somebody made about you, and you weren't in the room for it.

The part that took me years

I used to believe a close relationship was insurance. Stay involved. Keep the door open. Talk to your kids and they'll talk to you.

I don't believe that anymore. Well, mostly.

The closer someone is to you, the more they have to lose by telling you. A kid who loves you, protects you. An employee who respects you doesn't want to disappoint you. The relationship you've spent years building becomes the reason for the silence.

That's backwards from everything we get told about communication. It's also, in my experience, how it actually works.

Somebody should teach that. Nobody does.

Why I know this

I'm not writing this as an observer.

My daughter Maddie died in 2015. She was fourteen.

I was present. I was involved. I was close to her. She had two younger brothers at home, and I'd have told you I had a decent read on what was going on with all three of them.

There was a distance between what I believed Maddie was carrying and what she was actually carrying. I didn't know it was there. Or I didn’t want to know.

That's the thing about it. You don't feel a gap. There's no sensation. Nothing goes off. You go to work, you come home, you ask how the day was, you get an answer, and the answer sounds like the truth because it's delivered by someone who loves you and has had a lot of practice.

Eleven years on, I've lost count of how many parents have said the same four words to me. “We had no idea.”

Almost every one of them was watching.

We measure everything except this

Look at what we already count.

Grades. Attendance. Deadlines hit. Performance ratings. Engagement scores. Pulse surveys. Benefits usage. Turnover.

Every one of those measures the person we're worried about.

Not one of them measures us.

Not one of them asks the question that would have been useful to me. How far is what I believe from what's true?

Organizations spend real money finding out how employees feel. Almost none of it gets spent finding out how wrong leadership is about how employees feel. Those are different numbers. The second one is more useful.

The distance is the finding

Say a leadership team rates psychological safety at their company a nine out of ten. Say the people who work there rate it a five.

The five is a problem. Everyone can see that.

The four is the more interesting number, and nobody's looking at it, because it doesn't live in either survey. It only shows up when you put the two side by side.

Four points of distance means the people making decisions about that company are doing it from a picture that doesn't exist. Every choice they make from here is well intentioned and slightly aimed at the wrong thing.

Same at a kitchen table. Same in a one on one.

Zero isn't the target

There's always going to be distance, and there should be.

Teenagers are supposed to have an interior life their parents don't have full access to. That's not a warning sign, that's development working. Employees are entitled to a private one too. Nobody owes their manager everything.

A small gap is ordinary. It means someone's keeping some of themselves to themselves, which is healthy, and you've got a reasonable read on the rest.

A large gap is where things sit unnoticed for a long time.

The dangerous version is the one whose size you've never checked. Not because you were careless. Because nothing in your day tells you to check, and because everyone around you is doing the same thing, and because the answer you're getting sounds fine.

What happens before

We've built a lot for what happens after someone asks for help. Crisis lines. Assistance programmes. Referral networks. Therapy coverage. Training modules. Some of it's excellent and I use it and I recommend it.

We've built almost nothing for what happens before.

Before the resignation letter, when the person had already been gone for four months.

Before the meeting where somebody stopped contributing and everyone quietly decided it was an attitude problem.

Before the night a parent finally asks a second question and finds out how long it's been going on.

The resignation letter isn't where it started. The silence at dinner isn't where it started either. There were signals earlier than that, and there was a distance nobody had thought to measure.

The question

I'm not asking anyone to be more worried. Worry doesn't help, and I've met plenty of parents whose worry cost them the very conversation they needed to have.

I'm asking for something smaller and harder.

You believe you know how your kid is doing. You believe your team would come to you. You believe your people can speak freely.

You might be right. A lot of the time you will be.

How do you know?

FAQ

What is "the gap"? The distance between what you believe about someone you're responsible for and what that person is actually carrying. It shows up between a parent and a teenager, a manager and an employee, and a leadership team and the people who work there. Same failure, three altitudes.

Isn't a close relationship supposed to prevent this? That's the assumption most of us carry, and it doesn't hold up. The closer someone is to you, the more they have to lose by telling you. A kid who loves you protects you. An employee who respects you doesn't want to disappoint you. The relationship itself becomes a reason for silence.

How do I know if there's a gap between me and my teenager? You can't feel it, which is the difficult part. What you can do is stop treating "I'm fine" as information and ask a second time. The answer to a second question is usually different from the answer to a first one, and that difference is the closest thing to a measurement you'll get at a kitchen table.

We already run engagement surveys. Isn't that the same thing? Engagement surveys measure how employees feel. They don't measure how wrong leadership is about how employees feel. Those are different numbers, and the second one only appears when you ask both groups and look at the space between the answers.

Is a large gap always a problem? No, and zero isn't the target either. Teenagers are meant to have an interior life their parents can't fully see. Employees are entitled to a private one. A small distance is ordinary. The difficult version is a large one whose size nobody has ever checked.

You May Also Like

She Would Have Told Mehttps://www.thementorwell.com/blog/would-my-teenager-tell-me The belief that a close relationship guarantees disclosure, and why teenagers often hide more from the parents they're closest to. The full version of the argument the manifesto states in three sentences.

Why "Is Everything Okay?" Gets You Nothinghttps://www.thementorwell.com/blog/first-conversation-training-managers Why the scheduled check-in produces nothing useful, and where honest answers actually happen. Same problem as the manifesto, one altitude up, with something a manager can use on Wednesday.

The Thirteenth Questionhttps://www.thementorwell.com/blog/the-thirteenth-question Engagement at a record low and managers declining fastest. What employees carry to work and never mention, and why it sits outside the reach of every survey measuring it.