Free tool
Manager conversation readiness check
Nine conversations every manager eventually has to run. Score where your team actually stands on each, and see which gaps carry the most consequence. Runs in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere.
For each conversation, pick the honest answer
Answer for your managers as a group, or for one specific manager. Having handled something once is not the same as having an approach.
Telling someone they missed a deadline
Denying a raise request
Opening a performance improvement plan
Terminating someone for cause
Delivering layoff news
Addressing attendance or reliability
Managing people who were peers
Mediating conflict between two reports
A strong performer who has fallen off
Answered 0 of 9
Answer all nine to see your readiness score and your ranked gaps.
Why "I have handled it" does not count as readiness
The scoring ladder deliberately separates having done something from being able to do it again. Most managers acquire their experience of hard conversations by running one badly on a real person, and a single improvised attempt does not produce an approach that transfers.
Weighting is by consequence rather than frequency. A missed-deadline conversation happens weekly and costs little when handled poorly. A termination or a layoff happens rarely and carries legal exposure, retention damage, and a story the rest of your team will tell for years.
Gallup attributes at least 70 percent of the variance in team engagement to the manager. At a company without an HR function, the difference between a manager who has rehearsed these and one who has not is most of what determines whether people stay.
Turn the gaps into rehearsals
Every conversation in this check runs as a scored AI role-play against a persona that pushes back. Private, repeatable, and available in the ten minutes before the real one.