The Domestication Index.
Leaders rarely admit their domestication. The people who report to them see it first. One index and four measures of what British workers actually see in the person they answer to.
Live data. Opened 1 August 2026.
The first reading publishes when the sample passes fifty. Responses so far: –.
Updates automatically as responses arrive.
Why ask workers.
Your manager says things to you in private that they would never say in the meeting. You have noticed. Most people have. Nobody asks them.
Surveys of leadership ask leaders about themselves, and leaders answer as the person they intend to be. The Domestication Index asks the people who watch instead. Not what a manager believes about their own courage. What their team sees them do, week after week, in the meetings where it counts.
What is coming in.
The first measures publish here when the sample passes fifty. Until then the page carries the honest state of things, which is a survey in the field.
The four statements.
Each one is answered on a five-point scale, strongly agree to strongly disagree, about the person you report to.
“My manager says things to me in private that they would never say in a meeting.”
The gap between what they know and what they will say aloud. Editing, watched from the outside.
“My manager avoids decisions that might upset their own bosses.”
Managing the people above instead of leading the people below. Reward doing its quiet work.
“There are problems everyone on my team knows about that nobody tells my manager.”
The silence that forms around a person others have stopped telling the truth. The keystone, measured.
“When something at work is clearly wrong, my manager says so openly.”
This one runs the other way. Agreement here is the good news: a manager still dangerous in the right way.
The method, plainly.
Each statement scores 0 to 100 for each person: strongly agree 100, agree 75, neither 50, disagree 25, strongly disagree 0. The fourth statement is reversed, because there agreement is the good news.
The Index is the average across all four statements and everyone who has answered. 0 would mean teams see none of it. 100 would mean they see it everywhere.
People who live in the UK, are in work, and report to a manager. Three screening questions remove everyone else before the statements begin.
Adverts on Facebook and Instagram, and this page. No panel, no incentives, nobody is paid to answer.
Only responses that answered all four statements. Screened-out and partial responses are recorded and excluded.
No names, no employers, no tracking pixels. An optional email, used once, to send you the findings. Nothing else, ever.
Magnus Wood, Founder, Wild Leadership. This is my survey and I have an argument: most leaders get domesticated by the organisations they lead. The survey exists to test that against what workers actually see.
If the numbers cut against the argument, the numbers get published anyway.
Fieldwork opened 1 August 2026 and the sample is still growing. While it is small we will say it is small. Findings publish with the n attached, never without it.
Current sample: counting.
Where to go deeper.
The domestication of leaders, the mechanism the Index measures, set out in full.
Key concepts, the vocabulary behind the four statements.
Say what you actually see.
Four statements about the person you report to. Two minutes, anonymous, no sign-up. They will never know you answered. Your answers move the Index on this page.