Engagement surveys measure sentiment — how people feel about their work and environment. CQ measures behavior under pressure — Initiative, Applied Grit, and Learnability. Sentiment is worth tracking, but it doesn’t tell you who follows through when it’s hard. A team can score high on engagement and still miss deadlines and dodge ownership.
Global engagement has fallen for three straight years while the economy kept growing. If engagement scores captured what actually drives results, that gap couldn’t persist. It can — because feeling engaged and behaving in ways that deliver are different things. Use engagement to improve your environment. Use CQ to decide who to promote, hire, and hand the keys to. See the 2026 State of Engagement →
The point isn’t to abandon engagement surveys. It’s to stop asking a sentiment tool to answer a behavioral question.
See how a Prove cycle scores your team on the behaviors that actually move outcomes.
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