Managers hear "unexplained gap" as an accusation. What wording has worked for you?

What changed the tone for us was showing where the residual comes from over time rather than where it sits today. We split our 2.9% by the decision that created it: about 60% was already there at hire, 25% arose at promotion, and the rest in annual reviews.

Once managers saw that most of it arrived with people on their first day, set by offers many of them never made, the defensiveness went. The message became: you inherited this, and here are the three decisions where you can stop adding to it. Each manager then got only their own team's flagged cases, never a team-level gap figure.

I would be careful not to reassure too much. Some of it probably is biased decision-making, and if the briefing says nobody did anything wrong then nobody changes anything. We say plainly that the analysis cannot tell us why, that the pattern is consistent in direction, and that it is everyone's job to close it.

The decomposition by hire, promotion and review is something we can do with the data we hold, so I will try that for the November briefings. And point taken on not over-reassuring. I think we swung from accusing to absolving in the space of one slide.