Leadership Mindsets
Mini-Assessment Questions

1. Your rival shows up 30 minutes late to an important business meeting. You know that the reason s/he was late is because you made an honest mistake and told him/her the wrong meeting location; but you also know s/he will not openly blame you. What would you do?

a) Do nothing. b) Say nothing, but apologize to your rival privately after the meeting. c) After the meeting, comment privately to the boss that your rival is often late, and is not very conscientious. d) Immediately share your meeting notes with your rival, to catch him/her up on the meeting. e) Apologize to everyone at the meeting, noting that it was your fault s/he was late.

Remember --- it is OK to choose more than one response --- choose ALL of the responses that you would actually do. If none of the responses fit well, choose the response closest to what you would do.

2. You are leading a cross-functional team that has designed and developed an innovative handheld electronic game which will be central to the success, or failure, of the company. One of the team members, Anna, comes to you because she has discovered a critical design problem that will cause the product to stop working after a few months. Production has started and a significant amount of product has shipped. You have authority to make a final decision. Coincidentally, you have been planning a job change (to a different industry) within the next month. You:

a) Berate Anna publicly, and summarily fire her in front of other team members to distance yourself from the setback. b) Have team members vote on the appropriate course of action. c) Recall the product, and determine if there are any ways the recalled product can be recycled or used for a charitable purpose. d) Work around the clock to fix the problem as soon as possible, and also notify customers that you will replace any defective product. e) Because the design problem is unlikely to surface before you leave the company, do nothing.

3. Your company creates a chemical waste byproduct known to be harmful to human health over a ten-year exposure period, and which is dumped into the local river and water supply. However, emission of this waste product is directly proportional to your company's profits. You are in charge of determining how much waste the company will emit. What would you do?

a) Set the emissions levels at, but not above, the legal limit (as high as federal standards allow). b) Set the emissions levels well below the federal standards, reducing waste and guaranteeing compliance, but also reducing profit. c) Set the emissions levels higher than allowed by federal standards, and figure out how to do so without getting caught (e.g., through hiding information, or falsifying records if needed). d) Set emissions levels to satisfy standards, and allocate resources to research new ways to reduce your company's pollution in the long run, even though you know a cost-effective solution will not likely be found for several years. e) set the emissions at whichever level you believe will be supported by the company's key stakeholders.

4. An initiative in your organization takes you out of the country for 6 months. During your absence, and especially when you return, it is clear that your direct reports (who are all senior managers) were able to operate very effectively. And in some ways, it appears they have made significant gains on some projects that you previously were heavily involved with. One of their successes was figuring out a method to save outside suppliers a lot of money, and reduce waste and pollution. Upon your return, you:

a) Feel a little threatened, but try to stay out of the way of your employees and help them out where needed. b) Feel a little threatened that you may not be needed, but try to make yourself and the group look good by talking to others in the organization about the great things your group has done. c) Widely publicize the new method for saving suppliers’ money, waste and pollution, so that all suppliers (even your competitors' suppliers) can benefit. d) Look for opportunities to promote the directors who led particularly well during your absence. e) Gather detailed information about how your team made such good progress, and help them to perform even better by encouraging them to set higher goals for themselves.

5. You manage a company in an ethnically diverse region, and your company is the region’s largest employer of semi-skilled labor. Your HR director has brought to your attention that the local applicant pool of ethnic minorities tends to have lower levels of job skill and experience, in comparison to the ethnic majority applicant pool. As such, your current hiring system hires 8 out of 10 of the majority applicants, but only 3 out of 10 minority applicants. That is, ethnic differences in the job skill and experience distributions of the local labor pool create a performance-diversity tradeoff for your company. (Your current hiring procedure [a written test plus an interview] enhances employee job performance by helping you select more skilled and experienced applicants.) What would you do?

a) Eliminate your company's current hiring test in order to avoid the trail of test data that might be eventually used to implicate you in any wrongdoing, and instead hire people in a different way that is, however, probably much less effective at identifying the best applicants. b) Spend some resources in an attempt to change the current hiring procedures in ways that will improve hiring/representation of ethnic minorities, even if it will require hiring individuals with less skill and experience, offering additional on-the-job training, and accepting lower job performance in the short term. c) Invest some resources in an attempt to change the current hiring procedures in ways that will improve job performance above and beyond current levels. d) Donate money to a local charitable organization that emphasizes the advancement of ethnic minorities, to improve the company's local reputation. e) Form a relationship with a local educational institution that primarily serves ethnic minorities, with the goal of developing, identifying, and creating a flow of minority talent.

6. You have recently been recruited to an organization with a sterling reputation for having strong values and trust. When you joined the organization, you brought with you a star employee, Marc. Marc has over-delivered on the numbers and has been a huge financial asset so far to one of the struggling departments in the organization, but has alienated himself with his new colleagues because of his brash style and tendency to cut corners. Some of the long-standing clients are getting uneasy, but Marc has brought in new clients and if he continues to deliver like he has been, you are likely to receive a substantial performance bonus. You have just learned that Marc has violated some clients' investment requirements, and it has seriously put several elderly clients' retirement money at risk of total loss. If others find out, it may reflect negatively on you since he reports indirectly to you, and everyone knows that you brought him with you to the organization. What would you do?

a) Work quickly to distance yourself from Marc so that your reputation will be insulated from his actions. b) Reprimand Marc, work with an experienced colleague to ensure the organization’s reputation isn’t damaged, and try to institute regular training workshops to remind employees of the importance of respecting and adhering to organizational investment policies and procedures. c) Take steps to try to fix the problem Marc has created, while working to make certain that clients are not adversely affected. d) Ignore Marc for now, but start preparing a way to make Marc take the fall if the problem is ever revealed. e) Work with other industry associations and regulatory agencies to make Marc’s behavior less likely to happen, or even illegal, in the future.