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?

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:

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?

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:

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?

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?