Cameron Change Consultancy ~ Test your leasership skills

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Just how good are you at flexing your style to a variety of situations? Test your leadership here! There are six different leadership challenges below. For each one, please select the two options you think are most likely to be successful.
1	You have been successfully managing a highly motivated, highly competent team of professional staff for the last 9 months. You are also very familiar with the issues in hand. The next six months will be very challenging for the team: complex projects, tight deadlines and demanding clients. How do you behave?

a	You get the team together for a brainstorming session to create ideas and solutions for handling the coming 6 months.
b	You make sure you spend time with each individual team member building up trust in preparation for hard times to come.
c	You set challenging performance goals for yourself and the team and discuss these openly.
d	You remind people that they need to keep up the good work if they want to be rewarded at the end of the year.
e	You make a note to put time aside to help people with skills development issues.
f	You motivate the team by painting an attractive verbal picture of what it will be like once you have triumphed.

2	You are the new manager in a manufacturing plant where the previous manager had quite an aggressive style. You need to make some changes quickly to turn performance around as the plant is losing money. So far, you can see that the management team reporting to you lack some of the key skills required to implement the changes. How do you behave?

a	You give the whole department a strongly worded talk, making it absolutely clear that changes need to be made if jobs are to be kept.
b	You hold a management team meeting and ask people for improvement ideas.
c	You spend time walking about the department, getting to know people and building relationships.
d	You roll out a stretching objective setting exercise, starting with you and cascading down, encouraging managers to challenge their people.
e	You meet with management team members one to one and coach them in specific key implementation skills.
f	You present to all staff, describing your vision of how people will be behaving and what clients will be saying when the changes are made.

3	You have been running the IT Department very successfully for the last 5 years. Your recent 360-degree feedback indicated that you have the support of your staff - they trust you and value your leadership. However, Senior Management want the department to become much slicker and more responsive. How do you behave?

a	You hold a series of one to one conversations with people, asking them about their career plans, asking for their views on the department goals and building renewed relationships.
b	You see to it that you personally carry out performance reviews and develop training and coaching plans for everyone.
c	You run an off-site workshop for two days, looking at current feedback, studying processes and structure, getting improvement ideas and agreeing a plan of attack.
d	You send out an email asking people whether or not they want to be involved in the future of the department and encourage them to commit publicly to making the changes.
e	You spend some time talking and reading – building your own vision of how things should be. You work up an inspiring presentation of your thoughts. Then you run some vision building workshops with key people – getting them to add to your ideas.
f	You increase the energy and pace of your team meetings and one to one encounters, making sure that you always press people to achieve stretching targets.

4	You are the MD of a fairly new Interim Management company with five motivated Business Develop Consultants of various levels of experience. You have good working relationships with all five Consultants. Each Consultant works in a different sector, without much overlap. They all have separate targets, and thrive on the internal competition. Recent research shows the Interim Management area to be a growing market. You think the team should be stretching themselves more. How do you handle this?

a	You talk to all the consultants about their wants and aspirations.
b	You present your vision for growth to the Business Development Consultants, to get them excited about the challenge
c	You talk to the Business Development Consultants individually and challenge them to set some aggressive business development goals
d	You do some one to one sales and business development related coaching with the less experienced Business Development Consultants
e	You remind the team by email that to retain their jobs and salary increases, they need to grow business significantly more than at present.
f	You hold a team meeting with Business Development Consultants and get ideas on how to boost sales.

5	You are the head of a large secondary school. You have just had a school Health and Safety inspection that uncovered some really awful health and safety issues in the chemistry lab. There are two teachers involved who have been identified by inspectors as particularly lax about safety measures in the labs on repeated occasions. How do you handle this?

a	Arrange for an inspirational external speaker on Health and Safety issues to attend your next staff meeting and get people motivated. Start an up-beat campaign with targets and incentives.
b	Talk privately and empathetically with the two individuals to find out a bit more about how this situation happened.
c	Hold a staff meeting to discuss what needs to be done to correct the situation. Collect views and get people contributing to the implementation plan.
d	Send both the individuals in question on a Health and Safety course and talk to them about their plans for change on their return.
e	Tell them both exactly what the effects of their behaviour were and ask them to change their practice to conform to H&S requirements as from today. Explain the consequences of not doing this.
f	Enter the school for next year’s European Health and Safety award, and get the two individuals in question to handle the submission.

6	You are the Product Development Manager in a electronics company. The company has just been taken over by an Italian company, and your new boss has absolutely insisted that you send all your people on a two-week intensive Italian course. This is intended to enable teams to work well across the new organization. There is quite a lot of scope for product synergy between your group and a sister group in the acquiring company, based in Milan

a	Get a local tutor to come in to start everyone off with the basics of Italian.
b	Announce the training schedule to people, explaining the importance and the rationale.
c	Be the first to go on the course, and instigate an Italian Hour every day, where you insist that everyone speaks Italian. Make a point of phoning the Milan office and trying out your new skills. Set targets for people.
d	Spend some time at your next team meeting explaining how you see the positive benefits of working with the sister product team working out. Tell people about the things that you think are really exciting possibilities for the whole team.
e	Get the team together to look at other possible options for enhancing communication with the sister team.
f	Talk to each team member individually about his/her reaction to this suggestion and get a feel for the staff view on this before committing to a training schedule.

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