Leadership Academy — Week 1 Assessment Practice

Part of the Leadership Academy series — practice questions to go with the Week 1 study guide.

Q1 (scenario). A manager reassigns tasks, pushes longer hours, and hits the deadline — then two people quit right after. Management, leadership, both, or neither — and what’s actually missing?

A1. Management without leadership — a short-term result at a long-term cost. Pushing a team isn’t wrong in itself; pushing without regard for the long-term impact is. Through the Trust Equation, this usually reads as a Self-Orientation problem (the deadline mattered more than the people) or an Intimacy failure (nobody felt safe enough to say “this is too much” before it broke).

Q2 (analysis). A leader has excellent domain knowledge and always delivers on time, but their team is guarded around them and rarely raises concerns early. What’s wrong per the Trust Equation, and what would you change?

A2. High Credibility and Reliability, but low Intimacy — people don’t feel safe bringing this leader real problems, which usually traces back to how bad news has been received in the past, or a self-orientation the team has picked up on even if it’s never been named. Fix: actively invite pushback, and specifically notice how you respond the next time someone brings you something uncomfortable — that reaction is what either builds or kills Intimacy going forward.

Q3 (scenario). You’re asked to name one person who changed the direction of your own career, and describe in a word or two what they actually did. What kind of answers does this exercise usually surface, and why does that matter?

A3. Answers cluster around listening, creating space to be heard, nurturing, helping before being asked, guiding — not “hit the targets” or “ran a tight meeting.” It matters because leadership is remembered as a feeling, not a function — which is the whole reframe Week 1 is built on: the skills that make someone memorable as a leader aren’t the same ones a job description would list.

Q4 (scenario). You notice a junior team member has gone quiet. You have a private conversation, adjust their workload, and don’t explain why to the rest of the team. Is this leadership, management, both, or neither?

A4. Pure leadership — and the one people usually get wrong (most guess “both”). Leadership isn’t always about transparency; discretion here protects trust. What mattered was noticing without being asked, not broadcasting the fix.

Q5 (analysis). A leader commits to a client that a delivery will be done Friday. By Wednesday it’s clear it’s slipping, but the leader says nothing until the client asks on Friday. What’s the Trust Equation impact, and what should have happened instead?

A5. Saying nothing until asked costs Reliability directly — you didn’t do what you said, and you let them find out rather than telling them. Flagging it Wednesday, with a revised date and a reason, costs nothing on Reliability and actually lifts Credibility, because it shows a real grip on your own timeline rather than a hopeful one. Same slip, very different trust outcome, purely because of when you spoke up.

Q6 (scenario). The team proposes a process change you privately doubt. You let them try it for two weeks. It works. What do you do next, and what’s the underlying lesson?

A6. Publicly credit them for the change. The lesson is intellectual humility — being knowledgeable enough to have an opinion, and humble enough to admit it wasn’t fully right. It’s leadership, not management: it builds ownership and trust in the team rather than protecting your own being-right.

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