Leadership Academy — Week 3 Assessment Practice

Part of the Leadership Academy series — practice questions to go with the Week 3 study guide.

Q1 (scenario). A stakeholder has high power over your project but shows almost no day-to-day interest. How do you engage them, and what’s the risk if you get it wrong?

A1. Keep Satisfied — light-touch, concise, decision-focused communication, not silence. The risk: this quadrant is genuinely more dangerous than High/High, because these stakeholders look disengaged early, say nothing, then intervene late — after a decision is expensive to unwind. “Keep satisfied” means watch closely and stay ahead of them, not check in less.

Q2 (analysis). A leader kicks off a new client project with just “let’s get started, I’ll figure out the details as we go.” Three weeks in, the client is upset a deliverable they assumed was included wasn’t. What went wrong?

A2. No SCOPE conversation happened at the outset — specifically Outputs was never defined as named deliverables, and Expectations was never confirmed by directly asking the client what success looks like to them. Fix: run SCOPE before work starts, ideally in writing, covering all five letters explicitly.

Q3 (scenario). Two team members disagree about how much detail to give a low-power, high-interest stakeholder — one wants to send them nothing, the other wants to loop them into every decision. What’s the right call per the grid?

A3. Neither extreme — Low Power/High Interest is “keep informed”: regular updates and early visibility, because they can’t block you but they do talk and their goodwill matters, but they don’t need a seat in every decision, since that’s reserved for High Power/High Interest stakeholders.

Q4 (scenario). Your team is technically talented, but people don’t feel safe admitting mistakes or asking basic questions in meetings. Per Project Aristotle, what should you prioritise fixing first, and why?

A4. Psychological Safety — it’s factor #1 and the foundation the other four (Dependability, Structure & Clarity, Meaning, Impact) sit on. Individual talent isn’t the differentiator; whether people feel safe to take risks, disagree, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment is.

Q5 (analysis). A leader assumes they know all the important stakeholders from the org chart alone, and doesn’t ask anyone else. What’s the risk, and what should they have done differently?

A5. Power doesn’t require formal authority — a stakeholder with no title, like a vocal user group or an indirectly-affected team, can still redirect the work. The leader should have snowballed outward: asked who wants the project, who benefits, who’s affected, who are the end users and subject-matter experts, then asked each stakeholder found the same questions about their own network — rather than relying on a single brainstorm or the org chart.

Q6 (scenario). A project’s timeline, budget, and success criteria were all agreed with the stakeholder up front, but nobody agreed what threshold should trigger an escalation. Three weeks in, a delay happens and the stakeholder is upset they weren’t told sooner. What was missing, and how do you prevent it next time?

A6. The escalation threshold and channel were never agreed at the outset — what should trigger an escalation, and how it gets communicated. Prevent it by agreeing this explicitly during the SCOPE conversation: e.g., “flag me the moment a date is at risk, not once it’s certain,” and naming the channel (a call for anything urgent, not a buried email).

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