Leadership Academy — Week 4 Assessment Practice

Part of the Leadership Academy series — practice questions to go with the Week 4 study guide.

Q1 (scenario). You need to tell your manager a project is now at risk of missing its deadline. How should you frame this differently than you would to your own team about the same risk?

A1. To your manager (Managing Up): lead with the headline and its implication, confident tone, no hedging — state plainly it’s at risk and why. To your own team (Managing Down) about the same fact: context-rich, explaining the why behind the risk so they understand it well enough to prioritise — different mode, same underlying facts.

Q2 (analysis). A leader opens a tough conversation with, “We need to talk, and don’t take this personally, but…” What’s wrong per COIN?

A2. This violates Context — loaded openers like “we need to talk” or “don’t take this personally” create anxiety and make it feel personal regardless of the disclaimer. Context should be framed around the issue: “I want to raise something about the last two deliverables, because I want to understand what’s going on” — not around bracing the other person for pain.

Q3 (scenario). A team member disagrees with a decision you’ve made, and rather than saying so, they just quietly stop contributing in meetings. What type of difficult conversation is this actually, and how would you open it with COIN?

A3. It reads like disagreement wearing a behaviour-change disguise — the real issue is likely a difference of view they haven’t voiced, not a performance problem. Open with Context focused on the observed change, not an accusation: “I’ve noticed you’ve gone quieter in the last few meetings, and I wanted to check in” (Observation: specific, filmable — “you haven’t spoken in the last three planning sessions”), then use Impact and Next step to invite the actual disagreement out into the open rather than assuming what it is.

Q4 (scenario). You need to update a mixed audience — decision-makers and interested bystanders — on a project’s status. What’s the mistake to avoid, and what should you do instead?

A4. Don’t send one dense update to everyone — it serves no one well. Send a short, decision-focused version to the people who decide, and a fuller or tailored version to everyone else; that’s not duplicated effort, it’s properly calibrating the message to each audience.

Q5 (analysis). A leader delivers a difficult COIN conversation but ends with “so, what do you think we should do about this?” instead of stating a next step. What’s wrong, and how should it be fixed?

A5. This offloads the decision back onto the other person instead of being specific about what changes going forward — that isn’t leadership, it’s avoidance, and it’s exactly the “vague next step” weakness assessors are told to watch for. Fix: state a specific, concrete next step first (“I’d like X to happen going forward”), then pause and invite their response — the invitation comes after the ask, not instead of it.

Q6 (scenario). A performance conversation and a disagreement conversation both come up with the same person in the same week. What stays the same between the two, and what changes?

A6. Context, Observation, and Impact work the same way in both. What changes is Next step: in a performance conversation there’s formal authority behind it, so it can be a direct instruction or commitment (“going forward, you will…”); in a disagreement there’s no behaviour to correct, so it shifts to persuasion — finding the shared interest and proposing something that closes the gap, not issuing an instruction.

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