What is your management style, and what does it cost your team?
Leadership style quizzes ask how you relate to authority. This one asks how you run the week. Twelve statements about what happens between Monday and Friday: how much of the how you specify when you hand work over, how many decisions wait for you, how often you are in the work itself, and where the quality bar lives. Every statement scores the same direction, so a higher answer means more of the work runs through you.
Your answers build two axes. Control is how much you set direction and hold decisions. Presence is how much you are in the work and checking it. The two together place you in one of four styles, and each style has a cost to the team that most managers do not see from the inside.
You also get a control score from 0 to 100. It is not a good or bad number; the right level depends on how mature your team is, and the result page reads it that way. About four minutes, no email, and answer for the week you actually had.
Management Style Quiz
What is my management style, and what does it cost my team?
What you get
- Your score out of 100
- Which of the 4 results you land on
- Scores across Direction, Decisions, Contact and Standards
- Your strongest dimension and your gap, and where to start
Email me this result
Optional. Your score is already on screen. Enter your details and a copy of this result, your score, your level and your four dimension scores, is sent to you.
Done. Your result is on its way.
Related tools
The four results
Every completed run lands on one of these pages, with your own scores drawn from the link the tool gives you. Each one is readable without taking the tool.
- ForemanYou set the how and you are in the work.
- GatekeeperYou hold the calls and you are not in the room.
- PartnerYou are in the work and you do not hold the pen.
- SponsorYou set outcomes and step back.
How this differs
The live Leadership Style diagnostic uses Autocratic, Democratic, Servant and Transformational, which describe how a leader relates to authority. This quiz describes how a manager handles the week: how much of the how you specify, who holds the call, how often you are in the work, and how you check quality. None of those four names is reused, and the Goleman and Lewin style names that other quizzes borrow are not used either.
What happens to your responses
Your score, your result and your dimension scores are shown on screen without an email address. An anonymous copy of the score and the dimension scores, with no name, email or free text, joins the aggregate statistics for this tool, which are published only when a cut has at least 30 completions. Email is optional. Only if you ask for the result by email is it written to your contact record, and only then. The full rules are on the methodology page.
Common questions
How is this different from a leadership style quiz?
Leadership style quizzes ask how you relate to authority and hand you a label from a textbook. This quiz asks what you did with the work last week: how much of the how you specified, which decisions waited for you, how often you were in the room, and who held the quality bar. The four styles describe a way of running a week, not a kind of person.
What does the control score mean?
It is the share of the work that runs through you, scaled to 0 to 100. A high score means you set the how, hold the calls, sit in the work and check the output. A low score means the team does. Neither is right on its own. A new or junior team needs more control than a senior one, and the result page reads your number against that.
Which management style is best?
None of the four is best in general. Each one is right for a particular team at a particular stage and each has a cost the manager tends not to see. The result page names the cost for your style, shows which of your four dimensions is driving it, and gives you one change to try this week. The point is to choose the style rather than default to it.
Can my management style change?
Yes, and it should as your team changes. The twelve statements describe habits, not traits: how you brief, what you keep, where you sit, what you check. Each habit can be moved on its own. Most managers find that changing one dimension, usually the highest bar on their result, shifts the style within a quarter without changing anything about who they are.
Related tools
- Leadership Style Quiz12 min. How you exercise authority.
- Span of Control Calculator2 min. How many people can I actually lead well, and am I past it?
- 1:1 Meeting Builder and Score4 min. How do I run a one on one that is not a status update, and is mine any good?
- Communication Style Quiz for Leaders4 min. What is my communication style and why do people misread me?
- 5 Minute LeaderProgramme. Execution standards for leaders.
- Leadership Assessment GuideReference. How to assess leadership, and which tool to use.
The numbers behind this tool
Aggregate results are published at Management Style Statistics: Manager Benchmark once a cut reaches 30 completions, under the Leadership Readiness Index methodology. More free tools are at the tools shelf.