Exercises — Chapter 25: Leadership and Influence

Leadership is practice, not theory. These exercises require reflection on actual behavior — yours and others'. The most useful answers will be specific and honest.

Part 1: Leadership Self-Assessment

Exercise 25.1 — Your Leadership Profile

(a) Rate yourself honestly on each of the Four I's of transformational leadership (1 = rarely; 10 = consistently):

(b) Which dimension is your highest? What specifically do you do that earns that rating?

(c) Which dimension is your lowest? What would a 2-point improvement in that dimension look like as a specific behavioral change?

Exercise 25.2 — Power Inventory

Think about the domain where you have the most influence over others (work team, family, community group, classroom).

(a) Rate each power base (1 = minimal; 5 = substantial):

(b) Which power bases are you most reliant on? Which would you like to develop?

(c) The chapter notes that referent and expert power produce better long-term outcomes than coercive and positional power. If you currently rely primarily on legitimate or coercive power: what would building more referent or expert power require?

Exercise 25.3 — Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

(a) Self-awareness: Name the emotion you most commonly feel in difficult leadership situations (conflict, high-stakes decisions, poor performance conversations). Is this emotion typically visible to the people you lead?

(b) Self-management: Identify one situation in the past month where your emotional reaction affected your effectiveness as a leader — either positively or negatively.

(c) Social awareness: Think about a person you lead. Without asking them: what do they most need from you right now? What is your confidence level that your assessment is accurate, and how would you verify it?

(d) Relationship management: Is there a relationship in your leadership context where trust has been damaged or is lower than it should be? What specific behavior would begin to rebuild it?

Part 2: Understanding Your Team

Exercise 25.4 — Situational Leadership Diagnosis

For each person you currently lead (or for three people in your life who follow your direction in some context), assess:

(a) Are there any mismatches between the appropriate style and the style you're actually using?

(b) For the most significant mismatch: what is the effect of the mismatch on this person's performance and engagement?

(c) What would adjusting your style for this person look like in practice — specifically, what would you start doing, stop doing, or do differently?

Exercise 25.5 — Psychological Safety Audit

Rate your current team or group environment on the following indicators (1 = not at all; 5 = consistently):

(a) What is the overall psychological safety level in your team?

(b) The chapter notes that the leader's response to the first person who brings bad news sets the norm for the whole team. What happened the last time someone brought you a problem or failure?

(c) What one specific behavior change would most improve psychological safety in your team?

Part 3: Influence in Practice

Exercise 25.6 — The Influence Mapping Exercise

Think about a situation where you need to influence someone — to change their behavior, shift their thinking, or secure their commitment.

(a) Which of Cialdini's principles are most relevant in this situation? - Reciprocity (have you invested in this person?) - Commitment/consistency (can you link to prior commitments they've made?) - Social proof (can you show that respected peers have adopted this view/behavior?) - Authority (do they know the basis of your expertise here?) - Liking (is the relationship strong enough to support this ask?) - Unity (is there a shared identity you can draw on?)

(b) Design an influence approach based on the most relevant principles. Be specific: what would you actually say or do?

(c) Distinguish ethical influence (persuasion, genuine relationship, demonstration) from manipulation (exploiting biases, withholding information, manufactured urgency). Does your approach fall clearly on the ethical side?

Exercise 25.7 — The "Direction and Cover" Inventory

The chapter uses Rivera's phrase: "What we need from you is direction and cover."

(a) Direction: How clearly do the people you lead know: - The team's current top priorities? - What good work looks like in their role? - How to make a decision without escalating to you?

Rate each (1 = very unclear; 5 = crystal clear) and identify where the gap is largest.

(b) Cover: Think about the last time something went wrong in your team or in a relationship you're responsible for. Did you absorb the consequence or deflect it? What signal did your response send?

(c) Bottleneck audit: Are there decisions or tasks that go through you that don't need to? If you were unavailable for a week, what would be blocked? What does that tell you about the appropriate distribution of authority?

Part 4: Developing People

Exercise 25.8 — The Development Conversation

Identify someone you lead or mentor whose growth matters to you.

Design a development conversation:

(a) What do they most want to develop? (Ask them if you don't know.)

(b) What stretch assignment — a task or project at the edge of their current capability — would most accelerate their growth in the next 90 days?

(c) What would you need to do differently to make this conversation happen and follow through on it?

Have the conversation within the next two weeks. After it: (d) What did you learn about what they want that you didn't know before? (e) What specific commitment did you both make?

Exercise 25.9 — Feedback Quality Audit

Think about the last piece of developmental feedback you gave someone.

(a) Was it specific and behavioral (describing what they did) or general and evaluative (describing your overall assessment)?

(b) Was it timely — delivered close to the behavior it referenced?

(c) Was it delivered in a context where the person felt safe receiving it, or in a context where they were likely to defend against it?

(d) Did you follow up? Did you know whether it changed anything?

Now: identify someone who would benefit from feedback you haven't given. Write the feedback in specific, behavioral terms: "In [specific situation], when you [specific behavior], [specific impact]. Going forward, I'd suggest [specific alternative]."

Then give it.

Part 5: Leading Through Difficulty

Exercise 25.10 — Technical vs. Adaptive Challenge

Identify a significant challenge in your team or organization that isn't resolving despite effort.

(a) Apply Heifetz's diagnostic: Is this primarily a technical challenge (the solution is known, the problem is implementation) or an adaptive challenge (the solution requires changes in values, beliefs, or behaviors that people aren't ready to make)?

(b) If adaptive: what are people being asked to give up? Name the genuine loss, not just the resistance.

(c) What would it look like to hold the adaptive challenge — to create conditions for working through it — rather than applying a technical solution to an adaptive problem?

(d) Who in your organization is most resistant to the change? What information might their resistance contain about what's being lost?

Exercise 25.11 — Change Readiness Audit

Using Kotter's 8-step framework, assess a current change you're leading or participating in:

(a) Which step is weakest?

(b) What specific action would strengthen it?

Part 6: The Character of Leadership

Exercise 25.12 — Trust Inventory

For the most important leadership relationship in your life:

(a) Integrity trust: Do you consistently do what you say you'll do? Have there been gaps — where you committed and didn't deliver?

(b) Ability trust: Does this person believe you're competent to make the decisions you're making? Where is your credibility strongest? Where is it most uncertain?

(c) Benevolence trust: Does this person believe you genuinely care about their wellbeing — not just their performance? What evidence do they have of this?

(d) If any trust dimension is weak: what specific behavior would begin to address it?

Exercise 25.13 — The Leader You Want to Become

(a) Think of the best leader you've experienced — someone under whose leadership you felt engaged, developed, and genuinely valued. What specific behaviors made them that person?

(b) Think of the worst leader you've experienced — someone who created disengagement, fear, or stagnation. What specific behaviors defined that experience?

(c) Looking honestly at your current leadership behavior: which of the worst leader's behaviors appear in your own practice? (This is the uncomfortable question. It is also the most useful one.)

(d) Write a one-paragraph description of the leader you most want to be in three years — not the role you want, but the specific way you want to show up for the people you lead.

(e) What is the single most important thing that stands between where you are now and that description?

Part 7: Influence Beyond Authority

Exercise 25.14 — Leading Without Authority

Identify a situation where you need to influence an outcome but don't have formal authority over the people involved (a peer project, a cross-functional team, a community context, a family situation).

(a) What authority do you have — formal or informal?

(b) What sources of influence are available to you beyond authority? (Expertise, relationships, vision, reciprocity, shared identity?)

(c) The chapter notes that servant leadership asks "how can I serve your ability to achieve our shared objectives?" — rather than "how can you serve my objectives?" Apply this framing to your situation: what do the people you need to influence most need to be able to do their best work?

(d) Design a 30-day influence strategy that builds relationship and demonstrates value before making the ask.

Exercise 25.15 — The Psychological Safety Experiment

This week, in one leadership or team context, try one of the following:

Option A: In a meeting, ask a genuine question that reveals your own uncertainty: "I don't know the answer to this — what do you all think?"

Option B: Acknowledge a mistake explicitly to the person most affected: "I got that wrong. Here's what I should have done."

Option C: When someone brings you a problem or bad news, begin your response with acknowledgment before analysis: "Thank you for telling me. Tell me more before we figure out what to do."

After the experiment: (a) What happened? What did you notice in the other person's response? (b) What did you notice in yourself — was there discomfort in showing uncertainty or acknowledging error? (c) How does the experience change your understanding of what psychological safety costs the leader?