Are you effective in preparing staff for change?

See if your leadership skills are up to par with this 10-point quiz, writes Rick Spence.

As an entrepreneur and leader, your role is to show your followers a way forward, and then help them overcome the doubts, obstacles and setbacks that get in their way.

That job was easier when markets were stable and disruption was a word applied mainly to strikes at the post office. In today’s turbulent times, you need to help your entire organization adapt to continuous change. No plan can anticipate every storm or opportunity, so the best leaders equip their teams with the confidence and flexibility to think for themselves and adapt on the fly.

How good are you at preparing your organization for change? Here’s a 10-point quiz to help you assess your personal Change-Agent Quotient. As you go through these questions, don’t try to guess what answers we want to hear. Ticking the boxes you think will yield a high score won’t give you the frank feedback you need to help your organization truly master change.

When one of your people makes a mistake that costs your business money, what’s the usual consequence?

A. Nothing. Everyone makes mistakes.

B. A warning. Everyone in our organization gets one mistake.

C. I or a manager review the mistake with the employee to ensure that we all understand what went wrong, and learn how to avoid similar errors.

It’s late Friday. With a competitor aggressively muscling into your market, a client is pushing for a significant discount. They need an immediate answer, but only a junior employee is present to make the decision. Based on her training and the company culture, what is she most likely to do?

A. Put the customer off until Monday, since there are no decision-makers to authorize the discount.

B. Nervously approve a onetime discount, with the dread feeling that she is risking her job.

C. Happily approve the onetime discount, confident you’ll back her up for doing what she thought was right under imperfect but pressing conditions.

A junior marketing employee wants to take two college-level courses this year, on online marketing and critical thinking. Cash flow is tight. How would you respond?

A. “It’s your money. Do whatever you like.”

B. “We’ll subsidize the marketing course, because it’ll create direct value for the business.”

C. “We’ll subsidize both courses, because they’ll create direct value for the business.”

Your employees are blaming your firm’s declining market share on hungry competitors with innovative products. What should you do?

A. Form a committee to look into the problem.

B. Launch a hackathon to fasttrack new products and services.

C. Set innovation as a companywide priority, with a budget, and appoint staff to develop the best processes for surfacing and assessing new ideas.

You are anxiously looking for innovative processes to make your company more efficient. Who should you consult first? A. Consultants B. Customers C. Employees What type of employee awards or recognition programs does your organization provide?

A. Um, er, none, really. B. Employee of the Month. C. A quarterly or annual event that honours not just great employee performance, but identifies and rewards initiative, resourcefulness, innovation — and “the best idea of the year that didn’t work.”

A front-line employee tells you he has an idea for better servicing client inquiries. What do you do?

A. I’d ask him to send me an email.

B. I’d direct him to take his idea to his supervisor.

C. I’d refer him to our company’s innovation policy, which outlines clear processes and incentives for developing and testing new ideas.

How does your company keep tabs on its competition?

A. I’m plugged in. I know what’s going on.

B. We have an employee whose duties include studying competitors’ activity in her spare time.

C. We have a formal program for monitoring competitors’ activities and relationships, and continually soliciting customer intelligence. We aggregate the results into regular reports that our managers actually read.

According to Intuit, a software company that thrives on innovation, what is the optimal size for an innovation team developing a

new product or service?

A. Two people. The buddy system works best.

B. Ten people, from all across the company. The more the merrier, and the more accountable.

C. Five or six people from across the firm. Just as many as two pizzas will feed.

How do you ensure that you and your company keep aware of new opportunities, technologies and outside threats that could affect your business? A. I read a lot. B. I took a course in web design.

C. I have a board of advisers or directors consisting of cool, positive people from a variety of industries and demographic backgrounds. Now I see things coming!

Scoring: We kept it simple. You get one point for every C answer, and nothing for the others. (Sure, the B answers were marginally better than the A answers, but when it comes to the future of your company, half-measures get you no points.)

YOUR RESULTS

One to three points: you have your work cut out for you. Maybe this column will help. Four to six points: see above. Seven or more points: see above. In today’s climate, no one rests.

Financial Post Rick Spence is a writer, consultant and speaker specializing in entrepreneurship. rick@rickspence.ca Twitter.com/RickSpence