The Five Roles of a Master Herder

by author Linda Kohanov

Special Studies

shutterstock_424410517The following assessment is designed to measure which roles you employ in professional settings. Because your job description and the culture of the company or organization you work for is likely to influence your behavior, it’s important to take the test with a specific organization in mind. For instance, if you are a bank manager who also serves on the board of a local nonprofit, you should take the test two times to measure how you show up in each setting.

This assessment is designed for work, educational or community related situations, and volunteer positions.

Taking the Assessment

While some people who participate in this study will be familiar with the roles this assessment measures, it is actually preferable for you to complete the survey before you learn more about the benefits and challenges of each of the five roles.

After you take the assessment, you will be given access to an overview of the five roles, as well as how you scored. The results of your assessment will also be sent to us for the purposes of our study, but all participants will remain anonymous. (For this reason, please print out your results if you would like to keep a record of how you scored. We will not be able to access a specific individual’s results after he or she logs off.)

The assessment involves some careful thought. The format asks you to consider how you have responded to various leadership and social challenges in the past. If you come to a scenario you haven’t yet encountered, consider how you would be likely to respond in such a situation.

It is most beneficial to take the assessment with your current job in mind, as the culture of the company, nonprofit, community organization, social service agency or school etc. you work for may affect how you would respond in each situation outlined. If you are retired or unemployed, consider how you responded (or would have responded) in your last, most significant job.

Some questions relate to how you deal with peers and supervisors. Some questions assess how you deal with employees and organization-wide leadership challenges. In the latter case, if you are not in a managerial role, consider how you would respond if you were in charge. If you do not aspire to a leadership role, rate each of those responses according to how you would hope your current leader/manager would respond in each circumstance.

 

Scoring Each Response

Unlike many studies that ask you to rank options, this assessment is designed to measure how some people may balance or combine certain roles in different situations. For this reason, all five responses to each scenario should be rated independently, not scored relative to the others.

Use numbers 1 to 4, to rate the likelihood that you will take the action described in each response, according to the instructions in the sidebar on this page.

In essence, the middle scores indicate that you lean toward or away from that response more often than not.

Here is an example of how someone might rate the first scenario (using the letters A through E to refer to the five questions in each scenario): Response A=4; Response B=1; Response C=1; Response D=4; and Response E=3.

Notice that A and D have the same rating of 4. This indicates that the person is most likely to engage either one of these responses depending upon the situation or even that the person often combines the two.

Responses B and C have the same rating of 1; this indicates that the person is highly unlikely to respond in either of these ways.

Response E has a rating of 3, which indicates that the person might respond this way if the situation calls for it, but that he or she isn’t in full alignment with attitude expressed in the response. No responses for this scenario have a rating of 2.

As this example shows, it is expected that each scenario will have two or more responses with the same rating, and that some ratings may not be used.

As you move through the assessment, consider the intention of each of the responses and determine the likelihood of you responding in the manner presented, even if you wouldn’t use the exact wording.

Because it is unrealistic for this assessment to list all possible approaches to each scenario, we have concentrated on responses that represent five distinct styles of handling challenges. In some cases, this may mean that you give two or three responses the same high rating because you are likely to combine them to represent your own eclectic style. (It is also possible, yet rare, that you might give a rating of 1 to all responses for a given scenario because none of them represent how you would handle that challenge.)

Assessment scoring

  1. This rating indicates that you are “highly unlikely to ever respond that way.”
  2. This indicates that, though you wouldn’t rule it out, especially as a last resort, you probably would not respond that way.
  3. This indicates that while you may not agree with the attitude expressed in this response, you will sometimes take the action described if the situation calls for it.
  4. This indicates that you are highly likely to respond that way.
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