A free self-assessment. 25 questions, about 7 minutes, results shown on this page.
Ask people to describe the best manager they ever had and the answers converge on something very specific. It is almost never the kindest one, and it is almost never the most demanding one. It is the one who expected more of them than they expected of themselves, and who then made sure everyone knew whose work it was.
That combination is unusual enough to be memorable, which tells you something about how rare it is.
The two things being varied are what you ask for and where you point the recognition. Standard setting is the bar you hold other people to: what counts as finished, whether an average piece of work gets waved through, whether you expect someone to grow. Credit sharing is where the acknowledgment goes when the work lands: outward to the person who did it, or inward to the person who was in charge of it.
The folk model treats these as a trade-off. Demanding managers are assumed to be self-serving, and generous ones are assumed to be soft. Neither follows. Pushing people hard and making sure they get the recognition are separate acts, and doing both is what turns a job into a place where careers are made.
This chapter is about those two. It applies to managers, founders, academic supervisors, coaches, creative directors, and anyone whose name appears on work that other people did.
The two dimensions
Variable A: Credit Sharing
The tendency to direct recognition toward the people who did the work, including when you could reasonably claim it yourself.
Variable B: Standard Setting
The tendency to hold others to a high bar and to expect them to grow toward it.
Why these two vary independently
Asking a lot and giving recognition away are separate behaviors with separate costs, and the four combinations are all common. A creative director returns work three times, tells the client exactly which designer produced the final idea, and puts that designer in the pitch: high on both. A partner in a firm demands extraordinary output and describes every result in the first person: high standards, low credit sharing. A team lead is warm, generous with acknowledgment, and has not returned a piece of work in two years: high credit sharing, low standards. A manager runs a quiet team, asks little, and is not withholding recognition so much as not distributing anything at all: low on both. The correlation between the two is probably small. Credit sharing costs status and visibility. Standard setting costs comfort and requires a difficult conversation. Those are different prices, and most people are willing to pay one of them. **How this differs from two nearby chapters.** The bonus chapter on Relationship and Task Orientation concerns how much a leader invests in people versus outcomes, at the level of attention. This chapter is narrower and more behavioral: what you ask for, and where the recognition goes. Q025 concerns feedback, meaning telling people how they are doing and finding out how you are doing. Standard setting is what you require; feedback is what you report. A leader can set a very high bar and never say a word about how anyone is tracking against it.
Before you start. Your answers are calculated in your browser. Nothing is collected, stored, or sent anywhere. Close the page and it is gone.
This is an educational self-reflection tool, not a psychological test or diagnosis. Full notice at the foot of the page.
How it works
1You will read 25 statements and rate how well each one describes you.
2There are no right answers, and no good or bad results.
3Answer as you actually behave, not as you intend to behave.
4Your scores appear on this page and disappear when you close it.
The assessment
Rate how well each statement describes you.
0 of 25
Answer all 25 statements to continue.
Your scores
Credit Sharing
0/ 65
133965
Moderate
Standard Setting
0/ 60
123660
Moderate
Where you sit
Credit Sharing, low to high
Gracious CheerleaderHigh credit sharing, low standard setting
Star MakerHigh credit sharing, high standard setting
Neutral CaretakerLow credit sharing, low standard setting
Exacting HeadlinerLow credit sharing, high standard setting
Standard Setting, low to high
Your current pattern
No quadrant is better than another. Each carries real strengths and real costs. What matters is recognizing the pattern you are in and deciding what to do with it.
Your report
Overview
Your strengths
Watchouts
Relationships
Leadership and work
What tends to wear you down
Growth recommendations
Reflection questions
Where this pattern usually moves next
The other three patterns
Reading these is often more useful than reading your own. Most people recognize a spouse, a manager, or a colleague here.
The developmental growth model
Every quadrant in this book is treated as a current position, not a fixed identity. Growth tends to move through four stages.
Unconscious pattern. The behavior runs without being noticed.
Conscious recognition. You can name what you do and when you do it.
Intentional development. You practice a different response on purpose.
Integrated maturity. The new response becomes ordinary rather than effortful.
Finishing this assessment puts you at stage two. That is a real step, and it is the one most people never take.
Your result code
Write this down if you want to use one of the companion pages later: comparing yourself with another person, checking a retake against today, seeing how someone else would answer about you, or building a thirty-day plan.
The code carries your framework and your 25 answers, nothing else. No name, no date, and nothing that identifies you. It is generated in your browser and is never sent anywhere.
Your results describe how you answered today. People shift across situations and over time. Retaking this in a few months often tells you something useful.