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• Personal Growth

January 2011

By Anil Bhatnagar

Take this quiz to discover if you have it in you to always choose the right over the wrong.

This quiz is designed to help us discover how predisposed our habits and attitudes are towards upholding life-sustaining values and ethics. The quiz should also help us draw a customised step-by-step action plan to bring about the desired changes that can provide us with a lifetime of joy that comes from upholding our highest values. In this quiz, we grade ourselves on our integrity level – the extent to which we are willing to pay the price to uphold ethics, fairness and justice.

 

A.

This is what you have to do
1. Read the following ten situations and review the possible responses ‘A’ and ‘B’ that follow each of these situations.

2. Depending on the extent to which you are likely to follow the approaches outlined in the responses ‘A’ or ‘B’, distribute 5 marks under the respective columns ‘A’ and ‘B’. For example, if you think that you are likely to follow the ‘A’ approach 80 per cent of the time for a particular situation, then you give yourself ‘4’ under the column ‘A’ and ‘1’ under the column ‘B’.

Depending on the extent A and B may be true for you,

share 5 marks between them for the following ten sets of options:        Marks(A+B)=5

1. The bids of two contractors have tied and your judgment shall be considered final with negligible chance of being challenged by anyone. One of these contractors has a promising track record of high quality performance with integrity but he bears the same surname as yours. The other contractor appears to be cunning and his track record lacks proof of satisfactory work. This person will need to be supervised a lot on your part to make him come up to acceptable standards of performance. What will you do?

A. I would go for the one who shares my surname who is a man of integrity and has a good track record of high quality performance.

B. I would play safe with my image. Despite knowing that who is more deserving, I would go for the less deserving contractor and supervise him to the best of my ability to extract acceptable standards of work. This way with little loss on the quality of work, I would still be able to manage my good image of being an honest man.

2. Your relations are already strained with your powerful boss who is not only very authoritarian but at times abusive too – especially towards those who do not toe the line. This boss has called you today to recommend to you the name of a contractor friend of his for being included in a limited tender inquiry for a big work. As you are about to prepare the note for approval, your junior shows you the papers proving that this particular contractor has been blacklisted for 10 years and he has three more years to go before he can be considered for any work with the organisation. What will you do?

A. Irrespective of the implications, I would share with my boss the proof according to which the contractor in question cannot be considered for work not only for now but also for even the next three years and I will very politely convey my inability to my boss on this account.

B. I would feign ignorance of the existence of the proof while talking to my boss, do as my boss says, and would later pull out the papers proving his status as a black-listed party from the file and destroy them.

3. You have been running a business enterprise from a small room built on the common area of your resident welfare association. Even though it is much less than the current market rate, you have been dutifully paying to the association the unrevised rental for this room. This rental has so far not been challenged by any of the past governing bodies of the association. You have recently been elected unopposed as the secretary of the same resident welfare society. You have discovered that a few executive members in the newly-appointed governing body of the welfare association are misappropriating the funds as well as the common area for their own personal use. You want to show your disapproval of these acts but fear that they may hike your rental. What would you do?

A. I would confront them privately and let them know that what they are doing is unethical and offer to hike the rental in case they raise the issue.

B. I would turn my back on the goings on and feign ignorance of the members’ acts.

4. You have purchased a few undergarments from a shop and have discovered them to be too tight. Having tried them on it would be unfair to return them but retaining them would be a waste of money. What will you do?

A. I would repack the undergarments and swear to the shopkeeper that I have not tried them on. In case, he does not agree, I would pick up a fight with him in front of other customers.

B. I would consider offering it to close family members after letting them know that I have tried it on and leave it to them to pay me or not.

5. Your subordinate who happens to be a trainee has shared a great suggestion with you which if submitted will get him a sure recognition and possibly a reasonable hike in his salary. Your own career has been uneventful in the recent years. What will you do?

A. I would call the boy and find out more about the suggestion till I had all the information and then let him know why it cannot be implemented in its present state. I would share that I too had a similar idea in mind but did not submit it for the same reason. After his training gets over, I would get him posted to a remote area and submit his idea to the corporate office where I presently work, after incorporating the minor modification that are called for.

B. I would ask the trainee if he would be willing to let me take the credit for the small modification needed to make it implement-able and with his permission submit the suggestion stating the precise respective contributions (Or help him with the needed modification allowing him to take full credit since the suggestion was mainly his).

6. You approach your writer friend with a big heart to collaborate with you in your upcoming book. You promise him that the cover of the book will bear his name as a co-author along with yours and you will pay him 50 per cent of the royalty. He adds points for action after each chapter in your manuscript, which is highly appreciated by the publisher, upping the chances of the book doing well and giving a good amount of royalty. However, you will have to share the recognition and royalty with your friend, a fact that no longer seems fair to you considering that he has only added the points for action. What will you do?

A. I would not even tell the publisher of my friend’s contribution and persuade my friend to agree to forego his name on the cover. I would also persuade him to take only a 30 per cent discount, taking advantage of his generous heart and love for me.

B. I would share my honest reasons and request a reconsideration of the agreement. Apart from this, I would neither hide his contribution from the publishers nor from the readers.

7. The boss hands you over a file and some papers to work on. You discover that inadvertently, some confidential papers, including secret appraisal reports of yours as well as those of your colleagues, have been included. These papers are due to be submitted to the promotion review committee. What will you do?

A. I would rush to the boss to return these confidential papers without caring to go through any.

B. I would sift through these papers quickly to find papers relating to my report, read them as well as those of few others that matter to me (if possible, I will try to photocopy them quickly) before returning these to the boss.

8. You have very good relations with your boss but you are jealous of one of your colleagues. Your boss wrongly suspects him of spying for a rival company. You are sure of his integrity but you may not get another chance to finish his career and advance your own (since you are the only competitors for the next promotion). What would you do?

A. I will tell the boss that I have no concrete proof but I, like him, find some of his activities highly suspicious. Thereafter, while giving my boss the impression that I am very fair in my judgments, I will use every possible opportunity to add fuel to the fire.

B. I will tell my boss of my true impression about my colleague even if it contradicts that of the boss.

9. At a hotel where you stayed for a few days with your spouse and children, the clerk at the desk has paid you Rs 5,000 more than is actually due when settling your bill. What will you do?

A. I would pocket it. If someone is so careless with his employer’s money, he deserves to suffer for it.

B. I would return the extra amount.

10. You have a weakness for books and your wife for clothes. But your wife is better at controlling her weakness than you are. Recently she forewent purchasing a sari despite your urging whereas you splurged a large amount on a book. What will you do?

A. I would show her the book and tell her what happened while sharing my excitement.

B. I would quietly carry the bag to my room and mix this book among many others and not mention it to my wife.

 

B.

For calculating your total integrity score, check the scores given in the above exercise for each of the given 10 situations and accordingly fill the scores of ‘A’ or ‘B’ as asked in the second column below and add all the scores to arrive at their total.

 

C.

For interpreting your integrity score, see below. A score that is between

• 1 to 10 is poor,

• 11 to 20 is below average,

• 21 to 30 is average.

• 31 to 40 is above average.

• 41 to 50 is excellent.

 

D.

Drawing an action plan identify areas where you have scored lowest (below 3). These are the attitudes that you need to introspect the reasons for and improve.

(* This quiz is strictly for the personal use of readers only. No part of this quiz, or the ones published before by the same author in this magazine are permitted to be reproduced in any form or to be used by anyone, in part or full, for any commercial purposes without the written permission of the author).

Anil Bhatnagar, an IITian, apart from being a corporate trainer on behavioural skills to over 50 leading companies of the nation, is a motivational speaker, a personal growth coach, a reiki teacher, a painter, a columnist with The Times of India, and an ISTD award-winning author of five internationally acclaimed books. He also writes prolifically for some of the top Indian and International journals.

www.anilbhatnagar.com