Are you a team leader or a manager?

On the morning of a big meeting, two key team members call in sick. You:

• Call them and firmly encourage them to come in anyway.

• Roll up your sleeves and work with the team to get ready.

• Call for a quick 15-minute huddle to redistribute their responsibilities.

• Call in your most trusted player and ask him or her to step in and take charge.

In the middle of crunch time on a critical project, a pipe bursts in the break room, flooding the whole floor and jeopardizing the computers. You:

• Google the instructions and fix it yourself so the team is minimally disturbed.

• Call an emergency plumber and keep close as he works so it gets done fast.

• Rally the team and get their ideas on how to keep the workflow going.

• Tell your team members to grab their laptops and have your assistant book a large room for the day at a local restaurant.

It's your job to address the crowd at the quarterly meeting and set the tone for the rest of the year. Your speech emphasizes:

• How great the team is and how much you enjoy working with your people.

• The value to the team of following organization procedures to increase productivity.

• The importance of all employees making the organization successful and thinking creatively to get ahead of the trend.

• The exciting new developments in your field and how your company can lead the way to the future.

Your team has encountered a major setback, and you call everyone in for a meeting. At the end, your people respond by:

• Quietly returning to their desks, feeling nervous but calmer than before.

• Firing up their computers, initiating your recommended course of action with determination.

• Chiming in with their own suggestions and ideas, which could be incorporated with your own.

• Returning to their desks with genuine excitement, ready to go back to square one if necessary.

You have just had a quarter section in which the team exceeded all the benchmarks. You:

• Treat them all to a catered lunch.

• Give a rousing speech that personally acknowledges each individual's contribution.

• Invite them to a celebratory strategy session dinner with cocktails to set new benchmarks for the next quarter.

• Plan an off-site retreat, complete with adventure activities, to envision a new audacious goal for the rest of the year.

The weekend finally arrives after a hectic but very fruitful week. You:

• Decide to sleep in Saturday as a reward.

• Send out a "Great job, everybody!" email before you leave the office on Friday.

• Spend Sunday sketching out ideas to beat your record for the last week.

• Dedicate time every morning to dreaming up an exciting new project to show everyone on Sunday morning.

You have arrived at the annual conference and look over the program of sessions and speeches. You choose to spend most of your time at:

• Workshops and small groups aimed at the key to employee efficiency and satisfaction.

• A keynote and some panels on employee empowerment and growth.

• An all-day workshop on establishing personal and professional trajectories.

• A round table with industry leaders, a keynote by a famous entrepreneur, and the networking events.

There's no avoiding it … you're going to have to cut the well-liked but ineffective staff member. When you call her into your office, after you give the bad news, you:

• Follow with an encouraging speech about the many talents she has that will see her through.

• Offer to be a positive reference for her at future employers.

• Give her the name and number of a colleague with a position that would suit her well.

• Take her to lunch and spend some time discussing a career path she might truly enjoy.

An employee asks to talk to you about applying for a promotion you know is out of his current reach. Your response is to:

• Gently but firmly suggest he might be ready in a year or so.

• Explain what skills he needs and guide him through a self-assessment.

• Help him lay out a plan for developing the skills he needs and track his progress

• Show him some possibilities for other jobs shifts he has not considered and get him energized about a new direction.