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.19”
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Get up to speed on
using LPI Online
LPI Online is the Web-based application for the LPI
(Leadership Practices Inventory). LPI is an assessment
tool created by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner as
a valid and reliable method for measuring the frequency
of leadership behaviors. This book is primarily designed
to help LPI Online Administrators understand how to use
the technology.
• Administer LPI Online — it’s not hard, but you
may have some questions
• Which version works for you — LPI has a few
different flavors, including LPI 360, LPI Individual,
and Student LPI
Open the book and find:
• Tips on creating new
assignments
• How to share assignments
• Information on tokens and
reports
e
n
i
l
n
O
I
LP
• The lowdown on folders
and files
• Different sources of
information on LPI Online
• Create and manage assignments — assignments are one of the most important parts of
LPI Online, this book helps you figure out how to
work with them
• Get insider tips — find out how to use reports,
tokens, and so on
Learn to:
• Become an expert LPI Online
Administrator
Discover more at www.leadershipchallenge.com
Go to Dummies.com®
for videos, step-by-step photos,
how-to articles, or to shop!
• Help leaders gather and interpret
feedback
• Use the new features available on
the recently released upgrade
• Decide which version of LPI
is best for you and your
organization
Linda Morris is a freelance writer who
has worked on dozens of books in the
For Dummies series. The LPI Online
development team is a dedicated group
of Wiley employees, working with LPI
Online since it first launched in 2002.
Book not for resale
ISBN: 978-0-470-57096-8
Linda Morris
with the LPI Online Development Team
LPI Online
FOR
DUMmIES
‰
by Linda Morris
with the LPI Online Development Team
LPI Online For Dummies®
Published by
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774
www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise,
except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the
prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be
addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ
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for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade
dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the
United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any
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INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
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Publisher’s Acknowledgments
We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our Dummies online
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please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside
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Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media
Development
Project Editor: Jen Bingham
Editorial Manager: Rev Mengle
Composition Services
Project Coordinator: Kristie Rees
Layout and Graphics: Samantha K.
Cherolis
Proofreader: Melanie Hoffman
Publishing and Editorial for Technology Dummies
Richard Swadley, Vice President and Executive Group Publisher
Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher
Mary Bednarek, Executive Director, Acquisitions
Mary C. Corder, Editorial Director
Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies
Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies
Composition Services
Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
About This Book......................................................................... 2
Foolish Assumptions.................................................................. 2
Conventions Used in This Book................................................ 2
How This Book Is Organized..................................................... 2
Icons Used in This Book............................................................. 3
Where to Go from Here.............................................................. 4
Chapter 1: Getting Started with LPI Online . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Getting to Know LPI Online....................................................... 5
Choosing the Right LPI Online Product................................... 7
LPI 360................................................................................ 8
LPI Individual.................................................................... 8
Student LPI........................................................................ 8
Browsing the LPI Online Public Pages..................................... 9
Getting an overview of LPI Online.................................. 9
Purchasing LPI Online.............................................................. 10
Registering for the First Time.................................................. 10
Logging in to LPI Online........................................................... 12
Understanding Roles and Assignments................................. 13
Administrator.................................................................. 13
Leader.............................................................................. 13
Observer.......................................................................... 14
Assignments.................................................................... 14
Navigating the LPI Online and Administrator
Home Pages........................................................................... 15
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments. . . . . 17
Creating a New Assignment..................................................... 17
Search for Individual Leaders....................................... 19
Upload Text File of Leader Data................................... 24
Create an Administrator PIN to Manage
Leader Assignments................................................... 29
vi
LPI Online For Dummies
Managing and Monitoring Assignments................................. 30
Sharing assignments...................................................... 31
Transferring assignments.............................................. 32
Reassigning assignments............................................... 33
Inactivating assignments............................................... 34
Changing Assignment Information after You’ve
Entered It................................................................................ 34
Chapter 3: Managing Folders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Understanding Folders and Files............................................ 37
Creating Folders........................................................................ 37
Deleting and Managing Folders............................................... 39
Managing Leader Rosters........................................................ 40
Chapter 4: Working with Essay Questions. . . . . . . . . . . 41
Creating Essay Questions........................................................ 41
Editing Essay Questions........................................................... 42
Chapter 5: Generating and Viewing Reports. . . . . . . . . 45
Getting to Know the Types of Reports................................... 45
Discovering the Different Types of Report Formats............. 46
Requesting Reports.................................................................. 47
Retrieving Reports.................................................................... 50
Viewing a PDF report...................................................... 50
Importing your CSV file into Microsoft Excel.............. 52
Taking a Look at a PDF-Based LPI Online Report................. 54
Chapter 6: LPI Online Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Accessing the Resources......................................................... 57
Exploring the Leadership Challenge Web Site...................... 58
Examining the Facilitator’s Guide........................................... 59
Getting to Know the Participant Workbook.......................... 61
Checking Out the Leadership Development Planner........... 61
Getting to Know the Leadership Challenge Workbook........ 62
Chapter 7: Managing Accounts and Tokens . . . . . . . . . 63
Discovering Token Management............................................. 63
Transferring Tokens................................................................. 65
Retrieving Tokens Transferred from
Another Administrator......................................................... 70
Retrieving Tokens Purchased from Wiley or a Reseller...... 71
Table of Contents
vii
Chapter 8: Leaders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Getting Ready for the LPI Self Assessment............................ 73
Working with the Leader Home Page..................................... 74
Taking the LPI Self Assessment............................................... 75
Setting Up Observers................................................................ 76
Managing Observers................................................................. 78
Chapter 9: Observers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Getting Invited to Be an Observer.......................................... 79
Taking the Assessment as an Observer................................. 80
Chapter 10: Ten Most Frequently Asked Questions
(and Their Answers). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
What’s an Assignment?............................................................ 83
What Are the Different Roles in LPI Online,
and Do I Have a Login for Each Role?................................. 84
What Is an LPI Online Token?.................................................. 85
What Does “Transferring Tokens” Mean?.............................. 85
What Does “Transferring Assignments” Mean?.................... 85
Can I Upload Leader Information from a Spreadsheet
When I’m Creating an Assignment?.................................... 86
Can I Change My E-mail Address within LPI Online?............ 86
What’s the Deal with Essay Questions, and
How Do They Work?............................................................. 87
What’s the Difference Between LPI 360, LPI Individual,
and Student LPI?.................................................................... 87
What Is the Leader’s Experience Like?................................... 88
What Is the Observer’s Experience Like?.............................. 88
viii
LPI Online For Dummies
Introduction
W
elcome to LPI Online For Dummies! LPI Online is
the Web-based application for the LPI (Leadership
Practices Inventory). LPI is an assessment tool created by
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner as a valid and reliable
method for measuring the frequency of leadership behaviors.
In the 1980s, their research led them to identify what they
dubbed The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership:
✓Challenge the Process
✓Inspire a Shared Vision
✓Enable Others to Act
✓Model the Way
✓Encourage the Heart
To put it another way, these are five things that leaders who
get extraordinary things done actually do. And the Leadership
Practices Inventory is the result of their research: A quantitative way to measure these leadership practices in a leader.
LPI Online is a convenient way for you to benefit from their
research.
In a nutshell, LPI Online is a Web-based application that you
access via the Internet. Leaders take an assessment that consists of 30 statements designed to measure how often they
are fulfilling The Five Practices in their day-to-day lives. If you
purchase LPI 360, that self-assessment is supplemented by
feedback from others who know you well, such as your direct
reports and co-workers. (See Chapter 1 for a detailed explanation of the various flavors of LPI Online.) When the last
assessments have been taken, Administrators can generate
reports that detail the results.
2
LPI Online For Dummies
About This Book
This book is primarily designed to help LPI Online
Administrators. (For more on the roles in LPI Online, see
Chapter 1.) In addition, LPI Online went through a major revision in early 2010. If you’re a long-time user of LPI who just
needs to get up to speed on the changes to the new version,
this book is for you. On the other hand, if you’re a complete
beginner to LPI Online, we’ve got you covered, too.
This book was written for, with information supplied by, the
LPI Online development team.
Foolish Assumptions
We merely assume that you are someone who needs to use
LPI Online. You’re probably an Administrator, but you could
be a Leader or even an Observer. You might be a long-time LPI
Online user or a complete neophyte. Perhaps you’re using LPI
Individual, LPI 360, or Student LPI. Maybe you’re an independent consultant, or maybe you’re a human resources pro. We
kept you in mind while writing this book.
Most of the screenshots in this book were taken with LPI 360.
However, tasks are accomplished in all three versions (Self,
360, or Student) in very similar ways, so you should be able
to follow along with the step-by-step instructions easily, no
matter which version you’re using.
Conventions Used in This Book
New terms are in italic type when they’re defined. Web
addresses, also known as URLs, appear in a monospace font,
like this: www.lpionline.com.
How This Book Is Organized
You can read this book cover to cover, if you’re a stickler
for completion, or you can simply skip to the chapters that
Introduction
3
interest you. Here’s a breakdown of what each chapter
focuses on:
✓Chapter 1 discusses the different versions of LPI Online,
gives an overview of how the product works, and discusses roles and assignments.
✓Chapter 2 walks you through creating, managing, and
transferring assignments.
✓Chapter 3 covers organizing assignments with folders.
✓Chapter 4 is all about the customized essay questions
that Administrators can add to assignments in LPI 360 if
they choose to do so.
✓Chapter 5 gives an overview of the different types of
reports available for summarizing the results of your
assessment.
✓Chapter 6 focuses on some helpful resources for
Administrators and Leaders.
✓Chapter 7 details how to manage accounts and tokens
(the method for managing licensing in LPI Online).
✓Chapter 8 is all about Leaders. It focuses on taking a
self-assessment and selecting Observers to give their
feedback.
✓Chapter 9 explains the Observers’ perspective.
✓Chapter 10 summarizes ten of the most frequently asked
questions about LPI Online and their answers.
Icons Used in This Book
You will find some helpful little icons in the margins of this book:
This icon indicates a pointer that may help you use LPI Online
a little more effectively.
The Remember icon indicates a factoid that you may want to
file away for future reference.
This icon reminds you to beware of a possible pitfall.
4
LPI Online For Dummies
Where to Go from Here
If you’re an Administrator who is a complete beginner to
LPI Online, you may just want to dive into Chapter 1 and
read cover to cover. If you are an Administrator who simply
wants to get up to speed on what’s new, check out Chapter 2,
Chapter 3, and Chapter 7.You can find out about a few frequently asked questions and their answers in Chapter 10.
If you are not an Administrator, you may want to read Chapter
1 for an overview of LPI Online, and then focus on just the
chapters for your role: Chapter 8 is devoted to Leaders and
Chapter 9 covers Observers.
Chapter 1
Getting Started
with LPI Online
In This Chapter
▶Choosing the LPI Online product that’s right for you
▶Registering and logging in to LPI Online
▶Understanding roles and assignments
I
f you’re reading this book, you’ve probably been exposed
to LPI Online in some way or another. Perhaps you’re a
leadership educator who is looking to use it in your course.
Maybe you’re a leadership or talent development professional
in charge of a large LPI Online rollout for your organization.
In any case, we’ve got you covered in this chapter. We give
you a bit of background on LPI Online. We talk about the different versions of the product and how to figure out which
one is right for you. We give you a basic overview of the site
and talk about the different “roles” within LPI: Administrator,
Leader, and Observer. (We get into more detail on each of
those later in this chapter, in the section, “Understanding
Roles and Assignments.”)
Getting to Know LPI Online
LPI Online is the convenient Web-based version of Leadership
Practices Inventory (LPI), an assessment tool developed by
Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. It started out as a research
6
LPI Online For Dummies
project. In 1983, Kouzes and Posner began by asking thousands of people to describe their “personal best” leadership
experience through a series of open-ended project-related
questions such as
✓Who initiated the project?
✓How were you prepared for this experience?
✓What special techniques and strategies did you use to
get other people involved in the project?
After administering thousands of surveys and analyzing the
results, Kouzes and Posner concluded that the best leaders often had some methods in common — what the two
researchers identified as The Five Practices of Exemplary
Leadership:
✓Model the Way
✓Inspire a Shared Vision
✓Challenge the Process
✓Enable Others to Act
✓Encourage the Heart
The Leadership Practices Inventory is the result of their
research: A quantitative way to measure the frequency of
these leadership practices in leaders. And LPI Online is a convenient way for you to benefit from their research. To use LPI
Online, all you need is to have access to
✓A Windows machine running XP, Vista, or Windows 7;
a Mac running OS X; or Linux
✓Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, Firefox 3.0 or later, or
Safari 2.04 or later
✓An Internet connection
Chapter 1: Getting Started with LPI Online
Although you can use LPI Online with any of the listed operating systems or browsers, LPI Online has been optimized for
use with Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP.
But before you can get started, you have to choose the version of LPI Online that’s right for you.
Choosing the Right LPI
Online Product
LPI Online (Figure 1-1) isn’t exactly Baskin-Robbins, but
it does come in three flavors: LPI 360, LPI Individual, and
Student LPI. We detail them in the following sections.
Figure 1-1: The LPI Online Public home page.
7
8
LPI Online For Dummies
LPI 360
LPI 360 is an observer-based assessment tool. Leaders
(who are the subjects of the assessments) are evaluated by
Observers, who answer 30 questions anonymously via a Web
interface. They answer the questions based on their personal experience with the Leaders. Leaders answer the same
questions about themselves. After the questions (Surveys)
have been completed, Administrators can run reports to see
the results. We go into more details on the different roles
(Administrators, Leaders, and Observers) later in this chapter, in the section, “Understanding Roles and Assignments.”
LPI Individual
LPI Individual is a self-assessment tool. In other words, Leaders
answer the questions about themselves rather than soliciting
responses from Observers. One advantage of LPI Individual
is that it offers simplified administration and rapid results
because Leaders don’t have to assign Observers and wait for
them to fill out their surveys. On the other hand, they don’t
receive the feedback of others on their leadership behaviors,
either. But if you want to provide a single leader or group
of leaders with an introduction to The Five Practices model
and a quick self-assessment of their leadership behavior,
LPI Individual is the way to go. You can view and print your
reports in PDF form after taking the 30 assessment items. (Most
Leaders only need 10 to 15 minutes to take the assessment.)
Student LPI
Student LPI (www.studentlpi.com), shown in Figure 1-2, is
a version of LPI geared for — you guessed it — students. The
Student LPI is aimed at high school and undergraduate students with little or no business experience. Master-level and
higher students may have real-life business experience; for
them, regular LPI Online is a better choice.
Chapter 1: Getting Started with LPI Online
9
Figure 1-2: The Student LPI home page.
Browsing the LPI Online
Public Pages
If you’re still not sure which version of LPI is right for you, or
if you would like more information, you can find out more at
the LPI Online Web site at www.lpionline.com. In the next
sections, we explain what kind of information you can find
there.
Getting an overview of LPI Online
Click on the About LPI button or click the Learn More at the
LPI Online Web site (www.lpionline.com) to view a description of the product, detailed system requirements, pricing
info, and more.
For similar info on LPI Individual, go to the LPI Online Web
site and click the LPI Individual button. This brings up the
LPI Individual home page, where you can find info about the
assessment, see sample reports and questions, get pricing
information, and purchase the product.
10
LPI Online For Dummies
To access the Student LPI Product Overview, visit the Student
LPI home page at www.studentlpi.com and click the About
SLPI button.
Purchasing LPI Online
To purchase tokens for LPI 360 Online, you can simply click
Buy LPI at the top of the LPI Online home page. To purchase
LPI Individual, click the Buy Now link at the top of its home
page; the Student LPI home page has a similar Buy SLPI link
on its home page.
You can also purchase LPI Online through an LPI Leadership
Consultant. To do so, e-mail leadership@wiley.com or call
866-888-5159.
Tokens are a way of managing licensing for the product, sort
of like a special form of currency for LPI. They control, in
essence, how many leaders you can assess with the LPI product you purchase. One Leader taking one LPI assignment costs
one token. Thanks to tokens, Administrators don’t have to be
the same people who actually purchase LPI. The purchaser
can transfer tokens to the Administrator, allowing them to take
it from there. We cover tokens in more detail in Chapter 7.
Registering for the First Time
When you’re ready to log in to LPI for the first time, you’ll have
to register. You can register either before or after purchasing
LPI Online. Click the Register Now button under the New to LPI
Online? heading. You’ll see a Privacy Policy statement — read
the legalese if you’re the cautious type, or just click I Accept to
move on. This brings up a registration form like the one shown
in Figure 1-3.
Chapter 1: Getting Started with LPI Online
11
Figure 1-3: Registering to LPI Online for the first time.
You’re expected to fill in some pretty standard questions,
including name, e-mail address, and organization name. Only
those fields in red are required. As you type in your e-mail
address, you’ll notice that your e-mail address also automatically appears in the Username field. That’s because your username is, by default, the main e-mail address you enter.
In addition, you’ll have to answer some secret questions of the
“What is your mother’s maiden name?” variety. These questions and their answers will be used to confirm that you are
who you say you are if you forget your password. In the Secret
Question section, use the drop-down boxes to select a couple
of secret questions and then supply the answers in the Answer
boxes to the right. If you have more than one e-mail address,
list your secondary addresses in the Email Alias section.
If you’re taking LPI Online with more than one Administrator,
they may know you by more than one e-mail address. For
example, your school administrator might know you by
your yourschool.edu e-mail address, whereas your work
administrator might know you by yourcompany.com. By listing those various e-mail addresses as e-mail aliases, you can
ensure that no matter who is adding you as a Leader, they
will find your account in LPI Online. And, you’ll only have to
remember one username and password.
12
LPI Online For Dummies
If you’re an Administrator, you need to select the Yes radio
buttons in the Additional Information section to indicate that
you’re administering the program to other leaders. (If you’re
an Administrator, you’ll know it because you’ll be creating
assignments, adding leaders, and doing all sorts of other
stuff that Leaders don’t have to worry about.) If you’re not an
Administrator, leave the No button selected.
If you buy tokens, either from Wiley or from a reseller, you
don’t need to answer this yes or no: You will be granted the
Admin role automatically. It doesn’t hurt anything to select Yes,
however. And you don’t become an Administrator by default
just by clicking Yes. Someone needs to transfer tokens or
assignments to you, or create a share for you, in order for you
to get the role. See Chapter 7 for more on token management.
When you finish filling out all the required fields in this form,
click Next. A confirmation screen appears. Click the Sign In to
My LPI Online button if you want to get started right away.
With your username and password that you created during
the registration process in hand, you’re ready to log in.
Logging in to LPI Online
Logging in is simple as can be: From the LPI Online Public
home page, look for the Sign in to LPI Online area. Type your
username (by default, it’s the same as the primary e-mail
address you entered) in the Username field. In the Password
field, type in the password that you created during the registration process. When you log in for the first time, you’ll be
confronted with more legalese in the form of the LPI Online
License Agreement and Terms of Use. Click Accept to move
past it.
If at any time you forget your username or password, click on
the Forget Your Username? or Forget Your Password? links
next to these fields to be walked through a process of recovering this information.
Chapter 1: Getting Started with LPI Online
13
Understanding Roles
and Assignments
Congratulations! You’re going to get started on the road to
helping others to better leadership skills with LPI Online. But
what’s next? To get started, it will help you to understand
a little bit about the three basic roles in LPI: Administrator,
Leader, and Observer.
Administrator
In LPI Online terms, an Administrator is in the driver’s seat.
An Administrator is the one asking the Leaders to take the LPI
Online assessment. Administrators can be professors, workshop leaders, consultants, HR people, or anyone in charge of
leadership development.
In LPI Online, Administrators have a whole host of special
powers (no, leaping tall buildings is not among them).
Administrators are often (but don’t always have to be) the
people who purchase LPI Online. (More on that in Chapter 7.)
In addition to creating the assignments that Leaders have to
complete, Administrators can do a lot of, well, administrative
stuff, too. For example, if a Leader is signed up to do an assessment but then goes on a leave of absence, the Administrator
can reassign that assessment to someone else as long as it’s
not yet in progress. Administrators control to some extent
which questions that the Leaders have to answer, and most
importantly, Administrators are the only people who can view
and print reports after the assessments are done.
Leader
Leaders are really what it’s all about in LPI: They’re the ones
being measured. In LPI 360 and Student LPI, each Leader
responds to the 30 LPI items about themselves and then sends
the assessment on for others (Observers, which we cover in
the next section) to answer about them. In LPI Self, Leaders are
pretty much the end-all be-all: They (and no one else) answer
questions about themselves in this self-assessment tool.
14
LPI Online For Dummies
Observer
Observers are the other people who provide the valuable
feedback in LPI. They know and usually work closely with
the Leaders. The four types of Observers in LPI Online are
Direct Reports, Coworkers, Managers, or Other. In the case
of Student LPI, Observers may be teachers, coaches, or teammates: Anyone who has first-hand knowledge of the student in
a leadership role. In any case, due to a relationship with the
Leader, they’re in a unique position to give that Leader feedback via the LPI 360 or Student LPI, and they do it by responding to the 30 LPI Observer items.
LPI Individual is a self-assessment tool and as such does not
have Observers.
Assignments
For those of you who are used to working with older versions
of LPI Online, we’ve got a bit of new terminology: assignment.
No, it’s not like back in high school when you had to read
The Scarlet Letter and write a ten-page term paper about it.
An assignment is an instance of a Leader taking the LPI at a
particular time. An Administrator creates assignments for a
Leader. Each Leader can have only one active assignment per
Administrator at a time.
Folders and files
Another concept new to the updated
version of LPI Online is that of folders and files. For long-time users of
LPI, folders and files replace organizations and groups. The folders and
files (or sub-folders) are simply a way
of organizing different assignments.
Much like Windows Explorer consists of files that are organized
within folders, LPI Online organizes
assignments into folders (for example, XYZ Organization or Department)
and, within those folders, files
(for example, the XYZ folder could
contain files named Sales Team,
Marketing Managers, Fall 2010
Semester, and so on). Folders can
only go two levels deep, by the way,
so you can’t create a folder within a
folder within yet another folder.
Chapter 1: Getting Started with LPI Online
15
Navigating the LPI Online and
Administrator Home Pages
When you log on to LPI Online, you will find yourself at the
LPI Online Secure Home page. What you see will vary depending on what your LPI role is: Leader (or Student Leader),
Observer, or Administrator. From the LPI Online Secure Home
page, you’ll be able to see the tools and features that you
have access to at the bottom of this page. For example, the
LPI Online Secure Home page of an Administrator looks like
Figure 1-4.
Click the Home link next to the Administrator heading to
access the Administrator Home page (Figure 1-5).
The Administrator Menu on the left side of the screen features a list of links that allows you to do many of the tasks
an Administrator needs to do, from downloading reports
to creating and managing assignments, managing shared
administrations, and more. In addition, if you have tokens in
your account, a Token Summary displays at the bottom of
this menu, giving a summary of how many tokens you have
available in your account. (We cover tokens in more detail in
Chapter 7.)
Click here to go to the Administrator Home page.
Figure 1-4: The LPI Online Secure Home page of an Administrator.
16
LPI Online For Dummies
Figure 1-5: The Administrator Home page.
The Administrator Menu on the left side of the screen features a list of links that allows you to do many of the tasks
an Administrator needs to do, from downloading reports
to creating and managing assignments, managing shared
administrations, and more. In addition, if you have tokens in
your account, a Token Summary displays at the bottom of
this menu, giving a summary of how many tokens you have
available in your account. (We cover tokens in more detail in
Chapter 7.)
In the middle of the Administrator Home page is a Recent
Alerts and Activities area that summarizes recent transactions
for your account, such as report requests, token transfers, or
assignments shared by another Administrator.
The Leader Home page is much simpler to navigate than the
Administrator Home page, simply because Leaders have far
fewer tasks to accomplish in LPI Online. The Leader Home
page is basically a launching pad for Leaders to get started
taking their assessments and setting up the Observers who
will provide feedback to them. We cover those tasks in depth
in Chapter 8.
Chapter 2
Creating and Managing
Assignments
In This Chapter
▶Creating new assignments
▶Monitoring in-progress assignments
▶Sharing and transferring assignments
A
ssignments are the heart and soul of the new LPI
Online. An assignment is simply the act of a Leader
taking an assessment at a particular point in time. But before
Leaders can get busy taking assignments, Administrators
have to create them. And then there are a whole range of
things that an Administrator does related to assignments:
Monitoring and managing them once they’re in progress,
sharing them with other Administrators, and transferring,
reassigning, or inactivating them. In this chapter, we explore
every aspect of assignments.
Creating a New Assignment
To create a new assignment, simply log in to LPI Online with
your username and password. You will find yourself at the LPI
Online Secure Home page. If you’re an Administrator, you’ll
see a Create Assignment link: Click it. (Alternatively, if you
already happen to be on the Administrator Home page, just
choose Create Assignments from the Administrator menu.)
Whatever way you use to get there, you wind up at the Create
Assignment window (see Figure 2-1). This is like a wizard
that walks you through the steps of creating an assignment.
18
LPI Online For Dummies
On the first screen, you have to select a method to add
Leaders by selecting the appropriate radio button. Your
choices are:
Search for Individual Leaders: Search for Leaders one at
a time from a database of all previously registered users,
or create new Leader records for those not currently
registered.
Upload Text File of Leader Data: Create a Leader Roster
file using an Excel template and upload it to the system.
This is the best way to go if you’re adding a lot of new
Leaders.
Create an Administrator PIN to Manage Leader
Assignments: This choice doesn’t allow you to add new
Leaders; instead, you create a PIN number that your
Leaders use to associate themselves with you as the
Administrator. All their assignments will automatically
be tracked back to you as the Administrator via the PIN.
The Leader logs in to LPI Online and submits the PIN in
the form on the secure home page. The Leader then has
the option to use a token she already has, or to purchase
a token. Either way, she is set up with whatever settings
the Administrator selected when she created the PIN.
This method is often used in Student LPI to give a particular professor or Administrator control of the assignments without having to be the purchaser.
Figure 2-1: The Create Assignment screen.
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
19
In the next three sections, we explain how to create an assignment via each of these methods.
Search for Individual Leaders
Here’s how the process works if you decide to search for individual Leaders:
1. Select the Search for Individual Leaders radio button
and click Next.
This brings up the Select Folder window (Figure 2-2),
which contains a list of folders that already exist.
Figure 2-2: Select the folder for your new assignment here.
2. If you see the folder that you want to place the
new assignment in, click the folder row or select
the radio button to the left of the folder name.
Alternatively, if you don’t see it, you can type the
folder name into the box and click Search to find it.
3. If the folder you want to add your assignment to
doesn’t exist yet, click the Add a New Folder button
on the right of the screen. Type a Folder Name and
Folder Description in the boxes that appear and
click Save.
20
LPI Online For Dummies
A folder name might be the name of your organization or department, such as XYZ Corporation or XYZ
Sales Dept. You could then break down subcategories
as files, such as Marketing Dept., Sales Force, or 2010
Spring Semester.
4. After you’ve selected the folder you want, click Next
to move to the Add Leaders screen.
If you move to the Add Leaders screen and then realize that you selected the wrong folder, simply click the
Change Folder link to move back and select a different
folder.
5. To add Leaders to an assignment, select either the
By Username or By Email radio button and then type
their username or e-mail address in the adjacent text
box. Click Add.
You can’t add a Leader by username unless that
Leader is already in the system. If you’re adding a new
Leader, you must add her by e-mail address.
Below the text box you used to add a new Leader
are three sections that only appear when you have
entered a Leader who fits one of the following criteria:
•Leaders who aren’t already registered with LPI
Online.
•E-mail addresses that have multiple Leaders
associated with them. (If you haven’t submitted
an e-mail address that belongs to two or more
users, you won’t see this section.)
•Leaders who have already registered with LPI
Online.
If you’re entering a new Leader who isn’t already
in the LPI Online system, select the By Email radio
button and enter her e-mail address. If the Leader is
already in the system, you can select the By Username
radio button and enter her username, provided you
know it.
Depending on which category the Leader you entered
falls into, she will wind up in one of these three areas.
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
21
If the Leader you entered shows up in the area for
Leaders not already registered with LPI Online, you
can complete her records by entering any missing
information, such as her first and last name and phone
number, in the blank text boxes next to her e-mail
address. Don’t worry about entering the Leader’s username; she will be able to complete that piece when
she registers for the first time.
If the e-mail address you entered belongs to two users,
you’ll have to select which one you meant to add as a
Leader.
An e-mail address belonging to two users is a fairly
unusual situation that results from using e-mail
aliases. If you search for an e-mail address and that
e-mail address is either a primary e-mail address for
one person and an alias for another, or an alias for
two people, two people are returned as results for the
search.
6. Add as many Leaders as you need to by entering
their e-mail addresses or usernames and clicking
Add. When you’re finished adding Leaders, click
Next to go to the Enter Assignment Data screen.
7. Decide on a deadline by when your Leader must
complete the assignment and enter it in the Leader
Complete LPI By box by clicking on the Calendar
icon next to the box to select the date.
8. Use the same method to choose a deadline for the
Observers to complete the LPI assignment and enter
it in the Observer Completes LPI By box.
The dates that you enter here appear as due dates in
the e-mails that Leaders and Observers receive notifying them of an assignment. (This feature is not available for LPI Individual.)
9. (Optional.) If you want the Leaders to have access to
the LPI Participant’s Workbook and LPI Leadership
Development Planner, select the appropriate checkboxes here.
To see which resources are available in different flavors of LPI Online, see the “Resources for different
versions of LPI Online” elsewhere in this chapter.
22
LPI Online For Dummies
We cover these Leader resources in more detail in
Chapter 6. One reason you may not provide access to
these documents is if it’s material that the facilitator
wants to present herself.
10. In the Report Cover Sheet Label box, type the name
that you would like to appear on the report cover
sheet.
For the Report Cover Sheet Label box, many users
type the name of the organization that the Admin
belongs to, or a group or course name for a specific
set of Leaders.
11. Scroll down to the Essay Questions for All
Assignments section to select the essay questions
you would like your Leaders to answer. Highlight
essay questions in the Available Questions box and
click the Add button to select them.
Essay questions are in LPI 360 only, so if you are
using LPI Individual or Student LPI, you will not see
this feature.
You can choose up to five.
12. (Optional.) You can always simply reuse the same
essay questions that you used in previous assignments, but if you want to add a new question for this
assignment, click the Add Essay Question button.
This brings up a pop-up window with a text box.
Type your new question into the text box and click
Save. The new question now appears in the Available
Questions box and can be selected like any other
question. It will also be saved in the system and can
be used for future assignments.
13. When you have selected the essay questions you
want, click Next.
14. The Edit Message screen appears (Figure 2-3). LPI
Online generates a mostly boilerplate message that
will be sent to Leaders and Observers.
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
23
Figure 2-3: LPI sends out a message to all Leaders and Observers.
15. Read the standard message. If there’s anything you’d
like to add, type it in the Additional Message to
Leader box.
16. Click the To Observer tab to see the messages to
Observers.
17. Select the dates when these messages should be sent
by clicking on the Calendar icons next to the Leader
Delivery Date and Observer Delivery Date boxes.
Click Next when you’re finished.
You can send the messages on the same date, if you
like, or give Leaders a little advance notice by sending
their message before the Observers’ message.
18. You will now come to a confirmation screen that
allows you to review all the choices you’ve made
thus far. Review all your choices carefully and click
the Change links (Change Folder, Change Leaders,
Change Date, and so on) to make any necessary
modifications.
19. When you’re sure that everything is as you want it,
click the Confirm button.
24
LPI Online For Dummies
You will see a confirmation screen reminding you
which Leaders you sent assignments to and letting
you know how many tokens were used and how
many you have left.
20. If you’re done creating assignments, click the
Admin Home button to return to the Administrator
Home page. But hey, if you just can’t get enough
of LPI assignment creation, click the Create More
Assignments button to start the whole process again!
Upload Text File of Leader Data
If you decide to add Leaders by uploading an Excel file with
the Leaders’ information, the process is slightly different. For
this method, you must have an Excel (.xls) or text (.txt) file
containing the e-mail addresses and names of the Leaders you
want to add. If you’re using an Excel file, the Leaders’ e-mail
addresses should be in column A; the first and last names
of your Leaders should be in columns B and C, respectively,
as shown in Figure 2-4. Each Leader should appear in her
own row. If you’re using a text file, such as one you would
create with Notepad, the data points should be separated by
the pipe symbol. As with a spreadsheet, in a text file, each
Leader’s info should be on its own line.
Figure 2-4: An Excel spreadsheet with Leader e-mail addresses and names.
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
25
Resources for different
versions of LPI Online
The resources available vary
depending on what version of LPI
Online you’re using. For LPI 360,
the Admin resources include the
Facilitator’s Guide (PDF), Participant
Workbook (PDF), the Leadership
Development Planner (PDF),
LPI Online For Dummies (PDF),
and the Leadership Challenge
Web site (www.leadership
c h a l l e n g e . c o m ). Leader
Resources for LPI Online include all
the preceding except the Facilitator’s
Guide. Observers have access to
only LPI Online For Dummies and the
Leadership Challenge Web site.
For Student LPI, Admins have access
to the Facilitator’s Guide, Student
Workbook (PDF), Student Leadership
Planner (PDF), LPI Online For
Dummies (PDF), and the Leadership
Challenge Web site. Student Leaders
can access all the preceding except
the Facilitator’s Guide. Student
Observers can access only LPI
Online For Dummies (PDF) and the
Leadership Challenge Web site.
Both Admins and Leaders working
with LPI Individual can access the
Leadership Challenge Workbook,
LPI Online For Dummies, and the
Leadership Challenge Web site.
There are no Observers in LPI
Individual.
1. Follow steps 1–4 of the preceding numbered list,
except in Step 1, select the Upload Text File of
Leader Data radio button.
When you get to the Add Leaders screen, you will see
a Filename text box with a Browse button next to it.
2. Click the Browse button to browse to where you
have stored the Excel file containing your Leader
names. Select the file and click Open. Back in the
Add Leaders screen, click the Validate Format and
Upload button.
As long as your data was formatted correctly (e-mail
address in column A, first and last names split into
columns B and C), you will see the names and e-mail
addresses of your Leaders appear onscreen.
26
LPI Online For Dummies
The leaders will be divided into two sections. Leaders
not already registered with LPI Online appear in the
first table. You can provide any missing information
(such as a telephone number) by entering it into the
open text boxes. Leaders that have already registered
with LPI Online appear in a lower table.
3. After you’ve entered any necessary additional
information, click Next to move on to the Enter
Assignment Data screen (see Figure 2-5).
Figure 2-5: The Enter Assignment Data screen, where you select questions
and deadlines.
4. Decide on a deadline by when your Leader must
complete the assignment and enter it in the Leader
Complete LPI By box by clicking on the Calendar
icon next to the box to select the date.
5. Use the same method to choose a deadline for the
Observers to complete the LPI assignment and enter
it in the Observer Completes LPI By box. (This feature is not available for LPI Individual.)
6. (Optional.) If you want the Leaders to have access
to the Participant’s Workbook and Participant’s
Leadership Development Planner, select the appropriate checkboxes here.
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
27
For more on the participant’s workbook and leadership development planner, see Chapter 6 of this book.
7. In the Report Cover Sheet Label box, type the name
that you would like to appear on the report cover
sheet.
8. Scroll down to the Essay Questions for All
Assignments section to select the essay questions
you would like your Leaders to answer. Highlight
essay questions in the Available Questions box and
click the Add button to select them.
You can choose up to five. Any essay questions you
used in previous assignments will be here, so you can
simply select them here if you want to reuse them.
Essay questions are a feature in LPI 360 only, so you
won’t see this option if you’re using Student LPI or LPI
Individual.
9. (Optional.) If you prefer to write your own questions,
click the Add Essay Question button.
This brings up a pop-up window with a text box. Click
the Add Essay Question box in this text box. Now
type your new question into the text box and click
Save. The new question now appears in the Available
Questions box and can be selected like any other
question.
10. When you have selected the essay questions you
want, click Next.
The Edit Message screen appears (Figure 2-6). LPI
Online generates a mostly boilerplate message that
will be sent to Leaders and Observers.
11. Read the standard message. If there’s anything you’d
like to add, type it in the Additional Message to
Leader box.
12. Click the To Observer tab to see the message to
Observers.
13. Select the dates when these messages should be sent
by clicking on the Calendar icons next to the Leader
Delivery Date and Observer Delivery Date boxes.
Click Next when you’re finished.
28
LPI Online For Dummies
Figure 2-6: LPI sends out a message to all Leaders and Observers.
You can send the messages on the same date, if you
like, or give Leaders a little “advance notice” by sending their message before the Observers’ message.
14. You will now come to a confirmation screen that
allows you to review all the choices you’ve made
thus far. Review all your choices carefully and click
the Change links (Change Folder, Change Leaders,
Change Date, and so on) to make any necessary
modifications.
15. When you’re sure that everything is as you want it,
click the Confirm button.
You will see a confirmation screen reminding you
which Leaders you sent assignments to and letting
you know how many tokens were used and how many
you have left.
16. If you’re done creating assignments, click the
Admin Home button to return to the Administrator
Home page. But hey, if you just can’t get enough
of LPI assignment creation, click the Create More
Assignments button to start the whole process again!
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
29
Create an Administrator PIN to
Manage Leader Assignments
Creating a PIN number to manage Leader assignments works
similarly to the previous method, but with a few key differences. You don’t actually have to add the Leaders to the
assignment: Instead, you generate a PIN number that you distribute to your Leaders, and then they use that information to
register themselves at their time of purchase.
This method is ideal for Student LPI because it allows a professor Administrator to create a PIN number to distribute to
students who purchase Student LPI and register themselves,
yet all the Leaders are associated to the professor through
the PIN number.
To create an assignment this way, select the Create an
Administrator PIN to Manage Leader Assignments radio button
in the first Create Assignments screen. Click Next and select a
folder for your assignment as directed in Steps 2–4 of the step
list in the section, “Search for Individual Leaders.” Click Next
to move to the LPI Completion Dates and Participant Materials
Access screen. Enter the deadlines by when the Leader and
Observers should complete LPI by clicking the Calendar icons
next to the appropriate boxes. Enter a Report Cover Sheet
Label in the text box and a promo code, if you have one, in the
Promo Code box that appears.
Professor Administrators sometimes work with Leadership
Counselors to negotiate special sale prices for their classes. If
so, a promo code will appear on the PIN handout that the professor distributes to her students. Entering the promo code at
this stage enables the student to receive the discounted price.
If using LPI 360, select your desired essay questions (see
steps 5–9 of the previous step list if you need guidance with
this process). Customize the message that will be sent to
Leaders and Observers (see steps 11–13 of the previous step
list if you need help with this). Click Next.
On the final Confirmation screen, review the details. With this
method, you haven’t entered much info, so there is not much
you can change here, but you can click the Change Folder
link if you want to place the assignment in a different folder.
30
LPI Online For Dummies
Click the Confirm button when you’re sure you’re finished.
You will see a final screen that displays your Administrator
PIN. Distribute this PIN to the Leaders who need to purchase
tokens and take this assignment. Leaders will self-register
and all their assignment activities will be linked to you, the
Administrator.
If you would rather deliver the PIN to your Leaders using dead
trees instead of electronically, click the Handout link. This
takes you to the Manage PINs screen, where you can click
the Handout button to generate a printable document. The
Handout contains the PIN and any promo codes necessary to
redeem special pricing that the professor Administrator may
have negotiated.
Managing and Monitoring
Assignments
To manage the assignments that you are Administrator for,
choose Manage Assignments from the Administrator Menu on
the left side of the Administrator Home page. This takes you
to the View Assignments screen, shown in Figure 2-7. From
here, you can search for, view, and manage all the assignments you administrate.
Figure 2-7: You can manage all your assignments from the View
Assignments screen.
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
31
To view all the assignments in a certain folder, select that
folder name under All Folders on the left of the screen. If you
have a great many assignments, you may want to filter out the
stuff you’re not looking for to make it easier to find what you
need. Select All Assignments, Active Assignments, or Inactive
Assignments from the View drop-down list to narrow the
focus. You can also search for all the assignments between
two specific dates: Just click on the Calendar icons next to the
Between and And fields to enter the start and end dates, and
then click Filter. To select a Leader whose assignment you’d
like to manage in some way, click the check box for her row,
or click the Select All check box to have your changes apply
to every Leader listed.
From this page, you can share assignments, transfer assignments, e-mail Leaders, remind them to get going, and activate
or inactivate their assignments. We cover these various tasks
in the next sections.
Sharing assignments
You can share Administrator responsibility for an assignment
with another Administrator, if you like. Unlike transferring an
assignment, when you permanently relinquish Administrator
rights for an assignment, if you share the assignment, both
Administrators can access the assignment. (We cover transferring assignments in the next section.) Sharing an assignment
might be a good idea if you’re going on vacation and just need
someone else to mind the store for a bit while you’re out.
To share an assignment, on the View Assignments screen,
select the check box next to the assignment you want to
share and click the Share button. This brings up the Share
Assignment(s) screen. Next to Select Administrator, choose
either the By Username or By Email radio button and then
type the username or e-mail address of the Administrator
you’d like to share the assignment with. Click Search and then
click the radio button next to the desired Administrator from
the results that appear. In the Level of Access drop-down list,
select either Restricted, Limited, or Full, depending on what
kind of access you want her to have to your assignment. Full
gives her access to just about everything except using your
tokens. Restricted lets her do basic maintenance activities,
32
LPI Online For Dummies
and Limited is view-only. After you’ve selected the type of
access you want to give her, click Submit. An e-mail will be
sent to the Administrator that you’re sharing the assignment
with, notifying her of the change.
To un-share, simply click Stop Sharing in the list of
Administrators that appears in the Manage Share page.
When searching for Administrators, your search criteria
must match the Administrator’s username or e-mail address
exactly. You can’t do searches by entering criteria that are
only partial matches. Also, an Administrator search only
searches for users who either already are Administrators, or
who selected Yes in their user profiles when asked whether
they want to administer LPI. An Administrator search doesn’t
search against every single user in the LPI Online database.
Transferring assignments
To permanently transfer an assignment to another
Administrator (say, because you’re leaving the company),
go to the View Assignments screen by selecting Manage My
Assignments from the Administrator Menu. Click the folder
that contains the assignment you’d like to transfer to display
a list of assignments in that folder. Select the Leader whose
assignment you’d like to transfer and click the Transfer button.
This brings up the Transfer Assignment screen. Next to the
Select Administrator heading, choose either the By Username
or By Email radio button, and then type the username or e-mail
address of the Administrator you’d like to transfer the assignment to. Click Search and then click the check box next to
the desired Administrator from the results that appear. Click
Submit. An e-mail is sent to the Administrator that you’re
transferring the assignment to, notifying her of the change.
The new Administrator whom the assignment is being transferred to then has to accept the transfer by clicking on Manage
Assignments from the Administrator Menu, and then clicking
the Manage Transfers tab on the View Assignments screen that
appears. This brings up a Manage Assignment Transfers screen
that enables her to accept the transfer. Accepted transfers
place assignments in the Default folder, which users can access
via Manage Folders. Users need to move the assignment to
another folder before they can start editing or using it.
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
33
E-mailing and reminding Leaders
If you need to contact Leaders,
you can do so through the View
Assignments screen. Just select the
Leader you want to poke and click
the e-mail button. This brings up a
pop-up window. Type the subject
line of your message into the Subject
text box, type your message into
the Body text box, and click Send.
The message will be sent to the
e-mail address of record for that
Leader. To send a boilerplate message reminding the Leader to take
the LPI assessment, select the
Leader and click the Remind button.
In the pop-up window that appears,
click OK to send the reminder.
If you change your mind about a transfer, you can cancel it
from this same Manage Assignment Transfers screen, provided that the Administrator to whom you tried to transfer
it hasn’t accepted it yet. If the transfer isn’t picked up within
seven days, it is returned to the sender.
Reassigning assignments
If a Leader, say, leaves the company or class or no longer
needs to do an assignment for some reason, you can reassign it to another Leader, provided that the assignment’s
self-assessment has not been started yet by any Leader or
Observer. (Once Leaders or Observers have started an assignment, it can’t be reassigned to anyone else.)
To reassign an assignment, go to View Assignment and click
on the Leader’s name whose assignment you want to reassign. This brings up the Assignment Details screen. Click the
Reassign button to go to the Reassign Assignment screen.
Type the username or e-mail address of the Leader whom
you want to reassign the assignment to in the text box. Select
either the By Username or By Email check box, depending
on which one you are entering. Click Add, and then click the
Confirm button.
34
LPI Online For Dummies
Inactivating assignments
To inactivate an assignment (say, because the Leader for
some reason is unable to take the LPI ), go to the View
Assignments screen and select the check box for the assignment you’d like to inactivate. Click the Activate/Inactivate
button. You will see a popup box letting you know that the
assignment has been inactivated. The Leader also receives
an e-mail letting her know that her assignment has been inactivated. This button is a toggle, so to re-activate an inactive
assignment, just select it and once again click the Activate/
Inactivate button.
A Leader can only be assigned to one active assignment
per Administrator. That means that a Leader can have multiple active assignments as long as she has only one per
Administrator. If you as Administrator want to assign a new
assignment to a Leader you already have an assignment with,
you need to inactivate the first assignment.
Changing Assignment
Information after You’ve
Entered It
It’s easy to change information related to an assignment after
you’ve entered it. Say you discover that you made a mistake when entering a Leader’s e-mail address, or say that a
Leader has a name change or change of telephone number. Or
maybe you just decided that you want to change the Leader
and Observer deadlines that you set up when you created
the assignment. You can make all these changes from the
View Assignments screen. From the Administrator Menu,
select Manage Assignments. Under All Folders, select the
folder that the assignment you want to edit resides in. This
brings up a list of all the assignments in that folder. Click the
Leader’s name to bring up the Assignment Details screen.
Click the Leader’s name again to bring up a breakdown of
all the details associated with this person (Figure 2-8). To
Chapter 2: Creating and Managing Assignments
35
edit personal details such as the e-mail address or telephone
number, click the Edit button near the Leader heading. Make
the necessary changes in the text boxes that appear and click
Save. To change details related to the assignment, such as
the Observer Complete date, click the Edit button, make the
changes, and click Save.
Figure 2-8: Editing assignment details.
36
LPI Online For Dummies
Chapter 3
Managing Folders
In This Chapter
▶Understanding folders and files
▶Deleting folders and files
▶Managing Leader Rosters
F
olders help you organize your assignments into logical
groups. Using the Manage Folders screen, you can add
and delete folders and move assignments around within folders. In addition, using the Leader Roster, you can easily view
a list of all the Leaders that you administer, what folders they
have assignments in, and e-mail them with just a click of a
link. We show you how in this chapter.
Understanding Folders and Files
Folders are an organization tool used by LPI Online to classify
groups of assignments. For those of you who have used previous
versions of LPI, folders replace organizations. Files are subfolders
or subcategories of folders — they replace groups in previous
versions of LPI. For example, a company whose employees are
taking the LPI Online assessment, such as Wiley Publishing,
could be a folder. All the departments within that company,
such as Editorial, Sales, and so on, whose employees are taking
the assessment, would be files within that larger folder.
Creating Folders
If you have already created an assignment (which we cover in
Chapter 2), you’re already a little familiar with folders. In the
process of creating an assignment, you have to either place
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LPI Online For Dummies
that assignment into a pre-existing folder, or create a new
folder. You can also create new folders, and indeed manage
almost all folder-related tasks, from the Manage Folders
screen, shown in Figure 3-1.
Figure 3-1: You can view, add, and delete folders from this screen.
To get to this screen, select Folders & Leaders from the
Administrator Menu on the Administrator Home page. The
Manage Folders screen displays all the folders you are the
Administrator for. By default, all folders are displayed; if you
administer many folders and want to select a specific folder
to view, choose the By Name radio button and type the folder
name into the text box. Click Search.
To create a folder, click the Add a New Folder button and
enter a name and description in the Folder Name and Folder
Description boxes that appear at the bottom of the screen.
Click Save to save the new folder. If you want to change the
name or description of a folder you’ve already created, click
the folder name to select it and then click the Edit Information
button that appears at the bottom of the screen. Modify the
name and description that appear in the text boxes and click
Save to save your changes.
To create a subfolder (or file) within a folder, select a folder
by clicking it, and then click the Add a New Folder button.
Enter a name and description in the Folder Name and Folder
Description boxes that appear at the bottom of the screen.
Click Save to save the new folder. The files don’t automatically
Chapter 3: Managing Folders
39
appear on the Manage Folders screen. Instead, a sideways triangle appears next to any folders that contain a subfolder. Click
the sideways triangle to display a list of that folder’s subfolders.
Deleting and Managing Folders
To delete a folder, click the folder name to select it and then
click the Delete a Folder button. A warning appears at the
bottom of the screen to let you know that deleting a folder is
permanent and can’t be undone. Click Yes to proceed. (You
can only delete a folder if it contains no assignments.)
If you want to make changes to the contents of a folder,
just click the Manage Folder Membership link on the right
end of that folder’s row. This brings up the Manage Folder
Membership screen, shown in Figure 3-2.
Figure 3-2: Manage the contents of a folder from this screen.
If you decide you want to move a certain assignment to a
different folder, select the check box next to that Leader’s
name and click the Add button that appears. This moves that
assignment down to the Selected Assignments area. Select the
check box next to the Leader’s name in this area and then,
in the Move Selected Assignments to Another Folder area,
highlight the new folder into which you would like to move
the selected assignment and click Save. The Default folder
temporarily stores transferred assignments that have been
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LPI Online For Dummies
accepted; you can’t delete this folder. To use the transferred
assignment, you must move the assignment to another folder
in your administration.
Managing Leader Rosters
A Leader Roster provides a one-stop shop for viewing and communicating with all your Leaders. To view the Leader Roster
(Figure 3-3), select Folders & Leaders from the Administrator
Menu, and then click the Leader Roster tab on the screen
that appears. By default, all Leaders are listed. To show only
Leaders with active assignments or Leaders who have completed their self assessments, select either of those categories
from the View drop-down list. To display only Leaders whose
first name starts with a certain letter, click that letter in the row
of letter buttons to the right of the screen.
Click a letter to display only Leaders
whose first names start with that letter.
Figure 3-3: The Leader Roster lists all your Leaders.
To contact any of your Leaders via e-mail (to nudge them to
get going on their self-assessments, for example), click the
Email link on the right side of their row. Clicking this link
brings up a small pop-up window. Just type the Subject line of
your e-mail in the Subject text box, type your message in the
Body box, and click Send. The Leader will receive the message
at his address of record.
Chapter 4
Working with Essay
Questions
In This Chapter
▶Creating essay questions
▶Deleting and adding essay questions
▶Managing changes to questions
I
n addition to the 30 standard questions that are already
a part of LPI Online, LPI 360 gives you the opportunity to
create essay questions customized to your organization or
Leaders’ needs. In this chapter, we show you how to create
and manage these customized essay questions.
Essay questions are a feature of LPI 360 only. Student LPI and
LPI Individual don’t offer essay questions.
Creating Essay Questions
As you may remember from Chapter 2, you can create an
essay question while you create an assignment. But what if
you want to create a standard question or set of questions
that you like to use frequently? Rather than going through
the tedious process of adding those question(s) every time
you create an assignment, you can create a list of customized
questions — up to 50 of them — from which you can select
when creating an assignment.
To get started creating a set of essay questions, select Manage
Essay Questions from the Administrator Menu to bring up the
Manage Essay Questions screen, shown in Figure 4-1.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Figure 4-1: Create a set of frequently-used questions here.
If you’re stumped for ideas for possible essay questions,
check out the sample essay questions at the right of this
window.
To create a new essay question, type your new question into
the Question box in the Add an Essay Question section and
then click Save. Your new question will appear in the All Essay
Questions section at the top of the page and will be available
to be added to any new assignments you create.
You can add up to five questions to any one assignment. If
you have a number of different questions that you like to use,
depending on the assignment, you can save up to 50 in the
system, and select up to five essay questions to use for a particular assignment.
Editing Essay Questions
In the middle of the Manage Essay Questions screen, you will
see a list — called All Essay Questions — of any essay questions you may have already added to the system. Any essay
questions that you created in the course of creating an assignment will be here, too.
If you want to edit an existing question, just click the question
to select it. In the Edit Essay Question area that appears at
the bottom of the screen, make any necessary changes in the
Question text box that appears.
Chapter 4: Working with Essay Questions
43
You will see a series of radio buttons beneath the text box.
These buttons enable you to control where your changes
appear — for example, only in future assignments, or in current ones as well. If you want this update to take effect only in
new assignments you create, click the Only Apply Updates to
New Assignments Using This Question radio button. On the
other hand, if you want this change to take effect in current
assignments as well as new ones, select the Apply Updates to
All Assignments Using This Question radio button.
The Only Update My Assignments Including Those Belonging
to Other Administrators button updates all your assignments
that use that question, including those that you’ve transferred
to someone else. Bear in mind, however, that when another
Administrator accepts an assignment transfer from you, he
chooses whether to accept updates from you. If he declines
to accept future updates, you can’t override his decision and
update the questions anyway.
Make your choice and click Save to save your changes.
Only assignments that have not yet been started by Leaders
and Observers can be updated. As soon as anyone starts
an assignment, the essay questions are locked and can’t be
edited.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Chapter 5
Generating and
Viewing Reports
In This Chapter
▶Understanding the types of reports available
▶Working with the different report formats
▶Requesting and retrieving reports
W
hen you’re ready to see the results of the assessments,
it’s time to generate a report. Only Administrators
have the authority to generate reports. Several different
types of reports are available, and those reports can be
produced in different formats (PDFs and comma-separated
value files, for example). In this chapter, we familiarize you
with all the different flavors of reports in LPI Online and take
you through the process of creating one and downloading it
for viewing.
Getting to Know the
Types of Reports
LPI offers three basic types of reports. They are:
✓Individual report: This type provides one-time feedback for a single Leader. If you simply want to see how
a Leader is doing according to themselves and their
Observers, this is the one to choose.
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LPI Online For Dummies
✓Comparative report: This report displays a Leader’s
ratings (both their self-measurements and Observer
feedback) over multiple assignments. This report is
for you if you want to see how certain Leaders have fared
over time.
✓Combined report: This type of report gives you a comprehensive overview of ratings from a group of Leaders
and Observers. If you want to see how a specific group
of Leaders is doing, this is the way to go.
Discovering the Different
Types of Report Formats
LPI Online reports can be generated in three different formats,
depending on what you need to do with the data:
✓PDF (portable document format): If you want to create
a document that preserves the visual presentation of the
report and can be viewed on almost any computer, or
e-mailed to a Leader, choose this one. The PDF format
allows the report to be easily e-mailed or printed.
To view a PDF, you must have Adobe Acrobat installed
on your computer. Acrobat is readily available as a free
download from www.adobe.com.
✓CSV (comma-separated value): Comma-separated value
formats are data formats in which each discrete piece
of data is separated by a comma. Use this format if you
need to import your data into Microsoft Excel or another
spreadsheet application. When you import a CSV file
into a spreadsheet application, each piece of commaseparated data will wind up in its own cell.
✓LPI Scoring software: If you plan on importing your data
into LPI Scoring software, you can use this format to
generate a CD output of your report. Administrators use
this option if they have previously used paper assessments and want to merge the data. The scoring software
is available as part of the LPI Facilitator’s Guide package.
To find out more and purchase the software, go to www.
leadershipchallenge.com and type The Leadership
Practices Inventory Facilitator’s Guide into the Product
Search box on the home page.
Chapter 5: Generating and Viewing Reports
47
Requesting Reports
After you’ve made your decisions about what kind of report
you want and what format works best for you, it’s time to get
started generating a report. From the LPI Online Secure Home
page, click the Generate Reports link under the Administrator
heading. Alternatively, if you’re already on the Administrator
Home page, choose Request Reports from the Administrator
Menu.
Only Administrators can generate reports.
However you get there, you arrive at the Request Reports
screen shown in Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1: Select the type and format of your report here.
Here’s how to generate a report:
1. Select a report type by choosing the Individual
Report, Comparative Report, or Combined Report
radio button.
See the section, “Getting to Know the Types of
Reports” if you need more information on the differences between these reports.
LPI Individual offers only Individual Reports, not
Comparative or Combined ones.
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LPI Online For Dummies
2. If you’re generating an Individual Report, you have
a choice of report formats. Select a report format by
choosing either the PDF, Comma Separated Values,
or LPI Scoring Software radio buttons.
If you’re generating a Comparative or Combined
Report, you don’t have this choice: Your report will
be in PDF format. See the previous section for a discussion of the differences of these three formats.
3. Click the Next button to move on to the Request
Reports screen, shown in Figure 5-2.
The appearance of your screen may vary slightly from
Figure 5-2 based on what type of report you request.
Figure 5-2: Select which Leaders and assignments you want to run reports
for here.
4. In the bar on the left of the screen, click the name of
the Folder that contains the assignment you want to
generate a report for.
A listing of the assignments in that folder appears. If
you have a great many assignments, you may want to
filter some out to make it easier to find the ones you
want.
Chapter 5: Generating and Viewing Reports
49
5. (Optional.) If you have a long list of Leaders and
need to filter out some assignments to make it easier
to find the one you want, choose All Assignments,
Active Assignments, or Inactive Assignments from
the View drop-down list.
6. (Optional.) You can also filter out assignments by
clicking the Calendar icons next to the Between and
And boxes.
This filters the list down to only those assignments
that fall between those dates.
7. When you’ve found the assignment(s) you want
to generate a report for, click the check box(es) to
select and click the Add Selected to Request button
at the bottom of the screen.
A Selected Assignments area appears at the bottom
of the screen listing any and all assignments you’ve
selected.
The process varies slightly for Combined Reports.
Instead of clicking the Add Selected to Request button
at the bottom of the screen, click the Next button.
Then jump ahead to Step 9 to continue.
8. If you need to select other assignments, click the
Back button (within LPI, not in your browser) to go
back and select more assignments. If you’ve chosen
all the assignments you want to include, click Next.
If you change your mind or realize you’ve selected
the wrong assignment, select the check box for the
assignment you want to remove and click the Remove
Selected button.
9. On the Reports Requested screen that appears, click
Confirm if everything looks okay; click Back to go
back and fix anything that’s wrong.
After you click Confirm, you see a confirmation screen
letting you know that your report was generated. You
will also get a long confirmation number; you may
want to jot this down, although it’s not critical for
viewing reports. In the next section, we show you how
to view your report after you’ve generated it.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Retrieving Reports
Reports may take as long as 24 hours to be generated, although
it often happens much sooner. When your report is ready to
be reviewed, you get an e-mail message notification. An alert
also shows up on your Administrator Home page. Click on View
Reports (under the Administrator heading) from the LPI Online
home page to see the View Reports screen shown in Figure 5-3.
Figure 5-3: The View Reports screen displays any reports that you have
waiting.
Viewing a PDF report
To view a report, follow these steps:
1. (Optional.) If you have many reports awaiting you,
you may want to filter down the list to more easily
find the ones you want. Use the View drop-down
list and the Between and And boxes to filter down
the list.
(See Step 5 in the preceding section if you need
detailed instructions on how to use these tools.)
Chapter 5: Generating and Viewing Reports
51
If you aren’t sure which Leader a particular report
is about, click the check box on its row. A Detail
Information area appears at the bottom of the screen,
listing details such as the Leaders featured in the
report, as well as their e-mail addresses.
If you have a lot of reports and aren’t sure which one
you want, that confirmation number you (maybe)
jotted down when you generated your report will
come in handy. Check the Report Number column to
identify the confirmation number you’re looking for.
2. When you’ve found the report you want to view,
click the Download link in its row to select it.
A dialog box appears asking you if you want to Save or
Open it.
3. Click Save, navigate to a location on your computer
where you will be able to find it easily in the Save As
dialog box that appears, and click Save again.
The report is saved as a .zip file in the location you
specified.
4. Navigate to that location and open it by doubleclicking on the file. The .zip file is named with
the report confirmation number. For example,
1247755094788.zip.
If you requested PDF format, you’ll see an Adobe
Acrobat PDF file within the .zip file. If you selected a
CSV file, you’ll see a text (.txt) file. If you did select a
CSV report, see the section, “Importing your CSV file
into Excel” in this chapter for instructions on how to
do that.
5. If you selected a report in PDF format, double-click
the file within the .zip archive to view the report
(see Figure 5-4).
You can also e-mail the .zip file to others as an e-mail
attachment, if you like, from your e-mail client, such as
Microsoft Outlook.
6. To print a PDF report, click the Print button within
Adobe Acrobat.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Figure 5-4: A report generated from LPI Online.
Importing your CSV file
into Microsoft Excel
If you requested a report in CSV format, follow the first four
steps in the “Viewing a PDF report,” section to download and
save your report. After you’ve saved the report to your hard
drive or network, you’re ready to import it into Excel or some
other spreadsheet program. To import your CSV file into
Excel, follow these steps:
1. Extract the CSV file (it’s in .txt format) from the .zip
archive by clicking and dragging the file to a folder
where you can easily find it later.
2. Open the spreadsheet that you would like to import
the data into.
3. To import data, you’ll have to get to the Select Data
Source dialog box, and how you do that varies a bit
depending on which version of Excel you’re using:
In Excel 2007, click the Data tab to select it, and
then click the From Other Sources button on the Get
External Data area. On the menu that appears, choose
From XML Data Import.
Chapter 5: Generating and Viewing Reports
53
In older versions of Excel, click the Data menu to
select it and then choose Import External Data➪
Import Data.
4. In the Select Data Source dialog box, select All Files
from the drop-down list box that reads XML Files by
default, and then navigate to wherever you stored
the CSV text file earlier. Double-click it to launch the
Text Import Wizard, shown in Figure 5-5.
Figure 5-5: Step 1 of the Text Import Wizard.
5. Make sure that the Delimited radio button is selected
(it should be by default).
6. In the Start Import at Row box, click on the arrows
to choose a row where your imported data should be
placed, or leave the default choice of 1 if that’s what
you want. Click Next to go to Step 2 of the wizard.
7. In Step 2, click the check box next to Comma and
click Next to move on. Deselect any other check
boxes that may already be selected by default.
8. Step 3 of the wizard allows you to make some fairly
advanced formatting changes. Make any changes
you need to and click Finish.
9. An Import Data dialog box appears, asking you
where you want to put the data. Click OK to accept
the default of Existing Worksheet.
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LPI Online For Dummies
The data appears in your spreadsheet. An S label indicates scores from the Leader’s self assessment; the O
indicates Observer feedback. You can now sort, filter,
or process the data in any way your heart desires (and
your spreadsheet permits).
Taking a Look at a PDF-Based
LPI Online Report
LPI Online reports display data that reflects how Leaders rank
themselves, how Observers rank them, and how these numbers average out. Page down past the cover sheet and table
of contents to get a look at the real meat of the report. Each
Leader is also assigned a number based on how frequently
they exhibit The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership as
developed by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. (See Chapter 1
for a brief overview of the Five Practices.) Scores can range
from 6 to 60 for LPI 360 and 6 to 30 for Student LPI. The Five
Practices Data Summary and Bar Graphs are an at-a-glance
view of the same data (see the Bar Graphs in Figure 5-6).
The LPI Facilitator’s Guide explains in more depth how to
interpret and apply the feedback the Leader received. For a
quick primer on the Facilitator’s Guide, see Chapter 6.
Figure 5-6: The Five Practices Bar Graphs.
Chapter 5: Generating and Viewing Reports
55
Although the names of the individual Observers remain anonymous, in LPI 360 their feedback is identified in the table by
a legend: M stands for feedback from a manager, D for direct
report, C for co-worker, and O for other. If a report doesn’t
have at least three observers, co-workers and direct reports
won’t be identified as such: They’ll all be lumped together as
Other. Managers are always identified as Managers in LPI 360.
In Student LPI, however, Observers are simply identified as
Observers and aren’t broken down into categories.
The remainder of the report breaks down the Leader’s and
Observers’ responses into The Five Practices, detailing how
each of their answers to the various questions map to the Five
Practices. Information is presented in both tabular and bar
graph form for quick comparison between self-assessment
and the assessment given by Observers.
The final page of the report assigns the Leader a percentile
ranking, showing how the Leader’s score compares to the
historical scores of the several thousands of people who have
taken this version of LPI over the years. The percentile scores
of both the self-assessment and Observer-based feedback are
plotted out on a line graph, as shown in Figure 5-7.
Figure 5-7: Percentile charts show you how a Leader stacks up to others.
This graph compares your Self score and the average of your
Observer scores to the scores of thousands of Leaders and
their Observers around the globe. The horizontal lines at the
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LPI Online For Dummies
30th and 70th percentiles divide the graph into three segments, roughly approximating a normal distribution of scores.
This allows you to note where your score on each of The Five
Leadership Practices ranks in terms of other students (that is,
the percentage of students scoring below and/or above your
own score). Although this might be interesting, the important
point is that whatever your current level of frequency is, you
will be more effective if you can engage in the practice more
than you currently do. Keep in mind that this comparison
doesn’t necessarily provide an evaluative statement about
leadership for any particular person in any specific organization or context. Because leadership is a personal skill, you
should determine what it will take for you to improve your
base level of leadership abilities regardless of where you are
relative to others.
Chapter 6
LPI Online Resources
In This Chapter
▶Discovering the Facilitator’s Guide
▶Working with the Participant Workbook and Leadership Development
Planner
▶Exploring the Leadership Challenge Web site
L
PI Online offers several in-depth resources to help you
along your leadership journey. They’re all accessible
within LPI Online itself. Some of the resources are downloadable PDFs and others are Web sites. We discuss them in detail
in this chapter.
Accessing the Resources
To access the Resources within LPI Online, simply choose My
Resources from the Administrator menu. The Resources tab
that appears (see Figure 6-1) of LPI Online contains links to
the various resources you might need: The Facilitator’s Guide,
the Participant Workbook, The Leadership Challenge Workbook
for LPI Individual (Student Workbook for SLPI), Leadership
Development Planner (Student Planner for SLPI), and the
Leadership Challenge Web site.
The resources you have access to from the Resources tab
vary depending on what your role is. Administrators can
view the Facilitator’s Guide, Participant Workbook, Leadership
Development Planner, this LPI Online For Dummies guide, and
a link to www.leadershipchallenge.com. The Facilitator’s
Guide, Participant Workbook, For Dummies guide, and the
Leadership Development Planner are all PDFs available for
download. Your computer must have Adobe Reader installed
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LPI Online For Dummies
to view these documents. If you don’t already have it installed
(many computers do), you can download it for free by clicking
the Get Adobe Reader link at www.adobe.com. In the next few
sections, we examine each of these resources.
Figure 6-1: Links to LPI resources can be found here.
Exploring the Leadership
Challenge Web Site
For more information on The Leadership Challenge, the
leadership development program by Jim Kouzes and Barry
Posner, visit the Leadership Challenge Web site, shown in
Figure 6-2. (You can simply click the link on the LPI Online
Resources page, or point your Web browser directly to www.
leadershipchallenge.com). You can view a short video,
Are Your Leaders Ready to Lead?, learn about live events, sign
up for a monthly e-newsletter, and find a comprehensive listing of print, video, and Web-based leadership products based
on the Kouzes and Posner approach.
The site also contains a great deal of background information
about the history and development of the leadership approach
behind LPI, as well as the research that it is grounded on. You
can also find out about upcoming Leadership Challenge events
and conferences at the Web site. And in the Ask the Expert section, you can pose questions to experts in the field of leadership
development, and read an archive of past questions and their
Chapter 6: LPI Online Resources
59
responses. Dig around the site: There’s a lot of information
here. You can read about Leadership Challenge clients and case
studies, or sign up for The Leadership Challenge newsletter.
Figure 6-2: The Leadership Challenge Web site.
Examining the Facilitator’s
Guide
The Facilitator’s Guide (see Figure 6-3) is for Administrators
charged with LPI Online assignments in a workshop or other
training setting.
Figure 6-3: The Facilitator’s Guide is available as a downloadable PDF.
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LPI Online For Dummies
The three parts of this 250-plus page document contain a
wealth of information about everything you need to know to
conduct a leadership workshop with LPI Online:
✓Part 1, Preparing to Conduct LPI Training: This part
focuses on the background information you need in the
LPI philosophy. It discusses Kouzes and Posner’s overall
theory of leadership and details the Five Practices of
Leadership that LPI is built around. It covers administering LPI — everything from assembling your LPI team to
creating feedback reports. This part also contains sample
letters and memos to participants that you can use as-is
or adapt to your own needs.
✓Part 2, Conducting the LPI Workshop: Part 2 contains a
walkthrough of a typical LPI Workshop, as well as scripts
for explaining the Five Practices and the Kouzes and
Posner theory of leadership to your workshop participants. Part 2 shows you how to help your participants
interpret and understand their leadership reports. It also
shows how to work with participants to develop an action
plan to make the most of what they learn from LPI: What
they need to do in the short-term as well as long-term to
continue the development of their leadership skills.
✓Part 3, Appendixes: The Appendixes contain a variety
of useful information that may or may not apply to the
workshop you’re conducting. Check them out to see
which ones may be helpful for you. Appendix B, for example, contains master versions of all the visuals you need
to conduct an LPI workshop. Appendix D provides a list
of suggested open-ended questions for your workshop.
(LPI Online provides the Essay Question functionality for
just such exploration.) Appendix E covers administering
LPI multiple times, and the value of repeated testing to
establish benchmarks over time.
Student LPI comes with its own Facilitator’s Guide. Here’s a
rundown on what it contains:
✓Chapter 1: Introduction
✓Chapter 2: Origin of the Student Leadership Practices
Inventory
✓Chapter 3: The Five Practices of Exemplary Student
Leadership
Chapter 6: LPI Online Resources
✓Chapter 4: Preparing for the Student LPI Feedback
Workshop
✓Chapter 5: Workshop Process Details
✓Chapter 6: Design and Follow-Up Options
61
Appendixes contain the personal-best leadership experience activity, masters for visuals and handouts, checklists of
actions for Meeting the Leadership Challenge, comparative
data for Student LPI, and scoring software instructions for
those using it.
Getting to Know the
Participant Workbook
After you’ve taken LPI Online, you may be wondering, “Now
what? What to do with all the feedback I’ve gotten?” The
Participant Workbook is designed to help you utilize what
your LPI results tell you in the most effective way possible. It
lays out ten steps for you to follow to make the most of your
feedback. They include such pointers as “Examine Your First
Impressions,” “Find Patterns and Listen for Messages,” and
“Overcome Barriers and Concerns.” The steps contain several
exercises and questionnaires to help you understand, analyze,
and parse out the meaning of the feedback you’ve received.
The Student LPI Participant Workbook is very similar to the one
for LPI 360 and LPI Individual.
Checking Out the Leadership
Development Planner
The Leadership Development Planner is another valuable
resource aimed at leaders who have already taken the LPI.
Whereas the Participant Workbook is designed for Leaders
who are currently enrolled or have recently finished an LPI
training session, the Leadership Development Planner takes a
longer view. It helps you develop a long-term plan for developing your leadership skills over many years. You can find
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LPI Online For Dummies
leadership development activities that best suit your style,
write a step-by-step plan for improving your skills, and test
your progress over time.
In addition, Part 2 of the Development Planner provides a list
of 100 suggested ways to become a better leader, as well as a
recommended reading list, among other resources.
The Student LPI Development Planner is very similar to the one
for LPI 360 and LPI Individual.
Getting to Know the Leadership
Challenge Workbook
Purchasers of LPI Individual receive The Leadership Challenge
Workbook. The workbook is a hands-on, project-based guide
that helps readers put The Five Practices into action by working through several activities and worksheets. The workbook
supports success in three ways:
✓Reflection: Users think about their approaches to
leadership.
✓Application: Users learn how to apply The Five Practices
to all their projects.
✓Implications: Users record what they’ve learned about
themselves, their team, their organization, and their
project.
Chapter 7
Managing Accounts
and Tokens
In This Chapter
▶Transferring tokens
▶Retrieving tokens
▶Looking at transaction history
I
n LPI Online, tokens are a way of managing licensing,
which is a fancy way of saying that tokens help ensure that
the only people who have access to LPI Online are the ones
who should have access to it, either because they’ve paid for
it themselves, or because someone who has paid for it has
transferred tokens to them. Administrators need to know
how to transfer tokens to others and how to retrieve tokens
that have been transferred to them. In addition, the person in
charge of purchasing LPI Online for your organization has to
retrieve tokens from Wiley or the reseller they purchased it
from. We cover these major tasks in this chapter.
Discovering Token Management
All things token-related in LPI Online are handled through
Token Management. You can quickly access Token
Management at any time by clicking the Tokens link on the
upper right of your screen (see Figure 7-1). If you have a balance of tokens remaining in your account, the number of
unspent tokens you have appears in parentheses next to the
Tokens link. This link remains at the top of the screen in LPI
Online no matter what you’re doing, so you’re always just a
click away from Token Management (see Figure 7-2).
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LPI Online For Dummies
See how many tokens you have.
Figure 7-1: Click the Tokens link to access Token Management.
Figure 7-2: Token Management.
Token Management has four tabs: Summary, Detail Listing,
Transfer, and Transactions History. From these tabs you can
see a summary and detailed info of how many tokens you
have, what transfers may be pending, and a history of any
token transactions you may have made. And of course, you
can also transfer tokens to another Administrator, which we
cover next.
Chapter 7: Managing Accounts and Tokens
65
Transferring Tokens
You may find yourself needing to transfer tokens that you’ve
purchased to another Administrator. Perhaps you’re in
charge of purchasing LPI for the entire company, but you
want to delegate the task of actually administering assignments to Administrators throughout the company, for example. In that case, you can purchase LPI and transfer tokens
to those Administrators, letting them handle the day-to-day
administration.
You can transfer tokens only to another Administrator —
not to other Leaders or Observers. If the person that tokens
are being transferred to isn’t set up to be an Administrator,
the transfer won’t work. To add Administrator access to a
Leader’s account, log in to the Leader’s LPI account and click
the Account Info link at the upper right of the screen (it’s
right next to the Tokens link). This brings up the Leader’s
user profile. Select the Yes radio button next to Will You
Be Administering LPI Online Assignments to Others? at the
bottom of the screen. Click Next to bring up a confirmation
screen. Read over the information to make sure everything is
correct and then click Save. The Leader gets a message letting
him know that his account has been updated successfully. He
can now have tokens transferred to him.
Here’s how to transfer tokens:
1. Bring up Token Management by clicking the Tokens
link at the upper right of any window in LPI Online.
2. Click the Transfer tab to bring up the first Token
Transfer screen, as shown in Figure 7-3.
3. In the Change Product drop-down list, you must
select the LPI Online product you’re working with:
LPI 360, Student LPI, or LPI Individual.
The box is blank by default, so you have to pick something before you see any tokens available for transfer.
After you select a product from the drop-down, any
tokens that you have available to transfer for that
product appear in the Token Summary area, as shown
in Figure 7-4.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Select the product you want to work with here.
Figure 7-3: The Token Transfer screen.
Tokens are broken down by their expiration dates.
Figure 7-4: Token Summary shows you how many tokens you have
available to transfer.
All tokens expire one year after purchase. By looking
to the right of the Token Summary area, you can see
how many tokens you have set to expire and when
(for example, tokens are classified as due to expire in
less than 5 days, less than 30 days, and so on).
Chapter 7: Managing Accounts and Tokens
67
4. Decide which tokens you want to search for (based
on expiration date) and enter those parameters in the
drop-down boxes labeled Expires Between and And.
If you have tokens that are due to expire in less than five
days, you should select 0 Days and 5 Days, respectively,
in the drop-down list boxes. If you have, say, some
tokens that are expiring in less than 5 days and others
that are expiring in less than 30 days, select 0 Days and
30 Days in the Expires Between and And boxes.
It obviously makes sense to use tokens that are due to
expire soon before you use those that won’t be expiring for some time. LPI Online automatically assigns the
oldest tokens first when assigning Leaders.
5. Enter the number of tokens you would like to search
for in the Quantity box and then click Search.
One Leader taking one assignment costs one token.
Any tokens that match your search parameters are
returned, as shown in Figure 7-5.
Select these check boxes to choose tokens to transfer.
Figure 7-5: These tokens match the search parameters that were entered.
6. Select the tokens you want to transfer by clicking the
check boxes next to their token IDs. To select all the
tokens that are returned, click the check box at the
top of the list.
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LPI Online For Dummies
7. Click the Add button.
The tokens you add appear in the Token Summary box
to the right of the screen. If you make a mistake while
selecting tokens, you can remove them from Token
Summary by selecting their check box and clicking the
Remove button.
8. If you need to select more tokens, select them from
the Search results and click Add to move them to
Token Summary. You can also repeat the search
process outlined in Steps 4 to 5 to search for more
tokens.
A grayed-out check box indicates that a particular
token has already been added to Token Summary and
can’t be added again.
9. When you’re finished adding tokens to Token
Summary, click the Next button.
The next step requires you to indicate which
Administrator you want to transfer tokens to.
10. Select either the By ID or By Email radio buttons,
type the Administrator’s ID or e-mail address
(whichever you chose) into the text box, and click
Search.
The Search function returns the Administrator who
matches the e-mail address you entered, as shown in
Figure 7-6. If no results return, verify that you entered
the correct e-mail address and that the person in
question is set up to be an Administrator, or that they
checked Yes in response to the Administrator question in their user profile.
11. Select the radio button next to the Administrator’s
ID that you want to transfer tokens to and click Next.
12. Look over the confirmation screen that appears; if
everything’s okay, click the Confirm button. If not,
click Back to return and fix it.
Chapter 7: Managing Accounts and Tokens
69
Figure 7-6: Select the Administrator whom you want to transfer tokens to.
If you check the Tokens link in the upper right of your
screen, you’ll see that the tokens have been debited
from your account. The Administrator you transferred
tokens to gets an e-mail letting him know that tokens
are awaiting his acceptance (Figure 7-7).
Figure 7-7: The Administrator you transfer to gets an e-mail notification.
It’s now up to that Administrator to retrieve the tokens that
were transferred to him — we cover that in the next section.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Retrieving Tokens Transferred
from Another Administrator
Transferring tokens to another Administrator is only half the
battle — the receiving Administrator then needs to retrieve
them. Here’s how to retrieve tokens that have been transferred to you:
1. Log on to LPI and click the Tokens link in the upper
right of your screen.
See Chapter 1 if you need help logging in.
2. In the Token Inbox, you see a listing of any tokens
waiting to be accepted (see Figure 7-8). Click the
pending transfer.
Figure 7-8: The Token Inbox displays token transfers waiting to be
accepted.
3. Click the Accept button in the pop-up window that
appears.
The transaction disappears from your Token Inbox
and the accepted tokens now show up in your balance
(Figure 7-9).
Chapter 7: Managing Accounts and Tokens
Of tokens and resellers
The new LPI Online platform has
opened the doors for resellers to
purchase LPI Online from Wiley and
then resell it as part of their business.
Resellers (say, for example, leadership consultants who frequently
conduct LPI workshops or bookstores
who will sell tokens directly to
students) can purchase tokens and
then resell them to others. Resellers
don’t usually administer LPI Online.
For more on becoming an LPI Online
reseller, contact an LPI Online
Leadership Consultant. To do so,
e-mail leadership@wiley.com
or call 866-888-5159.
The accepted tokens appear in your account.
Figure 7-9: The tokens are now available for you to use.
Retrieving Tokens Purchased
from Wiley or a Reseller
If you’re the person who initially purchased LPI Online for
your organization, you will have to retrieve tokens from the
organization who sold it to you. (You may have bought LPI
Online from Wiley, who owns LPI Online, or from a reseller.)
71
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LPI Online For Dummies
If you purchased LPI Online from Wiley, you will be given an
eCore ID and a Purchase ID. Enter your code in the appropriate box on the right of the Token Management Summary
screen and click Retrieve. (Refer to Figure 7-9 to see these
boxes. To access the Token Management Summary, click the
Tokens link at the upper right of any LPI Online screen, and
make sure the Summary tab is selected.)
You only need to enter your eCore ID and Purchase ID once.
Every subsequent purchase is linked automatically.
If you purchased LPI Online from a licensed reseller, they
should provide you with a PIN number. Enter the PIN number
in the box under Reseller on the Token Management Summary
screen and click Retrieve.
Chapter 8
Leaders
In This Chapter
▶Taking LPI Self
▶Setting up Observers
L
eaders are what LPI Online is all about. The LPI
Assessment is a tool for measuring leadership skills and
collecting feedback from people who know Leaders best:
Observers who work with them or for them. Leaders have
two major functions within LPI. They must take the LPI Self
assessment to gauge their own behavior, and they must select
Observers who will then chime in with their perspectives. We
cover both tasks in this chapter.
Getting Ready for the
LPI Self Assessment
Before a Leader can take the LPI Self assessment, she has to
register and log in. (Chapter 1 has a detailed refresher on
how to do this.) In a nutshell, she clicks the Register Now
button on the LPI Online public page (www.lpionline.com),
accepts the Terms of Service, and then fills out a form that
asks for basic information such as name, e-mail address, and
so on. During the registration process, the Leader creates a
password. Back at the LPI Online public page, she enters her
username and the password to log in.
After a Leader logs in for the first time, she sees more legalese
in the form of a license agreement. Clicking Continue accepts
it and moves on. This brings up the User Profile, which is
basically all the personal information the Leader just entered
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LPI Online For Dummies
(name, e-mail address, and so on). If the Leader needs to
make any corrections, she can do so here; if not, she clicks
Next. The next screen confirms that the User Profile has been
updated successfully, and contains a link to the LPI Online
Homepage. Clicking this link goes to the nerve center of all LPI
Online activities. (In the future, when a Leader logs on to LPI,
she goes directly to this home page after she enters her username and password.)
Working with the Leader
Home Page
On the LPI Online Secure Home page, the Leader clicks the
Take Assessment link under the Leader heading to get started.
This brings up a Leader Home page (Figure 8-1), which allows
Leaders to do the three basic tasks they need to do:
Figure 8-1: Manage Leader tasks from the Leader home page.
✓Take the LPI Self Assessment: Answer a 30-item inventory about the frequency of her leadership behaviors.
✓Manage the Observers who will be assessing the
Leader: Select and set up those Observers who will then
be giving their feedback on the Leader.
Chapter 8: Leaders
75
✓Access Resources: LPI Online offers a number of leadership resources in the form of downloadable PDFs or
links to Web sites. Clicking Resources allows Leaders
to access them. (For more specifics on LPI Online
Resources, see Chapter 6.)
Taking the LPI Self Assessment
On the Leader home page, Leaders click the Take Assessment
link. Before a Leader begins the assessment, she is asked to
fill out a brief demographic survey. This survey is anonymous
and simply adds to the pool of data that LPI draws from to
create and evaluate assessments. (These questions can be
answered at any time. If a Leader wants to, she can click Skip
to pass over them now. To take them another time, she simply
has to click the Submit Demographic Info link on the Leader
Home page.)
The demographic questions are anonymous — your name or
organization’s name is never associated with the information
you provide. The information is for research purposes only,
to improve future versions of LPI, and is only shared with the
product’s creators, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner.
Four demographic questions appear before users get into
the LPI items. The rest of the demographic questions appear
after. To answer the first four demographic questions, the
Leader makes the selections that best describe her and clicks
Next to move on. The next questions involve more general
questions about the quality of life at her job: Are you productive?, Do you feel like you’re making a difference?, and so on.
The Leader answers each question by making a selection from
the drop-down list. When she’s answered each question, she
clicks the Submit button.
Next, she comes to an Assessment Tips screen that offers
her some pointers to keep in mind when she’s answering the
questions. She is asked to rate how often she engages in a
particular behavior on a scale of 1 to 10 (or 1 to 5 for Student
LPI), with 1 being almost never and 10 (or 5 for SLPI) being
almost always. It will be most helpful if Leaders are honest
and realistic.
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LPI Online For Dummies
After a Leader reads the Assessment Tips, she clicks Start
Assessment to get going. The first ten questions appear on the
next screen (Figure 8-2). Leaders should read each question
carefully and decide how often they engage in that particular
behavior. A Leader selects answers from the drop-down list
beneath each question. When she has answered all the questions on the first page, she clicks Next to go on to the next
page. There are 30 items and she can expect to take about 10
to 15 minutes. When she’s finished, she clicks Submit.
Figure 8-2: The first page of the LPI Self Assessment.
The Leader then sees a screen notifying her that she’s successfully completed the assignment. The answers are compiled into a report that the LPI Online Administrator will be
able to view. But a Leader still has one major task: Selecting
Observers to rate her performance.
Setting Up Observers
Right after a Leader has finished taking the LPI Self
Assessment, she sees a confirmation screen that contains
a link to Manage Observers. Otherwise, she can click the
Manage Observers link from the Leader Home page, or from
the LPI Online Home page that she sees when she first logs in.
(She can click the Manage Assignment tab at the upper left of
Chapter 8: Leaders
77
her screen to return to the Leader Home page at any time.)
However she gets there, clicking the Manage Observers link
brings up the screen in Figure 8-3.
LPI Individual doesn’t contain Observer functionality.
Figure 8-3: Add Observers here.
LPI recommends that Leaders add their manager, all their
direct reports, and at least three co-workers or other
Observers. Student Leaders should aim to add up to seven
to ten Observers who have closely witnessed their leadership behaviors. These may be teachers, coaches, teammates,
fellow club members, or co-workers. To get started adding
Observers, Leaders click the Add a New Observer button.
This brings up an area at the bottom of the screen for adding
Observer information. To add an Observer, Leaders follow
these steps:
1. Type the person’s e-mail address in the Enter
Observer’s Email Address box and click Search.
If the person that is entered is already registered
with LPI Online, the Leader sees a message that reads
There Are Observers in the System with That Email
Address and a list of any Observers that have the
address.
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LPI Online For Dummies
2. The Leader selects the radio button next to the
Observer she wants to add. To add a new Observer
with that same e-mail address, she selects the Define
New Observer with Same Email radio button instead.
3. In the Relationship drop-down box, choose what
relationship the Observer has to the Leader: Direct
Report, Co-Worker, Manager, or Other.
4. (Optional.) If the Observer whose e-mail address was
entered wasn’t already in the system, a series of text
boxes appear at the bottom of the screen: First and
Last Name, Telephone Number, Email Address, and
a Relationship drop-down list box. The Leader fills
in these boxes with the Observer’s information and
clicks Next.
5. Review the information and click Confirm if it’s correct; otherwise click Cancel and go back to try again.
After the Leader clicks Confirm, the Observer is added
and he is taken back to the Manage Observers screen,
where he can click Add a New Observer to start the
process of adding the next Observer.
6. Repeat the process until you’ve added all your
Observers.
Managing Observers
To remind Observers to take their part of the assessment,
the Leader can go to the Manage Observers screen (by clicking the Manage Observers link on either the Leader Home
page or the LPI Online home page). Clicking the Remind
Observers button brings up a pop-up box with a boilerplate
reminder message. Clicking OK sends the message to all your
Observers. (Reminders go only to those Observers who have
yet to complete the survey.) Leaders can contact Observers
individually by clicking the Email link in the row containing
their name. In the pop-up window that appears, the Leader
types the subject and body of the message in the appropriate
boxes and clicks Send. Remind sends a reminder to take the
survey as well as a link to it; Email sends only the information
typed into the subject and body areas.
Chapter 9
Observers
In This Chapter
▶Getting invited to be an Observer
▶Taking the assessment
▶Observing more than one Leader
O
bservers are the people who know Leaders best. They
can be their managers, their direct reports, or their coworkers. Whoever they are, they’re uniquely qualified to give
input on a Leader’s leadership style. In this chapter, we cover
being invited to be an Observer, taking the LPI Online assessment, and more.
Observers are only relevant in LPI 360 and Student LPI.
LPI Individual users assess themselves: They won’t have
Observers assessing their skills.
Getting Invited to
Be an Observer
When someone is invited to be an Observer, he gets a message like the one shown in Figure 9-1.
Clicking the link in the e-mail message takes the Observer
to the LPI Online public page. If the Observer has registered
before, he simply needs to log in. If he hasn’t, he’ll have to
register and then log in. (See Chapter 1 for instructions on
how to register and log in.) If you’ve already registered for LPI
Online as a Leader or an Administrator, you can use the same
username and password to log in as an Observer. The system
recognizes who you are by your username.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Figure 9-1: Congratulations! You’ve been chosen to be an Observer.
Taking the Assessment
as an Observer
After the Observer logs in, he sees the Terms and Conditions
page. He clicks Accept to move past it, and then arrives at
the LPI Online Home page (Figure 9-2). Under the Observer
heading, the Observer clicks the Take Assessment link to get
started.
Figure 9-2: The LPI Online Home page for an Observer.
The home page in Figure 9-2 is the home page for someone
who is an Observer only, but some folks may have additional
roles such as Leader. If that’s the case, your home page will
Chapter 9: Observers
81
look slightly different — no worries. As long as you see an
Observer section with a Take Assessment link under it, you’re
good to go.
Clicking the Take Assessment link takes the viewer to the
Observer Home page, shown in Figure 9-2. If an Observer is
serving as an Observer for more than one Leader, they will all
be listed here. The Requesting Leader column displays which
Leader each assignment is for.
To contact the Administrator or Leader directly, an Observer
can do so from the Observer Home page by clicking the Email
Admin or Email Leader link.
The Observer needs to identify which Leader he wants to
take the assessment for and click the Take LPI Observer link
in that column. He’ll be asked to complete a demographic
survey, if he hasn’t done so already. Four demographic questions appear before users get into the LPI items. The rest of
the demographic questions appear after. To answer the first
four demographic questions, the Leader makes the selections that best describe him and clicks Next to move on. The
Observer clicks Next to move on to the remaining questions,
which involve the quality of life at his job: Are you productive?, Do you feel like you’re making a difference?, and so on.
He answers each question by making a selection from the
drop-down list. After he’s answered each question, he clicks
the Submit button.
After answering the questions, the Observer clicks Next to get
to the assessment.
The first page contains instructions for taking the assessment.
Observers are asked to rate how often they see a Leader
engaging in a specific behavior on a scale of 1 to 10 (or 1 to 5
for Student LPI). (One is almost never; 10 is almost always.)
Basically, Observers should be honest and realistic. They
have to respond to 30 items and they can expect the assessment to take about 10 to 15 minutes.
After the Observer has read the instructions, he clicks the
Start Assessment button to get going. Ten questions appear
on each page, as shown in Figure 9-3. Observers answer each
question by selecting a response from the drop-down list next
to each question. When they have answered all the questions
on a page, they click Next to proceed.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Observers often wonder how to answer questions that they
think aren’t applicable to them. LPI Online doesn’t offer a
“not applicable” choice because all the questions are applicable to Leaders. Instead, Observers should focus on the
frequency of the behavior. For an in-depth discussion of how
Observers should answer questions that they think aren’t
applicable to them, see www.leadershipchallenge.com/
go/notapplicable.
Figure 9-3: A page of questions for an Observer.
The first 30 items represent the standard part of the LPI assessment that all Observers take. The next part of the assessment
contains any essay questions that the Administrator may have
decided to add to the standard assessment. (Not all LPI assessments will have essay questions.) If yours does, read the essay
question and type an answer into the text box. Observers click
Submit to submit their assessments when they’re finished. Be
sure to finish your session within 45 minutes, or you will be
logged out of the system.
If an Observer has more assessments to take for other Leaders,
he can click the Observer Home Page button to go back and
start the assessment over again for other Leaders. To do so, he
just has to identify the next Leader whose assessment he’d like
to do and click the Take LPI Observer link in that row.
Chapter 10
Ten Most Frequently
Asked Questions
(and Their Answers)
In This Chapter
▶Understanding LPI roles
▶Figuring out token and assignment transfers
▶Changing your LPI Online email address
L
ike every good For Dummies book, this one finishes up
with a Top Ten list. In this chapter, we explore the ten
questions that users of LPI Online most frequently ask. And
hey, it wouldn’t be a For Dummies book if we didn’t give you
the answers too, right?
What’s an Assignment?
In LPI Online, assignment means something a little different
than solving a bunch of algebra equations or writing an essay
about symbolism in Lord of the Flies. Instead, an assignment
is the bread and butter of LPI Online: It’s the assessment of
a Leader, taking that assessment one time. Assignments consist of at least 30 questions that are standard for all Leaders
participating in LPI Online. In addition, in LPI 360, when an
Administrator creates an assignment, she can add essay
questions customized for that Leader or assignment.
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LPI Online For Dummies
Leaders take the assessment about themselves (in other
words, they answer all the standard questions and any essay
questions that their Administrator may have added). Leaders
then invite Observers to answer the same questions about
them. Administrators, Leaders, and Observers are all roles in
LPI Online, which brings us to the next section . . .
What Are the Different Roles
in LPI Online, and Do I Have
a Login for Each Role?
LPI Online has three basic roles:
✓Administrators: Administrators have the most powerful
role in LPI. They create assignments, manage tokens, and
generate and print reports.
✓Leaders: Leaders are the people whose leadership behaviors are being assessed in LPI Online. In LPI Individual,
Leaders simply assess themselves by taking an LPI Self
assessment. In LPI 360 and Student LPI, Leaders assess
themselves and then select a group of several Observers
to provide them feedback.
✓Observers: Observers are the people selected by Leaders
to provide feedback about them. Observers can be the
Leaders’ manager, direct report, co-worker, or someone
else. For the Student LPI, Observers may be teachers,
coaches, teammates, or fellow club members. Observers
take the same assessment (30 standard questions plus
any essay questions that have been added) that the
Leaders take about themselves.
The latest version of LPI Online offers single sign-on, which
means that users have only one login, no matter how many
roles they have. Even if you are an Administrator, Leader, and
Observer, you still have just one user ID and password that
you use to manage all those roles.
Chapter 10: Ten Most Frequently Asked Questions
85
What Is an LPI Online Token?
Tokens are a way of controlling who gets access to LPI Online.
One Leader taking one assignment is charged one token.
Tokens are handled through Token Management in LPI Online.
To access Token Management, where you can buy, transfer,
or accept tokens, click the Tokens link at the top right of any
LPI Online page. Chapter 7 covers managing tokens in detail.
What Does “Transferring
Tokens” Mean?
Administrators can transfer tokens to another Administrator.
For example, if you are in charge of purchasing LPI Online for
a large organization, you may want to put multiple department-level administrators throughout the company in charge
of the actual day-to-day administration of the assignments
for their departments. In that case, you can purchase LPI
Online, receive a number of tokens, and then transfer them to
Administrators as you need to.
To transfer tokens, you have to access Token Management
by clicking the Tokens link at the top right of any LPI Online
page. For a detailed walkthrough of how to transfer tokens,
see Chapter 7.
What Does “Transferring
Assignments” Mean?
All assignments are associated with a particular
Administrator. Sometimes, you may want to transfer an
assignment to a different Administrator; for example,
because the original Administrator leaves the organization.
To access the screen you use to transfer an assignment,
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LPI Online For Dummies
select Manage My Assignments from the Administrator Menu
on the Administrator Home page. For a detailed explanation
of how to transfer an assignment, see Chapter 2.
Can I Upload Leader Information
from a Spreadsheet When I’m
Creating an Assignment?
Yep, you sure can. Create a spreadsheet in Excel or another
spreadsheet program listing the names and e-mail addresses
of your Leaders. Place the Leaders’ e-mail addresses in
column A; the Leaders’ first and last names should go in columns B and C, respectively. Each Leader should appear in
her own row. Then when you create your assignment, select
the Upload Text File of Leader Data radio button in the first
Create Assignment screen. Continue with the process of creating an assignment as usual. (If you need a refresher on how to
create an assignment, Chapter 2 gives you the lowdown.)
When you get to the Add Leaders screen, click the Browse
button next to Filename to navigate to where you saved the
spreadsheet file containing your Leader info. Select the file,
click Open, and then, back in the Add Leaders screen, click
Next to move on. As long as your data was formatted correctly, your Leader info should now be added to the assignment in a table format.
Can I Change My E-mail Address
within LPI Online?
Yes, you can. Log in to LPI Online and access your user profile by clicking the Account Info link at the top right of your
screen. In the editable form that appears, type your new
e-mail address in the Email Address field. When you’re finished, click Next to go to the Confirmation screen. Give it
a look-see to make sure that everything is okay and then
click Save.
Chapter 10: Ten Most Frequently Asked Questions
87
What’s the Deal with Essay
Questions, and How Do
They Work?
In LPI 360, when an Administrator creates an assignment,
she has the option of adding essay questions to the standard
30 questions that every LPI Online assignment contains.
Administrators can add up to five essay questions to an
assignment. After the Observers are finished answering the
30 standard questions, they will have an opportunity to type
a free-form answer to each essay question into a text box.
For more on taking assignments as a Leader or Observer, see
Chapters 8 and 9. Essay questions are not available in Student
LPI or LPI Individual.
What’s the Difference Between
LPI 360, LPI Individual, and
Student LPI?
LPI 360 relies on a combination of self-assessment and
Observer feedback. In other words, a Leader rates herself and
then selects Observers (her co-workers, direct reports, manager, and others) to rate her as well. Administrators can then
generate reports comparing how the Leader ranked herself
versus how Observers ranked her.
LPI Individual consists only of a self-assessment. The Leader
answers the questions and no third party Observers give
feedback.
Student LPI is much like the other flavors of LPI Online,
except that it’s aimed at students and young adults. It
includes the SLPI Self assessment and SLPI-Observer assessment, which is filled out by Observers in order to compare
the student’s own view of her leadership behaviors with
those of others. Student LPI is appropriate for high school
88
LPI Online For Dummies
and college undergraduates with no formal business experience. (Students in graduate-level or MBA programs who have
real-world work experience are probably better served by
using LPI 360.)
What Is the Leader’s
Experience Like?
When an Administrator creates an assignment that she wants
a Leader to complete, the Leader receive an e-mail letting her
know that an assignment is waiting. She clicks the link in the
e-mail to go to the LPI Online registration and login page. If
the Leader is already registered, she can simply log in; otherwise, she’ll need to register. (See Chapter 1 for a detailed
walkthrough of how to register and log in to LPI Online.)
It takes about 10 to 15 minutes for most Leaders to work
their way through the 30 items (perhaps a little longer if the
Administrator has added essay questions to the assignment).
For more details on Leaders in LPI Online, see Chapter 8.
What Is the Observer’s
Experience Like?
Observers have just one task to do in LPI Online: Take the
assessment giving their feedback on the Leader’s skills.
When a Leader designates someone as an Observer, the
Observer receives an e-mail letting her know that an assignment is waiting. She clicks the link in the e-mail to go to the
LPI Online registration and login page. If the Observer is
already registered, she can simply log in; otherwise, she’ll
need to register. (See Chapter 1 for a detailed walkthrough of
how to register and log in to LPI Online.)
It takes about 10 to 15 minutes for most Observers to work
their way through the 30 items (maybe a little longer if the
Administrator has added essay questions to the assignment).
For more details on Observers in LPI Online, see Chapter 9.
spine=
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asier!
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Get up to speed on
using LPI Online
LPI Online is the Web-based application for the LPI
(Leadership Practices Inventory). LPI is an assessment
tool created by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner as
a valid and reliable method for measuring the frequency
of leadership behaviors. This book is primarily designed
to help LPI Online Administrators understand how to use
the technology.
• Administer LPI Online — it’s not hard, but you
may have some questions
• Which version works for you — LPI has a few
different flavors, including LPI 360, LPI Individual,
and Student LPI
Open the book and find:
• Tips on creating new
assignments
• How to share assignments
• Information on tokens and
reports
e
n
i
l
n
O
I
LP
• The lowdown on folders
and files
• Different sources of
information on LPI Online
• Create and manage assignments — assignments are one of the most important parts of
LPI Online, this book helps you figure out how to
work with them
• Get insider tips — find out how to use reports,
tokens, and so on
Learn to:
• Become an expert LPI Online
Administrator
Discover more at www.leadershipchallenge.com
Go to Dummies.com®
for videos, step-by-step photos,
how-to articles, or to shop!
• Help leaders gather and interpret
feedback
• Use the new features available on
the recently released upgrade
• Decide which version of LPI
is best for you and your
organization
Linda Morris is a freelance writer who
has worked on dozens of books in the
For Dummies series. The LPI Online
development team is a dedicated group
of Wiley employees, working with LPI
Online since it first launched in 2002.
Book not for resale
ISBN: 978-0-470-57096-8
Linda Morris
with the LPI Online Development Team