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60 free Leadership trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fifty-three leadership trivia questions with answers, written for team meetings, corporate training icebreakers and anyone who enjoys the history of how people lead. Half the set covers famous leaders: Cincinnatus handing back power after sixteen days, Shackleton's 720-mile lifeboat voyage, Mandela on Robben Island, Merkel, Thatcher, Mary Barra and Satya Nadella. The other half covers the ideas: Maslow's hierarchy, Tuckman's forming-storming-norming model, the Peter principle, servant leadership, OKRs, Six Sigma and the golden circle. There are also a few questions on the coaches whose methods crossed over into business, from John Wooden's Pyramid of Success to Vince Lombardi, and on the classic books, from Machiavelli and Sun Tzu to Covey, Collins and Sinek. Difficulty runs from easy to genuinely tricky, so a mixed group will find both quick wins and arguments. Every answer is checked against a cited encyclopaedia page. Play it free here, see your score, and share it with the colleague who keeps quoting Drucker.
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Q 01The phrase 'servant leadership' was popularised by a 1970 essay, 'The Servant as Leader'. Who wrote it?
Robert K. Greenleaf
Greenleaf credited Hermann Hesse's 1932 novel Journey to the East, in which the party's humble servant turns out to be its real leader, as his inspiration.
Q 02According to the Peter principle, employees in a hierarchy tend to be promoted until they reach what?
Their level of incompetence
Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull added a corollary: in time every post tends to be filled by someone unable to do it. Hull called the study of hierarchies 'hierarchiology'.
Q 03Parkinson's law, first published in The Economist in 1955, states that work expands to fill what?
The time available for it
C. Northcote Parkinson wrote it after a Royal Commission on the Civil Service; a later corollary holds that data expands to fill the storage available.
Q 04At which business school did Douglas McGregor develop his Theory X and Theory Y models of workforce motivation?
MIT Sloan
Theory X assumes people dislike work and must be coerced; Theory Y assumes they seek responsibility. Both were rooted in Maslow's motivation theory.
Q 05Bruce Tuckman's 1965 model of team development runs forming, storming, norming and then which stage?
Performing
Tuckman later added a fifth stage, adjourning; in his original paper only half the studies he reviewed showed a distinct conflict phase.
Q 06James MacGregor Burns, who coined transformational leadership, was also a biographer of what?
US presidents
Burns held that transformational leaders and followers 'make each other advance to a higher level of morality and motivation', and saw it as the opposite of transactional leadership.
Q 07Which Scottish essayist behind the 'great man theory' wrote that history is 'but the biography of great men'?
Thomas Carlyle
His hero types ranged from Odin as divinity to Napoleon as king; critics like Herbert Spencer replied that great men are products of their societies.
Q 08Which common term did management thinker Peter Drucker coin in 1959?
Knowledge worker
Drucker later called knowledge-worker productivity the next frontier of management; his 1954 book The Practice of Management had already popularised 'management by objectives'.
Q 09In Abraham Maslow's 1943 hierarchy of needs, which need sits at the very top?
Self-actualization
Maslow's paper 'A Theory of Human Motivation' listed five sets of needs; the famous pyramid diagram was drawn by others, not by Maslow himself.
Q 10Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence subtitle claimed it can matter more than what?
IQ
The term itself dates to 1964; Peter Salovey and John Mayer had proposed a more academic model of emotional intelligence in 1990.
Q 11In Stephen Covey's 1989 bestseller The 7 Habits, what is the first habit?
Be proactive
Covey grouped the first three habits as steps to independence, the next three as steps to interdependence, and the seventh, 'sharpen the saw', as renewal.
Q 12Dale Carnegie's 1936 classic grew from a course attended by Leon Shimkin, an employee of which publisher?
Simon & Schuster
Shimkin had a stenographer take notes on Carnegie's 14-week course; the resulting book has sold more than 30 million copies.
Q 13Jim Collins's Good to Great names its focus-on-one-thing concept after which animal?
Hedgehog
Q 21Alexander the Great was tutored by which philosopher until the age of 16?
Aristotle
Philip II considered Isocrates and Speusippus for the job first; before that Alexander had been drilled by the strict Leonidas, a relative of his mother.
Q 22UCLA coach John Wooden, who won ten NCAA titles in 12 years, taught players his 'Pyramid of' what?
Success
The 'Wizard of Westwood' delivered short, simple messages that later spread into business and personal development.
Q 23Phil Jackson holds the NBA record for championships as a head coach. How many did he win?
11
Six came with the Bulls and five with the Lakers; he also won two as a player, making him a 13-time champion overall.
It borrows Isaiah Berlin's line that the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing; the book studied eleven companies that made the leap.
Q 14In Simon Sinek's 'golden circle' from Start with Why, 'Why' comes ahead of which two words?
How and What
Sinek's argument is that people are inspired by a sense of purpose, and that inspiration is more powerful and sustainable than manipulation.
Q 15Psychologist Kurt Lewin described three leadership climates: authoritarian, democratic and which third?
Laissez-faire
In the laissez-faire climate the group sets policy with no participation from the leader at all; Lewin's 1939 studies used groups of schoolboys.
Q 16The Hawthorne effect is named after a Western Electric plant in Cicero, in which US state?
Illinois
Between 1924 and 1927 researchers changed the lighting for relay workers and found productivity rose whatever they did, though some scholars now doubt the accounts.
Q 17Who wrote Team of Rivals (2005), the Lincoln cabinet book that became a leadership touchstone?
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Three of Lincoln's cabinet members, Edward Bates, Salmon Chase and William Seward, had run against him for the 1860 nomination.
Q 18Nelson Mandela's 27 years in prison began where?
Robben Island
He was later moved to Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons before F. W. de Klerk released him in 1990.
Q 19To which island did Shackleton sail 720 nautical miles from Elephant Island to fetch help?
South Georgia
Every one of his men survived. He died of a heart attack in 1922 with his ship moored at the same island, and Endurance's wreck was found in 2022.
Q 20In January 2014 Mary Barra became the first woman to run a 'Big Three' automaker. Which company?
General Motors
She had joined the company at 18 as a co-op student and rose through product development, purchasing and supply chain before succeeding Daniel Akerson.
Q 24Across 26 years at Manchester United, how many Premier League titles did Sir Alex Ferguson win?
13
His 38 trophies also included five FA Cups and two Champions Leagues; the 1999 win completed the first treble by an English club.
Q 25Machiavelli's The Prince, written in 1513, was printed only in 1532. What had happened five years earlier?
The author had died
It began life under the Latin title De Principatibus, 'Of Principalities', as an instruction guide for new rulers.
Q 26Sun Tzu's The Art of War is composed of how many chapters?
13
The text dates from roughly the 5th century BCE, and its earliest parts were probably written at least a century after Sun Tzu is said to have lived.
Q 27In which language did Marcus Aurelius write his Meditations?
Greek
He wrote the 12 books in Koine Greek purely for his own guidance and almost certainly never meant them to be published.
Q 28Cincinnatus is celebrated for winning a war as dictator in sixteen days and then immediately doing what?
Returning to his farm
He gave up absolute power the moment the emergency ended, which is why George Washington's officers named their society after him and Cincinnati bears his name.
Q 29Angela Merkel, the first woman elected Chancellor of Germany, served from 2005 until which year?
2021
She was also the first chancellor of reunified Germany to have grown up in the former East, and led the CDU from 2000 to 2018.
Q 30Before Jacinda Ardern in 2018, who was the only elected head of government to give birth in office?
Benazir Bhutto
Ardern was 37 when she took office, making her the world's youngest female head of government at the time.