The Manager's Dilemma — Priya's First Week at Meridian

A four-round, intermediate leadership-and-ethics simulation set inside Meridian Digital Consulting Ltd., a 240-person Manchester digital-transformation consultancy (GBP 38M revenue, 12% margin) whose 18-month-old values charter — Candour, Care, Courage — is printed on every offer letter. You play Priya Nandra, promoted last Friday to lead the 14-person Aurora delivery team, who opens her first Monday inbox to two colliding people-dilemmas with a client steering meeting on Thursday at 16:00. Dilemma A: Tom, a likeable nine-year engineer and unofficial team mentor, has missed delivery for three sprints — his code-review reject rate is 31% against a 9% team norm — and replacing him on the client-critical module would protect the deadline but breach the Care the team watched the old leader live. Dilemma B: Aisha, the team's star and the obvious rescue, privately tells Priya she has accepted a verbal offer elsewhere and asks her to keep it confidential — so staffing her onto the critical module rests on someone who may resign within the week, and concealing her likely departure from HR and the project owner pits Candour against Care against Courage. Aurora bills GBP 1.9M/year; a missed Thursday milestone triggers a GBP 95,000 service credit and threatens a GBP 5.7M three-year renewal; if Tom leaves badly, three long-tenured engineers (~GBP 600,000 in attrition) signal they would reconsider; the skeptical peer manager has already called the promotion 'a stretch'. Across four rounds you (1) read the people not just the problem using an emotional-intelligence lens — separating fact from feeling and naming the real values clash; (2) run a structured ethical decision method, generating genuine third options and finding the route between betraying Aisha and deceiving the firm; (3) script and deliver the two hardest conversations so candour preserves dignity rather than humiliating a mentor; and (4) decide, defend, and set the precedent with a first-30-days trust-building commitment. The math tracks Team Trust as the real KPI alongside Ethical Integrity, Deadline Protection and Manager Credibility, and is tuned so that the five classic errors — solving before reading, confusing candour with cruelty, becoming complicit, optimising only the GBP 95,000 number, and treating the two dilemmas as independent — each measurably underperform a conscious, EI-led, owned-trade-off decision.