Page 24 - How To Answer Interview Questions (II)

Lots of people will tell the story but forget to mention the outcome. The outcome, or result, of
your actions, is what the employer cares about most.(Include the actual numbers in the story as
much as you can—quantification is powerful.)

If your example is a team that you led:

Situation or Task– Briefly set up the situation that led to the conflict. Choose
something that was an actual problem involving priorities or a budget.(Don’t
talk about about trivial things, like how the team couldn’t agree on where to go to
lunch.) Be brief. The employer doesn’t need to know that much about the details.

Action – How did you approach the team? How did you exercise your
leadership? Talk about how you listened (listening is a critical skill), taking into
account the emotions of the people on your team, and made a rational, logical
decision(rather than one based on your own emotions).

Result –This is your real focus here—the outcome.What happened as a direct
result of your actions? This is a prime spot to add numerical evidence for the
employer (“As a result of my plan, we were able to reduce overlap by 50%,
which also drastically reduced the time spent in X.”).

If your example is a team that you were on (but not necessarily leading), you want to:

Talk about how you mediated the conflict, again by listening and taking the emotion out of the
equation.

Describe how you took the time to talk to each member of the team and hear what they had to
say.

Talk about how you rooted out the miscommunication or found common ground.

End with what happened as a result—always a positive one.

So you might say,

“I was part of a handpicked cross-department Kaizen team tasked to find ways to become more
lean and efficient as a company. But some of the suggestions stepped on the toes of one person in
particular who was from X area and caused them to react badly. I took them out for coffee to take
some of the group pressure off and we talked. I realized what the real problem was, and helped them
present their issue to the group in a different way. As a group, we came up with a new solution that
made this person feel much more positive about it and still achieved our goal. The end result of this
project was that we streamlined X number of procedures and saved the company as a whole about 40
hours a week, which they valued at $X.”