How To Answer: "Tell Me About A Time You Demonstrated Leadership" Interview Question

in this video we're going to talk about an important theme in behavioral interviewing and that theme is one of leadership now often interviewers have many viable candidates for a job and a core differentiator in figuring out which candidate to select is understanding your leadership capabilities and this does not have to be in the form of directly managing a team but what they're really looking for is how do you take ownership even if you don't officially own a team and how do you lead influence and inspire others so how is this question asked it's typically asked in one of two flavors flavor one is they might ask you about a specific time they might say tell me about a time you let a team or tell you about a time you led a team to a successful outcome the second flavor is asking it more abstractly they might ask you tell me about your leadership style or tell me about how your team might describe your leadership style and regardless of the flavor of the question it's important that you go back to your star framework and when you highlight the actions you're very clear about the role you played in being a leader and you're very clear about how that role impacted others and when it comes to the results it's important that the result highlights not just how the team achieved a business objective but also what is the impact to the team their morale their excitement level and you want to make sure you're balancing both the impact on the business and the impact on others and now let's get a little deeper on the actions we want to highlight now I want to use one of my favorite frameworks that is used to define human performance and that is the skill will matrix let's talk about the will dimension first and on the will dimension what you're trying to highlight is do you understand what motivates your team do you understand their intrinsic motivations and what galvanizes them and if you do can you then map that and harness that to achieve the company's objectives and then from there can you build followership so that the team is coming to you on a regular basis so that you can uplift the performance of the team without having to be prescriptive now let's talk about this skill dimension which ultimately comes down to how do you make sure that your team skills are always relevant and that they are at the top of the pack and the things you want to highlight are how do you train them how do you upscale them how do you invest in them and then you want to express that in a way that explains how you do that not just for the near-term but also for the long-term in many jobs these skills of today are going to be irrelevant in terms of the skills that are needed to be successful tomorrow and so can you express how you upscale your team not just today but also for the future let's talk about the results the are in the star framework and I want you to think about two things first and foremost it's important that you express what they before picture was and what the after picture was you have to crystallize the vision of how your leadership transformed the team the business and got to an outcome secondly it's very compelling when you articulate results that scale beyond just the individual project you are working on ideally the impact persists and resonates beyond just this direct story imagine if after you have led the team to a successful outcome other teams have adopted what your team has done that's an example of having your impact scale so I want you to think about both aspects making sure you crystallize a vision of the before and the after and making sure that this after is not static but ideally scales beyond you over time and now let's bring this home with an example imagine if you told them I'm gonna tell you about a time I was managing a team of four inventory analysts for Best Buy we were four months out from Christmas Christmas happens to be 30% of our annual revenue so it's a very critical point in time and we were running behind on a new system upgrade that was going to allow us to fulfill all of our online orders so right there you framed up a very compelling context then you're gonna go into your actions and imagine if you framed up your actions as I did a few things first and foremost I sat down with the team individually sitting down with each person and talking through what success would mean like not just for the team but for each person on the team I spend time understanding what were their motivations behind seeing this success for some people it was getting a promotion for others it was being part of something bigger than themselves and I got a really good sense of what was going to excite them throughout the next four months as we got ready for the Christmas season the other thing I did was I spent every Thursday sitting down with each team member and asking them whether they felt like they were progressing towards the goal they articulated to me some time back I wanted to make sure the team was building their skills that they didn't come out of this four months sprint just feeling like they've executed on something but they haven't grown so I built out a skill matrix and went through it week by week with the team and asked them whether they felt like they were progressing and they contributed to this skill matrix and they gave me a sense on what other aspects of the project they wanted to get involved in and I sought to get them involved in those projects and finally one of the other things that I did was I wanted to make sure this was a fun-filled atmosphere so every Thursday I had the team come into the office with a superhero costume I wanted them to know that they were the heroes of this story and I also wanted them to know that we didn't have to take ourselves that seriously and infusing that type of tidbit in your story it's what's gonna make your leadership style come across as authentic and make them understand what's unique about your leadership style now let's go into the results part imagine if you framed up the results by saying well there's a couple key results that came out of this first and foremost we hit our mark for the Christmas season we drove the revenue we needed to drive but more importantly what's really exciting about this is that the team morale was even higher going into the next fiscal year and the war room that we set up to work on this was an idea and strategy that was adopted by many other teams when they were facing a critical challenge so this scaled beyond just this one time and now you see how the pieces of the puzzle come together you're showing how you enable their skill you're showing how you motivated their will you're showing how it's scaled beyond just one project and they're also getting a sense of your authentic leadership voice and now I want to leave you with three guiding principles number one humanize your leadership give the interviewer a sense of your authentic personality of your leadership style how you motivate others how you inspire others how do others feel when you when they're being led by you infuse humor in the story if that's natural to you secondly do not be prescriptive about leading others this is not about holding a clipboard and telling people exactly what to do step by step this is about inspiring others motivating them and influencing them to accomplish something together that could not be achieved as an individual finally the third principle is be very respectful of everyone in the story a common mistake people make is they can potentially frame themselves in a leadership or superior capacity while framing others in a subservient capacity and it's very important that each player in the story is on the same level and what I mean by that is what might differentiate you from other people on the team is simply Ariane's these are some of the best practices to consider when framing up your story and what we do at rocket interview is sit down with you and figure out what are the most salient aspects of your candidacy the best stories you've had in your professional career and then we weave them together to form a compelling career narrative that elevates you above the competition allows you to ace the interview and secure your dream job

Channel: AccelaCoach

Views: 141,216

Keywords: demonstrated leadership question and answer, showed leadership interview question, leadership interview question, behavioral questions, behavioral interview questions, interview questions, job interview questions and answers, interview tips, job interview tips, interview prep, star interview questions and answers, star interview method, star interview technique

Id: ZQ9cOTeVm1w

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2017