Behavioral interview questions related to culture

Although there are a lot of questions and sample answers available for common questions on the internet, I found that there are some specific questions for which answers are not available. Here I will be covering questions related to culture.

Cultural awareness

• Tell me about a time when you had to take someone's cultural perspective into account when dealing with them.

• Give me an example of a situation where you had to take into account the sensitivities of different parties.

• Tell me about a time when you have worked in a team with individuals from different cultural backgrounds.

Here is the example of an answer which follows the STAR approach.

Situation

Here we need to provide a context for the story and this section should be concise and to the point.

• Recently I had a chance to manage a project which involved the release of specific software to multiple regions across the globe over Citrix infrastructure.
• One of the tasks involved was setting up and managing weekly bridge calls involving different teams including business, technology and leadership teams from different countries across the globe. 
• During these calls, I noticed that we were not getting much input from some regions and the leadership was getting the impression that everything was going smoothly.

Approach

In the previous section, you described the situation. Now the important part comes which is how you demonstrated the specific competency you have which you want to highlight through the steps that you have taken to resolve it

• The project was on a tight deadline so everybody was keen on moving things as quickly as possible.
• However, I was very concerned about the lack of inputs from specific regions where the software will be rolled out.
• As a project manager, I decided to set up calls with each regional team and get their inputs, just to make sure that they don't have any inputs/concerns.
• It turned out that several of them had concerns regarding the response time and some specific features related to the customization as per the language.
• They were hesitant to express their concerns because they did not want to contradict opinions from the leadership team.
• From there on I started setting up regular bridge calls with specific regional teams, note their concerns/opinions and then summarise and present it in the larger team calls.

Results

• I was happy that I was able to capture concerns/opinion of regional teams well before the rollout and that saved us from trouble which could have happened after the roll-out.
• I found that people from regional teams are more confident, comfortable and gets more time to explain their concerns/opinions in detail when we setup calls with individual teams.  
• I got appreciations from my leadership team for this approach as we were successful in addressing the concerns from regional teams well before the rollout which otherwise could have remained unknown.
• This experience helped me understand how important is to have a platform where everyone is comfortable to communicate effectively.

How effective is the above answer

Here we are highlighting

• the project manager's project management as well as general people management skills.
• he is meticulous, a good learner and  willing to go the extra mile to achieve results
• above all, he shows that he is very good at dealing with people from different cultural or regional backgrounds.

Summary

Nowadays with more and more organizations going global, you can expect questions related to cultural perspective in most of the interviews. Therefore it's very important that you prepare a few stories in advance to avoid surprises.

All the best with the interview preparation!