Behavioral interview questions related to managing conflicts

It is very important for an organization to assess candidates ability to manage conflicts as a part of assessing interpersonal skills during an interview. The expectation here is that the candidate should showcase his competency to get along with different types of people as we cannot expect everybody in the organization to behave nicely to you :). He should also show how he manages those disagreements gracefully.

 Here we will see some sample questions related to conflict management and how to answer them effectively.

Conflict management

• What do you do when a team member refuses to complete his or her quota of the work?
• Tell me about a time when you had to disagree with a specific approach or process
• Tell me about a time you had a conflict at work.
• Tell me about an incident where you had to handle an unhappy customer/employee/supervisor/colleague
• Tell me about a situation where you had to work with a colleague who is difficult to deal with.

Situation

• I was the project manager for a high visibility project with a tight deadline As. the project was a very important one from an organizational perspective, senior leadership including directors were closely monitoring the progress.
• I was managing a bridge call to complete the User Acceptance Testing(UAT). Multiple teams including leadership and all other stakeholders joined the call except the systems assurance analyst who was supposed to do the UAT.
• When I approached the systems assurance analyst who was supposed to join the call and complete the UAT,, he blew up at me.

Approach

• Although I was not getting an expected response from him. I maintained my composure and explained to him once again about the importance/visibility of the project as well as the importance of completing the UAT on time.
• He apologized for not making it to the call and explained about the competing priorities he has with other projects.
• We discussed further to find a solution and finally decided to approach his Director to appraise her of the importance of this project over others
• She decided to assign another Systems Assurance Analyst who is more experienced to handle my project's UAT testing

Results

• Although we lost almost half an hour of our UAT time, we could complete the UAT well before the deadline because we had a well experienced Systems Assurance Analyst doing our UAT.
• We were able to complete the project on schedule and the handling of conflicting situations was well appreciated by the leadership in the final project completion notification.

How effective is the above answer

Here the candidate was able to handle the situation without impacting the project schedule with a final positive outcome. He was able to handle the conflict very well without impacting the relationship with Systems Assurance Analyst.

Summary

Conflict resolution is not only relevant to the interview but its also important in our day to day life. It's important to learn the art of conflict management and to resolve conflicts with a positive outcome for all the parties involved.

This is a sure shot question in an interview and preparing the story well in advance and practicing to answer will definitely impact the interview outcome.

All the best with the interview preparation!