Behavioral interview questions related to managing work.How do you handle situations where you did not have enough work to do

Although most of the time we will have more than enough work to do, there are situations in an organization where there is not much work to do. This can be due to a transition phase of the organization or the organization might be in a restriction period for change implementation or for new projects because of the annual high transaction period or budget constraints. In an interview, there can be questions related to this and the intention of asking this question is to understand the attitude of the candidate.

Here we review some sample questions related to this.

Sample questions related to managing your work

• Have you been in a situation where you did not have enough work to do

• How do you keep you busy if you don't have much to do at work

• How do you kill time when there is not much work to do

Situation

• I was working in a financial services organization which enforces restriction period wherein no project specific changes are deployed during the busy transaction period from November to January

• Restriction period basically translates to less busy time with respect to work. And there are days where we cannot do anything with the systems which we work on.

Approach

• Although I didn't have enough work during the restriction period, there were opportunities to improve my knowledge as well as to share it. I was utilizing this opportunity to learn new technology relevant to work as well as sharing my knowledge with others in my team.

• I also took this as an opportunity to research on improving the existing systems, optimizing the process/systems to get some re-engineering saves.

• I also took initiatives to do the proof of concept study for some of the new improvements that I found.

Results

• Although there was not much work, I was able to utilize the work hours effectively to the advantage of the organization in all possible manner.

How effective is the above answer

The candidate was able to demonstrate that he will be committed to the betterment of the organization and he thinks innovatively and comes up with better ideas instead of sitting idle or spending work hours in a non-fruitful manner.

Summary

Spending your work time wisely and effectively is something that every organization expects and questions related to this is common in an interview. It's also good to have a story handy to address these questions.

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!

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!

Behavioral interview questions

What are behavioral interview questions?

Most often we come across these categories of questions in a job interview. Here  I am providing a  summary of what these questions are all about, how to answer them and some sample questions along with sample answers.

How to identify if the question being asked is a behavioral interview question

If the question starts with something like below, it's highly likely to be a behavioral question

"Give me an example of ....."
"Have you ever..."
"Describe a time when..."
"Have you had to.."
"What do you do if you.."

Methods  for answering behavioral interview questions

The STAR technique

STAR stands for SITUATION  TASK ACTION  and  RESULT

Situation/Task  -  Explain the event or task that you encountered.

Action -  Explain what steps you undertook

Result - Describe the outcome that you delivered

The CAR  technique

This method is similar to the STAR method except that here you provide a CONTEXT, ACTION, and RESULT

Context -  Explain the situation and the background

Action - Describe what measure of steps you took

Result- Describe the outcome  you achieved

Pointers to  answering behavioral interview questions effectively

Due diligence -  Find out what skills and behaviors the employer is looking for, and find answers for possible questions including well-known questions that you will definitely get in an interview. If possible, prepare answers from your own previous experience. If there are questions beyond your experience, make sure you have a story ready. Remember, the expectation here is to demonstrate how you handled those situations.

Practice - answering the questions using STAR or CAR method out loud in advance for those questions you identified. Make sure that while telling your story, you stay on point. Better if you have someone to listen to your answers and provide corrections.