Tell me about a leadership experience.

This question has a number of variations as well:

Tell me about your most significant leadership experience.

Tell me about a recent leadership experience.

Tell me about a leadership experience that has impacted your leadership style.

Tell me about your greatest accomplishment.

Tell me about a failure.

Tell me about an ethical dilemma.

And so on.

My point here? First, leadership is broad and encompasses a number of topics. I include failure and ethics because these too are part of being a leader. Two (my main point for the purposes of this post), all these questions are asking you to tell a story. The question and thus the required structure for the response are different from the earlier question “Walk me through your resume” (see Jan. 17 post).

Whenever you tell a story, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Introduce the setting: What is the situation? What is going on? The interviewer will need a little background information in order to understand what you are about to tell her.

2. What is the task that is facing you?

3. What actions did you take to deal with this challenge? Try to go beyond just listing actions (“First, I did this…second, I did that…”) which can make you sound robotic. Mention why you made certain decisions, show what was going on inside your head.

4. Tell the interviewer the result. What happened at the end? Was there an impact?

MIT Sloan uses the acronym “STAR” for this method where

S = Situation

T = Task

A = Action

R = Result

You’ll probably recognize that this is the same format you used for writing your essays. Telling your story in this way will allow your interviewer to visualize your actions and behavior and, most importantly, your skills and attributes.

Would you like to practice interviewing? Contact us at http://www.reve-counseling.com/contact.html