Team Work Fit Question

Hi there,

Being asked for a leadership story you should focus on your best experience leading a team (of any size), either on a personal or professional situation. Keys here:

• You leading style is and how you inspire the team to reach a challenging goal
• Your teamwork skills to coordinate work and make everyone shine
• Your ability to understand and act on team dynamics, even the personal ones (motivations, frustrations)

I hope this helps.

Alberto

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Hi Anonymous!

This is a typical question in fit interviews and distinctively different from a leadership question:

1. When asking about teamwork, interviewers want to understand how effectively you will work in a consulting case team. The job is stressful and comes with many challenges. As sad as that sounds, most of us see our colleagues more than we do our spouses. This means you need to be a team player to succeed.
2. When preparing for this type of questions, think about a story where you managed a difficult team situation. A conflict among team members, disagreement about how proceed with a project, etc. This story should end with your role in finding the solution and enabling the team to function and succeed. It therefore should not just be a story about your role as a team member, but about how you were fundamental piece to drive success.
3. In a question about leadership, the interviewer wants to hear a story about how you drove a project, convinced others of it's merits and created impact. The team work story needs to tell about how you helped the team succeed.

I hope this helps. Generally, you should make sure to develop all these stories to a point where you can give a 90 second upfront pitch and then be prepared for detailed questions by the interviewer. They will give you a hard time, trying to look for holes in the story to understand if you are authentic or are presenting a brushed-up experience. You should therefore spend significant time on preparing for these questions and ask someone to practice their delivery with you.

Hi there,

1) Can you work well with others? Can you accept responsibility for your task, take on (volunteer) for additional responsibility if the team needs it, communicate effectively, support others, etc. 

2) Definitely your role as a team member. However, the "team" question tends to already have a "trick" to it! As in they will likely already say "tell me about a difficult team you worked in" or "tell me about a team member you had a disagreement with".

3) Well, what do you think? Teamwork is as mentioned in #1 (all about you "giving"). Leadership is about you taking control / ownership, driving things forward, etc. etc. Now, remember, a good leader is also a team player and works well with others. So be careful to not go too far down the "I led the charge and did everything" route. But I think you now get the gist :)

Dear A,

Here you might be tested as a team player, any situations with a conflict managements, as well as a leader - because the best leader is best teamplayer - those who can take responsibility and share the success with the team. 

Best,
André