Latest Leader of a Team Interview Preparation Guide

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Effective leaders typically make smart choices. They must also be willing to make unpopular decisions or act when others are unwilling. People often avoid making important decisions because they fear they'll become unpopular or be criticized by management. When answering these questions, provide personal examples from previous work experiences. Describe the steps you take to solve problems, make decisions, conduct risk management, and evaluate results.

The term "leadership skills" typically encapsulates several business critical competencies including effectively communicating vision, motivating and inspiring others to excel, empowering others, help others to grow and develop, turning vision into reality, delegating responsibility, and making tough decisions. These are the skills that interviewers will be testing for when conducting behavioral leadership interviews.

✫ Breaking your workload up into daily or hourly targets to ensure that the next small success is never too far away.
✫ Living a healthy life-style. Eating the right foods and drinking lots of water in the office can have a big impact on your concentration levels.
✫ Motivating others and promoting a positive atmosphere in the office.

An opportunity to discuss what has attracted you to this line of work and what inspires you to persevere through the tough times. In a sales role, this could be the adrenaline rush of meeting daily targets, whilst in a customer-service role, this could be the personal satisfaction you gain through helping people.

Talk about the benefits the company has to offer and how they suit you at this point in your career. For example, if you are joining the company as a graduate, discuss how you plan to utilize their highly-structured training scheme.
Also comment on the company's reputation and try to make reference to a recent success you have seen on their website.

You will confirm that you are creative in your job role, and markedly so compared to some of your colleagues. You should then proceed to give examples which demonstrate this.
This question gives you the opportunity to tell the interviewer about how you developed a Monday-morning prize-giving incentive to get your team fired up for the week. Or how you introduced daily staff meetings to keep your team engaged with the goals of the organisation. Or implemented a buddy-up training program to help your new recruits settle in faster.

Whilst working in a XYZ as a leader, I introduced Sugar Fridays giving my team sweets and treats to get them through the Friday slog.
Prior to introducing the incentive, I compiled a backlog of sales figures from previous Fridays. I then introduced the incentive on a trial period, continued collecting data and cross-compared the results. There was an obvious peak in sales figures and so the incentive became permanent.

The interviewer will be looking for an example of where you have taken this insight and subsequently developed, implemented and improved your sales process. This could be through the introduction of training, post-sale procedures, a change in marketing communications, or other process improvements, to ensure that the cause of any future complaint is eradicated.

I started to notice that a lot of customers were complaining about feeling patronized by my agents. In response to this, I listened to the calls these complaints stemmed from and realized that words such as wonderful were being over used.
I then had a meeting with the worst offenders in my team and suggested changes that they could make to correct this behavior. After this meeting, customer complaints reduced and sales increased.

Recommend thinking about a specific instance and then discussing this in detail. Outline the process stage by stage and, if there are areas that need improvement, focus your answers on the solutions instead of the problems.

As a leader or manager charged with delivering excellent customer feedback, you will know how important it is that customer feedback and insight are monitored, measured and acted upon, whenever appropriate or necessary.

Here your potential employer wants to know that you are capable of organising yourself properly and ensuring that nothing gets forgotten.

This question is a test of character and is especially important if you are being interviewed for a management role.
An ideal answer will demonstrate that you are able to support your team, even when things do not go according to plan.

Morale is infectious whether positive or negative and, when working in a team-orientated environment, it's important that there is always an air of positivity around.
Its therefore vitally important to ensure that if you're having a bad day, you contain this and don't let it influence the morale levels of the team, and in turn the productivity and efficiency of the overall operation.

Try to think about how you would describe yourself if someone asked you for your strengths, then relate these to what people say about you; peers, agents, managers and stakeholders. Have three or four at the ready, ideally in line with the role you are being interviewed for. Have examples or situations ready, in case your interviewer wants to drill down as to why you think or believe these are your key strengths.

If possible, think work related. There will hopefully be a number of things you are most proud of in your career to date. Think about your key achievements; were they commercial, people or process orientated? What was the cause and effect? How were you involved, what was improved, saved or developed.
If you are short on career-based examples, use personal achievements which demonstrate the commercial skills required for the role, such as team work, commitment, empathy, determination, attention to detail, etc.

You will need two or three instances of how you may have: delivered change, managed conflict, improved performance, reduced absence, increased customer satisfaction, etc. You also need to be able to clearly and concisely communicate the problem, solution and outcome.

Change is an essential part of life in any call center or leadership environment, as the industry strives to achieve best practice for their customers and stakeholders. Have some examples on how you personally managed, or were affected by, some change. What was your focus, what were you aiming to achieve and how did you deliver the outcome? Know what the problems encountered were and what was learned through and following the transformation.

During interviews, difficult or awkward questions could come your way. The intention is not to catch you out, but to test how you operate under pressure.
Be clear and precise and be sure to convey any previous first-hand experience you have. they will want to feel confident that you can handle similar issues within the new role.

I am a very conscientious worker and I get irritated by colleagues who don't share this value and take any opportunity to take time off work or do the minimum required when they are there. I am learning, however, that these people generally get found out and I leave it to my supervisor to recognize these problems and address them.

I have been told that I am an excellent communicator, especially in a team, but I feel I have good interpersonal skills generally and find it easy to get along with all sorts of people.

When asked to give examples on the weaknesses, you need to think very carefully, and plan in advance what your response will be, as many people dig a very deep hole here. A good response to the weakness quoted would be:
I had a situation once where I knew that a more experienced colleague was regularly absent from work following nights out drinking, but she would say that she had a migraine. When this happened my workload increased significantly. I undertook this willingly but I must admit I was annoyed that this person was taking advantage of me and the company. However, I decided to let the supervisor do their job and just get on with mine. In quite a short space of time, the issue was addressed and the problem was resolved.

When I was first promoted to team leader, I consistently struggled to ensure that my team achieved their sales targets on a Friday.
I sought the advice of more experienced team leaders to find out how they motivated their teams through the Friday slog.
Acting on the advice of the other team leaders, I implemented a combination of incentives over the next few weeks and successfully boosted my team's sales figures.

As part of my regular team monitoring, I assess all advisers call quality in order to measure them against the relevant DRIs. When reviewing calls for one adviser, I noticed a trend where the adviser was quite abrupt with callers. I scheduled a meeting in private with that adviser, which I prepared for by reviewing supporting information (including their performance statistics for the month).

They want to hear things like how you hold team meetings to discuss the week ahead and allocate time slots and deadlines for various projects.