From the Ask Tom mailbag –
Question:
Okay, we got integrity, customer care and individual initiative. The last value we want to interview for is our people. By that, I mean respect for others, support for others, collaboration and cooperation.
Response:
Same model as the past couple of days, interviewing for an attitude, a characteristic or soft skill.
- Identify the behavior connected to the attitude or characteristic.
- Identify a circumstance where we might see that behavior.
- Develop questions about the behavior.
Your description identifies some behavioral things, like collaboration, cooperation and support. That’s a good start. Your team can likely come up with more related behaviors to the value you have in mind.
Connected behaviors
- Collaboration, or cooperation on a team
- Support for another teammate
- Respect for a manager, or respect for another team mate
Behavior – Collaboration or cooperation in a team.
- Tell me about a time when you worked on a project that required multiple steps and multiple people to solve a problem?
- What was the project?
- What was the problem?
- How many steps involved?
- How many people on the project team?
- What was your role on the project team?
- To solve the problem, how did the team have to work together?
- When the team worked well together, what happened?
- When the team did not work well together, what happened?
- When the team did not work well together, what was the impact on the project?
- How did the team know when it was working well together and not so well together?
- When the team did not work well together, what did it do to start working better together? What steps were taken? What was said?
Behavior – Supporting another teammate.
- Tell me about a time when you worked on a project where another team member was taking the lead, but some team members disagreed with the work method or sequence of work?
- What was the project?
- What was the purpose (goal, objective) of the project?
- How long was the project?
- How many on the project team?
- What was your role on the project team?
- What was the leader’s role on the project team?
- What was the disagreement about?
- What words were said?
- Which side of the disagreement were you on?
- How was the situation resolved?
Behavior – Respect for a manager, or respect for another team mate.
- Tell me about a time when you worked on a project where you disagreed with the manager about a work method or sequence of work?
- What was the project?
- What was the purpose of the project?
- How long was the project?
- How many people on the project team?
- What was your role on the project team?
- What was the disagreement about?
- How did you approach the disagreement?
- What words were said?
- How was the situation resolved?
You can interview for any attitude, characteristic or soft skill, as long as you can connect it to behaviors.