How This Professional Services Manager Turned a Peer’s Struggle into Success with a Simple Act of Ownership
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Preparing the interview
Complete interview transcript & analysis below
Enhanced transcript with interviewer insights
INTERVIEWER
You ready to jump into it? Good stuff, all right, um. This, uh, this first question is about, uh, dealing with peers, specifically peers who were struggling, uh, and you decided to help out, right? Step in and, and help a peer out who was struggling. What was the situation and, and tell me what you did to help, and then I'll ask some, some following questions.
CANDIDATE
Tell you about a situation in my current role as technical project manager at IHS Market. Uh, I've been in this role for 3 years, and I was hired, uh, at the same time of this peer that I'm gonna tell you about. This peer had a little trouble figuring out a, a tool called Planview, and it was a project management tool and also a bit of a portfolio management tool. And it was new to both myself and this individual. I caught on pretty quick with it and gave this person who at the time sat next to me, uh, extra coordination, extra time after work to go through different setups of different projects in plan view so that he could be more successful. Um, this, this was something I just would do for, for a teammate or a partner. This wasn't someone I considered a competitor, but rather someone who was coming on board and, and trying to get on board, uh, in a new organization and be successful. That person is very comfortable with the tool now of running projects successfully, uh, and, and interestingly, the, the tool Plan view has been retired and we simply have gone back to Microsoft Project, um, but looking out for a teammate like that is, is pretty common, common thing for me to do.
Interviewer Insight
the initial answer sets up a good opportunity to deliver feedback/help a peer. The candidate did an insufficient job of establishing the stakes of failure for their peer. How important was this tool to their job? What was the impact on their job or to the company with their failing? Without this context it's hard for an interviewer to determine if this was a big deal or not. As it stands, the candidate has left this judgement to the interviewer which is always a risky call.
INTERVIEWER
Uh, good old Microsoft project, um. Uh, so just out of curiosity though, in, in addressing this situation. And, and working with this, this peer. Was there any directed or pointed feedback that you had to give them to initiate this helping process, or, or was it something else?
CANDIDATE
Well, thank you for that. Um, to get into a little bit more detail, um, the, the details of Planview are, are separate from, uh, what we might think of in typical project management or Microsoft's parlance. In Planview, you have to actually make two entries for every task. So, if one of the tasks, for example, was going to be, um, create a requirements document, There need to be two entries for that task, one for the actual tracking of reporting of the duration and the time at the p.m. level, but then a second one that was handled a slightly different way for reporting purposes and sent up through Power BI. It was the trickiness of handling almost two versions of the project that this particular guy needed some help with. And again, it was just a click, a click of the mind, enough practice on setting up a few practice projects that enabled him to eventually get it, so that his reports looked well and, and went, did well in Power BI. Um, but he also was able to keep local control and management of the project. Um. With that other side of it. Hope that helps.
Interviewer Insight
with this explanation, there is a risk that an interviewer may undervalue the work done by the candidate. In this specific situation, there is risk that the interviewer determines that the expectations on the candidate (by associative property) were very low because as explained this does not feel like a difficult problem to master. Without establishing some sort of distance vis a vis ability coming into the job (experience, software proficiency, etc) there is risk that the interviewer will begin to question the scope of the role of the candidate. Won't 100% happen - just highlighting a risk.
INTERVIEWER
And so what was the, uh, what was the end result of that interaction?
CANDIDATE
The end result of that interaction was, uh, there were a few follow-ups, but now this individual, uh, learned the tool and is successfully using it for project management in the company for his assigned projects. As I did mention though, about 3 years, uh, I've I've been with the company 3 years, and, and for a short time, uh, this was the main tool, but it just has been retired. So, it's interesting that The tools come and go. Uh, but if that person needed my help again, uh, I would quickly, quickly provide it.
Interviewer Insight
This is the interviewer trying to establish some numerical measure or level of impact of the work. Without having some level of impact explicitly laid out, the interviewer has only the information as presented. The example, as presented is, "I had a peer who was struggling with the idea of double entry in a software platform. We fixed that." What isn't established was how this was impacting the performance (hard numbers, not a relative comparator) the peer, how this impacted their ability to deliver work for the company, etc. There is an opportunity to expand on and improve this answer by adding metric-based details.
Expert Assessment
Interviewer assessment - would be used in a hiring meeting
The leadership of the candidate shines throughout the interview. There were multiple examples of the candidate demonstrating Ownership in how they approached work that was either out of scope, not previously theirs, or just needed to get done. This is not uncommon in former military officers. Where the specific answer block for this leadership principle suffered was the lack of stakes establishment by the candidate. The scope of the stakes were simply not high enough for the role for which the candidate is currently interviewing. Fortunately there were multiple other instances throughout the interview where the stakes were much higher and Ownership was on display (in particular the issue with the Networking SME).