Behavioral Interviewing: Decisiveness and Judgement Skills
If you work for, or are interviewing at a large company, chances are that responsibilities are spread out across many different people. The more people that you have in an organization, the more important decision-making skills become. For example, a company that consists of one manager and one employee may not worry as much about the employee making bad decisions because the span of control of the manager is small, making it more likely that the decision making power remains in the hands of the management. However, the more staff that a manager is responsible for, the less likely it is that the manager will be able to closely observe and interact with the staff, making the staff’s judgement skills very important.
In a behavioral interview where decisiveness and judgement skills are being assessed, start by explaining what your expectation is of an employee in this role. Here’s one example of how you could do that.
In our organization the secretaries answer many very important incoming phone calls to our directors. And while many of these questions can be answered by the secretary, it’s very important to know when you need to escalate something to the director.
Sample Question
Tell me about a time when you encountered a situation where you had to decide whether it was appropriate for you to handle a problem yourself, of escalate it to your manager. What were the circumstances? How did you handle it? Would you handle the same situation the same way again or would you do it differently this time?
For the candidate:
When answering this question, select a story that you can clearly explain why you felt that there was a need to escalate. This can either be because it is a time where escalated a problem and were told you made the right decision, or because you did not escalate a problem and were told you made a mistake. Don’t be afraid to use an example where you made the wrong decision. Just be sure to say that you learned from it. Managers don’t expect people to be perfect but they do expect that employees learn from their mistakes.
For the manager:
To interpret the response to this question, pay attention to how the candidate decided whether or not the problem needed escalation. Did he/she consider all the options before deciding? Did he/she think about similar past experiences that might help guide the decision whether or not to escalate? If the candidate verbalized that he/she did not escalate and was later reprimanded for it, did learning occur or did he/she feel that they would follow the same path again should they encounter a similar problem?
Knowing when to escalate a problem is critical to many organizations. Making one mistake does not mean that a person is wrong for the job, however, not learning from the mistake probably does.
Read more about Behavioral Interviewing from Interview-Chatter
Behavioral Interviewing: An Introduction
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1 opinion for Behavioral Interviewing: Decisiveness and Judgement Skills
Behavioral Interviewing: Assessing Influencing Skills
Jun 20, 2008 at 10:21 pm
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