General Advice:
Leadership and Drive interviews are typically not weighted too heavily, but nevertheless you come across as more prepared if you have stories from various experiences prepared to discuss the mistakes, successes, and conflicts you might have come across. This is an opportunity for the interviewer to understand your character, integrity, and coachability. A few pieces of advice based on some trends I've seen:
- If you identify as female, make sure you’re actually owning your successes and not deferring them to your team when you were the one driving success—own it.
- If you identify as male, make sure you’re actually owning up to your mistakes “here’s how I personally fucked up, and here’s what I learned, and here’s why I’ll never do it again” and not deferring them to your team. Everyone makes mistakes and that’s okay.
Framing your Stories:
One good way to frame your stories is to use the “Nugget + S.A.R.” format. This means you say a quick nugget about what you’re going to talk about and then frame your story in a Situation, Action, Result format.
Example: “I’m going to tell you about a time on the ____ team when I made a mistake that led to ____. (Nugget) This particular half my team was focused on ____. (Situation) Because I believed that ____ I pushed the team to _____ but this was the wrong strategy because ____. As a result, _____, and it was because I lead the team to work on ____ in the first place. I learned a lot from this mistake, in particular, _____ and it’s why I’ll never make this mistake again. In fact, more recently I’ve incorporated what I’ve learned from this mistake I made into my work and _____ happened as a result!”
If you can populate this table or one like it with stories and practice them you should be able to ace the Leadership & Drive section of the interview.