Tell me about a time you had to make a difficult decision on the job.
"I had a coworker who asked if I'd help them with a project. This would've detracted from the work I was responsible for. I wanted to help, but in the end, it was more than I could handle. Then they offered to pay me to perform the work for them. That didn't feel right to me, either. So I shared the resources they needed to do accomplish this work on their own, yet they continued to solicit help instead. They didn't meet their deadline, which I thought was unfortunate, and they held it against me. I know we're all responsible for our own actions, but I still feel bad for them and wished I had the where-with-all to help them out. But there's only so much one person can do."
Making decisions under pressure are challenging and can lead to task paralysis. So, they're evaluating where you fall between being an asset versus a liability. How you answer this question serves to offer insights into your personality. It may clue them into what aspects of your job you view as challenging, andas well as your experience level. It also serves to clue them into how developed your leaderships skills are. As a leader, you are often required to make split decisions for the good of the team. The first steps to handling a difficult decision is by identifying what resources are at your disposal, gathering information, determining a strategy for moving forward, and diving in. Provide insights into your thought processes.
As with any behavioral question, it is framed in a way that asks you 'about a time' when you faced a situation in the past. Your interviewer will listen to your example and study how you responded to and handled the situation, and what you learned from it. They will take the information you share and view it as a predictor of what to expect from your performance in the future. When answering a behavioral question, the STAR method is the recommended approach to organizing your answer. STAR is an acronym for Situation, Task, Action, Result, and is intended to help you frame and organize your response in a way that will resonate with your interviewer. So you would start by introducing the situation you faced and the task at hand. You would then present the action you took, why it was significant and how you came to deciding on this approach, and ultimately the result of your actions.
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