How to Answer: What strategies do you use when managing competing priorities?
Advice and answer examples written specifically for an Executive Assistant job interview.
14. What strategies do you use when managing competing priorities?
How to Answer
As an Executive Assistant (EA), your ability to prioritize effectively is a vital component of the EA role. Your interviewer is qualifying your ability to successfully manage competing priorities with a systematic approach. They want to ensure that you can demonstrate the ability to autonomously prioritize your responsibilities and tasks with little to no intervention. They want to validate that you are capable of working independently so that they are free to manage their own high-level tasks. Lastly, they want to be certain that they trust your decision-making skills around prioritization. By providing answers with concrete frameworks, you demonstrate your skills around prioritization and when it's best to leverage each framework.
Prioritization framework methods:
Force Ranking
Hundred Dollar Method
Moscow Technique
Numerical Assignment Grouping
Ivy Lee Method
Written by Angela Fontaine on April 12th, 2021
Answer Example
"I leverage a variation of prioritization techniques depending on the tasks at hand. For daily task management, I like to use the Moscow Technique. With the Moscow technique, I focus on must-have time, should-have time, could-have time, and will not have time. This approach allows me to strategically bucket my workload in relation to risk, impact, and project size. However, when I prioritize a project's tasks, I find that the Ivy Lee Method is the best approach. This method keeps me on task for six specific actions, not moving on to new tasks or adding until my task list until the initial six are complete. I believe it's important to utilize different techniques depending on what I'm prioritizing."
Written by Angela Fontaine on April 12th, 2021
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