Strategic Interview Questions and Answers

If your interviewer asked this question, then you must tell this by giving an example. Tell them of the time when you made a mistake but don’t stay on it for long instead tell them what you have learnt from it and how you improved. Explain them the steps you took so that mistake never happened again. You can also explain how you have worked on that mistake to convert it into your strength.

As you enter in your carrier making phase you meet more and more people, and your actions start to affect them. Some of these people will greatly influence your work and these people are stakeholders. These stakeholders could be your strong supporter or blockage for your projects.

So, to identify who is your relevant stakeholders you must follow this three-step process:

• Identifying your stakeholders
• Prioritize your stakeholders
• Understand your key stakeholders

In my last organization I have been always tried to react to situation instead of stress. Working on multiple projects sometimes create too much pressure but I always assure that helps me to stay motivated rather than to create stressful situation. And despite of being working on three large projects together I have successfully managed to deliver them all on time by breaking the projects into small assignments and prioritize them.

NOTE: Stress is an integral part of any job, and this is the most common strategic interview question to ask to candidates. Interviewer wants to know if you can handle job related stress. Again you must give this answer together with an example like-

A good communication is an integral part of any successful business or organization. You must opt following ways to keep your team informed-

• Schedule an all-company meeting or small team meeting.
• Keep the message small, simple but deep in meaning.
• Create a good internal campaign on market and customer insights.
• Use a proper framework to prioritize the messages
• Show your real person entities instead of corporate entities.
• Provide conceptual and informative tools.
• Focus on telling and retelling the history of organization.
• Compare your past planning process with new ones.
• Allow employees to ask questions.

If you are setting up long term goals, they should be motivational for your team and meet all quality standards. Ways to setting up them are.

• Clear in your ideas and know what you want to achieve.
• Ask people for their opinions and let them develop their own goals
• Show your team how settled goals are impactful.
• To make goals more productive tie them up with incentives.
• Make goals tangible and measurable so that you can track success.
• Set deadlines of goals and help people to achieve them.

Long term goals often required more reviews and frequent check ins because they can’t be achieved in a day. Touch base with your employees at least once a week to track their progress.

An action plan is a document that describes all tasks you need to finish to accomplish a goal. A good action plan also contains prioritization of your tasks by assigning them a time frame.

Following factors one should consider building an action plan

• Set SMART goals means Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Based.
• Create a list of actions that you want to complete in order to achieve that goal.
• Set a timeline to maintain consistent progress.
• Allocate resources which required to complete the task such as money, equipment, users etc.
• Track the progress by organizing regular meetings or internal meetings.

Remember one thing while answering this question- “Everyone fails”. Don’t try to hide your failures instead be ready to talk about it.

In my last organization my goal was to manage a project for our biggest client. I was so excited that I have estimated two weeks for that project. But that ended up taking three weeks and I have failed in doing time estimation. Clients were not happy with timelines. That day I have learnt that always add some extra days in your expectations. I took this experience and use this in my next project. I told clients to complete that in four weeks and we have completed before time. As a result, client is very happy to hear that.

To measure efficiency or effectiveness of any strategy you must take care how it is connected to your actions of achieving the goals. An effective strategy is the one which uses the allocated resources and delivers the output in settled time frame which meets all quality standards of an organizations. Being aware of opportunities, strengths, weakness and success of any goal is also an effective way to measure the strategy.

Last time changes are common part of any project. Don’t panic in that case instead following mentioned steps-

• Know the reason from customer for changing priorities and circulate that in team.
• Notify your team about all the changes at earliest and tell them to analyse.
• Tell customer about all the risk associated with changing priorities in future.
• Make an estimation to implement all those changes and communicate it with client.
• Don’t hesitate to ask for more helping hands.
• Follow up.

You interviewer wants to see your ability to compromise and how you handle conflicts in workplace. So, keep your answer simple and stop overdramatizing any situation.

Use STAR method to answer this.

• Situation: Tell them about the whole situation in brief but don’t dwell on it.
• Task: Talk about the task or goal which you must achieve.
• Action: Steps you have taken to avoid conflicts
• Result: Result in the end.

Avoid these kind of response

• Talking negative point of co-worker.
• Avoid taking name in your example.
• Telling them that you get along with everyone.