Leader of a Team

When I was first promoted to team leader, I consistently struggled to ensure that my team achieved their sales targets on a Friday.

I sought the advice of more experienced team leaders to find out how they motivated their teams through the Friday slog.

Acting on the advice of the other team leaders, I implemented a combination of incentives over the next few weeks and successfully boosted my team's sales figures.

As part of my regular team monitoring, I assess all advisers call quality in order to measure them against the relevant DRIs. When reviewing calls for one adviser, I noticed a trend where the adviser was quite abrupt with callers. I scheduled a meeting in private with that adviser, which I prepared for by reviewing supporting information (including their performance statistics for the month).

They want to hear things like how you hold team meetings to discuss the week ahead and allocate time slots and deadlines for various projects.

I would first get a lowdown on the actual problem and try to work out a solution to the conflict. I have seen many conflicts getting worked out if the right amount of time is given, or if there is some opportunity that is bigger than personal and trivial issues between people.

Leadership has been described as a process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task. For example, some understand a leader simply as somebody whom people follow, or as somebody who guides or directs others, while others define leadership as organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal.

Effective leaders typically make smart choices. They must also be willing to make unpopular decisions or act when others are unwilling. People often avoid making important decisions because they fear they'll become unpopular or be criticized by management. When answering these questions, provide personal examples from previous work experiences. Describe the steps you take to solve problems, make decisions, conduct risk management, and evaluate results.

✫ Breaking your workload up into daily or hourly targets to ensure that the next small success is never too far away.

✫ Living a healthy life-style. Eating the right foods and drinking lots of water in the office can have a big impact on your concentration levels.

✫ Motivating others and promoting a positive atmosphere in the office.

The term "leadership skills" typically encapsulates several business critical competencies including effectively communicating vision, motivating and inspiring others to excel, empowering others, help others to grow and develop, turning vision into reality, delegating responsibility, and making tough decisions. These are the skills that interviewers will be testing for when conducting behavioral leadership interviews.

An opportunity to discuss what has attracted you to this line of work and what inspires you to persevere through the tough times. In a sales role, this could be the adrenaline rush of meeting daily targets, whilst in a customer-service role, this could be the personal satisfaction you gain through helping people.

Recommend thinking about a specific instance and then discussing this in detail. Outline the process stage by stage and, if there are areas that need improvement, focus your answers on the solutions instead of the problems.

Talk about the benefits the company has to offer and how they suit you at this point in your career. For example, if you are joining the company as a graduate, discuss how you plan to utilize their highly-structured training scheme.

Also comment on the company's reputation and try to make reference to a recent success you have seen on their website.

A leader is someone who has the authority to tell a group of people what to do. In the simplest sense, a leader is somebody whom people follow. A group with no leader is called leaderless. A leader is one who gets others to take action towards a common goal. One job of a leader is to govern the actions of followers. A leader also represents a group or company.

You will confirm that you are creative in your job role, and markedly so compared to some of your colleagues. You should then proceed to give examples which demonstrate this.

This question gives you the opportunity to tell the interviewer about how you developed a Monday-morning prize-giving incentive to get your team fired up for the week. Or how you introduced daily staff meetings to keep your team engaged with the goals of the organisation. Or implemented a buddy-up training program to help your new recruits settle in faster.

Whilst working in a XYZ as a leader, I introduced Sugar Fridays giving my team sweets and treats to get them through the Friday slog.

Prior to introducing the incentive, I compiled a backlog of sales figures from previous Fridays. I then introduced the incentive on a trial period, continued collecting data and cross-compared the results. There was an obvious peak in sales figures and so the incentive became permanent.

I started to notice that a lot of customers were complaining about feeling patronized by my agents. In response to this, I listened to the calls these complaints stemmed from and realized that words such as wonderful were being over used.

I then had a meeting with the worst offenders in my team and suggested changes that they could make to correct this behavior. After this meeting, customer complaints reduced and sales increased.

The interviewer will be looking for an example of where you have taken this insight and subsequently developed, implemented and improved your sales process. This could be through the introduction of training, post-sale procedures, a change in marketing communications, or other process improvements, to ensure that the cause of any future complaint is eradicated.

As a leader or manager charged with delivering excellent customer feedback, you will know how important it is that customer feedback and insight are monitored, measured and acted upon, whenever appropriate or necessary.

Here your potential employer wants to know that you are capable of organising yourself properly and ensuring that nothing gets forgotten.

This question is a test of character and is especially important if you are being interviewed for a management role.

An ideal answer will demonstrate that you are able to support your team, even when things do not go according to plan.