How to answer an interview question on your organisational skills?

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Detailed preparation and practice are the key to a successful interview. Identifying key behaviours or competencies is an essential part of your preparation plan and you should use the job specification to identify the competencies against which you are being assessed. The following list is not exhaustive, but it covers all the typical competences and should provide a useful checklist.

Key Behaviours: 

• Organisation and Planning
• Communication to include Influencing and Negotiation
• Decision-making and Problem Solving
• Strategic Thinking
• Service Delivery
• Commercial Focus
• Personal and Team development
• Teamwork and Collaboration

The most common interview questions are designed to test behaviours. This type of interview is often referred to as a competency-based interview, the basic premise being that if you can demonstrate how you handled a particular situation and delivered against a specific task, then you should be able to replicate your actions when faced with a similar situation in a new role. It is crucial when selecting your examples that they are highly relevant to the role, if possible recent, and have a degree of complexity and challenge.

We will take a deep dive into the behaviour ‘Organisation and Planning’, using the STAR format to examine which elements should be included in a model answer. The competency may be named differently, but it is essentially assessing you on the same skills. For example, Civil Service Interview Questions refer to the competency on organisational skills as Delivering at Pace.  Amazon uses the principle, ‘Delivery Results’. 

Building a strong STAR example to a behaviour question at interview:

The STAR method or format is the ideal and almost expected way to deliver an answer to a competency or behaviour-based question. Using STAR allows you to set the scene, show what you did, how you did it, and explain the overall outcome. You should use ‘I’ and not ‘We’ when giving your answer. 

Situation: Include where you were, who you were working for and a brief synopsis of what was happening, do not go into detail about why this was happening.

Task: The interview panel will want to be able to identify very clearly from your example the task that you had to undertake. Too often candidates are vague about the task at hand, at which point the answer loses credence. 

Actions: This is not about what did you but how did it. In other words, could I replicate your actions upon hearing your story? Never be shy about taking credit for your behaviour.

Result: What was the outcome and wider impact of this example? What did you learn, why is the example relevant to the skills required to do the job and what specific value does it demonstrate?

Key Steps to building a strong answer to the Competency ‘Organisation and Planning’.

1. You work in a busy, fast paced environment with a lot of activity. Business as usual is consuming much of your working day.

2. An additional unexpected project arrives on your desk; you need to think carefully about how you are going to deliver on this new piece of work while also ensuring that business as usual does not suffer. If you are leading a team then you must consider what impact this may have and the pressure it may put them under. 

3. The key is to demonstrate that you were able to prioritise all the work you were doing. You therefore mapped out a plan regarding how you would deliver against all key work streams. You might have considered delegating certain tasks and you may have sought changes to non-urgent deadlines, canvassed help from other teams and discussed with your team the options regarding how this could be best delivered.

4. An important part of being able to deliver work under pressure and to tight deadlines is a focus on maintaining high quality outputs. The consideration here is that too much work can lead to reduced quality. 

5. As you work through the example it is important that you incorporate as much challenge as possible, so for example, if things happened which impacted your ability to complete the project, then you should demonstrate how you regrouped, revised your plan, and moved forward. If you manage a team then you should demonstrate how you considered resources and the additional workload on the team and how you removed any blockages that might have impeded their ability to deliver.

6. To summarise, you will need to demonstrate that the actions you took delivered excellent work on time and that everyone was still ready for the next task. You must show that you prioritised, listened to those around you for good ideas, set about developing a work plan, redistributed other work and not only kept the project on track but insured high quality throughout. This will convince the panel that when faced with multiple and conflicting priorities, you are not only able to cope but continue to inspire and motivate those around you.

Example questions for the Behaviour/Competency ‘Organisation and Planning’.

• Describe a time when you (and your team) delivered something under difficult circumstances and to a tight deadline.
• Tell us about a time when you were unable to complete a task within the set deadline. What action did you take?
• When you have led a team in a fast-paced environment, how did you maintain positive motivation and resilience?
• Tell us about a time when you dealt with a project which had gone off track.
• Describe a time when you had to manage competing priorities to deliver a project under difficult circumstances.
• Describe a situation when you had to make a change to deliver a project under difficult circumstances.

It should not be necessary for you to develop multiple examples to answer questions on a single competency. If your example has sufficient complexity and challenge, then you should be able to adapt your story to answer specific questions. Although it may sound obvious, the key is to listen carefully to the interviewer’s question and ensure that you place emphasis on the part of your answer which is most relevant to the question at hand. Having completed and practised this competency, you can look to develop examples and answers for the other behaviours which you have identified within the Job specification. 

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