Tips for Stakeholder Management Questions

Remember that interviewers are looking for:

• Flexible communication skills.
• Ability to navigate work relationships effectively in times of change, challenge, and uncertainty.
• Experience building and maintaining trust.

This is a lot to demonstrate at once. Here are some additional tips to help you prep.

Study Company Values

Companies are always assessing for culture fit. Every time you answer a behavioral question, try to showcase yourself as a match to the existing company culture.

This might seem extra-scary if you have a consulting background, as this might be your first time as an embedded team member, but we promise - it's easier to do than you think. Here are the company mission and values pages for a few top tech companies.

• Amazon Leadership Principles
• Facebook Core Values
• Google's "Ten Things We Know to Be True"

Be sure to look for similar information on your target companies.

Choose One Big Project

Behavioral questions ask you to describe situations from your past. Choosing the right story is key. We'll build a bigger, more comprehensive story bank in a later lesson, so focus on project complexity (as a proxy for complex stakeholder interactions) for now.

Begin with the prompt:

Tell me about the biggest cross-functional team project you’ve led or participated in, including when it happened, the purpose of the team, and the results achieved.

Diagram Relevant Stakeholders

Visual aids help you properly capture all important stakeholders and how your actions affected them. Try this schema to help you capture all the stakeholders you worked with:

Think through the priorities of each group, what they wanted, and how you navigated and balanced these needs. Spend extra time on any disagreements. You'll surely be asked follow-ups about how you handled conflict.

Fill in Context

Interviewers want to get a sense of a few key things. Make sure you include:

• The underlying pace of the organization. Were you under pressure to undergo rapid change? Or were you working at more of a steady-state?
• The size, importance, and makeup of the teams involved. For example, did you work with a team of three? five? twenty-five? Were they junior or senior? And how many functions were involved?
• Who you influenced with a specific focus on the level of the person (i.e., peers, subordinates, superiors, executives, outside consultants, and vendors).
• the growth of your role and influence. Do you eventually grow more involved at the strategy and planning level, and in cross-functional leadership positions?
• The overall success of the team projects and your specific role in achieving this.

Here are a few additional tips to keep in mind.

• Use numbers wherever you can. Don't get so caught up in relationship mapping that you forget to quantify your results. Interviewers want to know who you worked with, but at the end of the day, results are your strongest asset.
• Don't lose focus on your own contributions. Interviews are not the place to minimize your contributions.
• Always demonstrate self-reflection and willingness to learn. Things won't always go smoothly. Interviewers love questions about the "hard stuff" because they want to know how you'll respond to adversity. There's nothing wrong with an occasional failure - as long as you learn from it.