Natalie Fisher teaches how to answer "Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership skills" using the SARI formula: Situation, Action, Result, Interesting features. She walks through an example of a new manager fixing a disgruntled team through one-on-one meetings, emphasizing personal actions over "we" statements.
In this video, we'll talk about the question, tell me a time about a time when you demonstrated leadership skills. This question comes to us from Isuru, so thank you, Isuru. I hope I'm saying your name correctly. In this video, we will cover why this question is asked, How to answer the question with an example, and how to wrap it up gracefully. So stay tuned. All right, why is this question asked? They want to see how you directed somebody or a group of people or led a team or how you turned around a situation that wasn't doing well. So for the purpose of this video, we are going to use the SARI formula and an example. So if you're not familiar with the SARI formula, it stands for situation, action, result, and interesting features. So to tell a complete story, you need a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the story should be fun and interesting to listen to. So that's what we're going to do here. You should paint a clear picture with your story. So how to answer. So say that you were assigned to a new team and this team wasn't doing very well and they weren't very happy because they'd had a lot of changes happen in their department in the last little while. So you're dealing with a disgruntled team and you've just come into the situation. So that's how you set the stage. Step 2 is the action. So what action did you take? What did you do? It's extremely important here that you talk about specifically what you did and not what we did or how we proceeded because that doesn't matter. They just want to know about you specifically. So continuing with our example, say some of the actions that you may have taken were scheduling one-on-one meetings with each person on the team where you ask them some questions around what they thought was going on with the team, what was holding them back, and what each person thought that you should do as their new manager, team lead coming in to fix the situation. And you also ask them what they would like to happen, what their ideal outcome would be. Step 3, result. So here is where you talk about your happy ending. So for example, in this example, say you took action on the main thing the team had mentioned that was holding them back. So you talked to everyone on the team and they all kind of mentioned the same key thing. And you now keep one-on-one meetings weekly on the calendar to make sure that the team stays strong and are communicating with you. And everyone is a lot happier now and you're proud of the work the team did and of the turnaround. So that would be an example of a great result with a happy ending. Step 4, interesting features. So here you can talk about things like servant leadership, or you can mention resources that you've used in the past, books you've read, employee engagement nuggets of wisdom. It can be anything that you found interesting looking back at the situation and what really helped you turn it around. And there we have it, an example of leadership skills and how they were demonstrated. Now, if you don't have an example like this, don't worry. You don't have to lead a group of soldiers into battle to have a good story about leadership. It can start with just one person. If you want some help coming up with your own stories for these types of questions, I've got you covered in the downloadable guide you can click below to get. And what you'll get is Top 10 examples of stories that I've used in my own interviewing, and it's taken a long time to come up with all of these stories. It is challenging at first, so you do need to take some time to prepare them and think about what your greatest career stories are. In the guide, you'll also get the SARI formula breakdown step by step, psychologically why it works, and and the fill-in-the-blank templates for each question. So you'll be able to fill in the blanks. You just need to come up with your own stories. And if you are still getting stuck because you can't think of your own stories very quickly, I've also included 25 questions that you can ask yourself to come up with your stories much quicker and more effectively. You'll get all this in a beautifully designed workbook prepared specifically for you to prepare for your interviews. By the end of working through this guide, you'll be totally ready for any situational interview that comes your way and any of those tough questions that you may have gotten stuck on in the past. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next week on Natalie TV. Okay, that's the end of that video with my dog in the background. Corgi. That's not my dog, but I like dogs.
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