Interview Question of the Week: Tell me about a time that you facilitated a meeting

photo credit: e³°°°

Sample Interview Question of the Week: Tell me about a time that you were responsible for facilitating an important meeting for your company.  What was the situation?  How did you prepare?  What was the outcome?

Regardless of your position, if you work in an organization that has meetings, you need to be able to facilitate a meeting.  Some companies rotate responsibility for departmental meetings for just this reason.  So, if you’re applying for a role in management or want to be in management someday, this question may come up.

What many people don’t understand is that conducting effective meetings is more than sending out the agenda and making sure there are adequate chairs — it’s a skillset that can make or break a project.

Things that a well-crafted answer to this interview question might mention:

• Logistics.  Booking the room, arranging for AV equipment, communicating the details, collecting RSVPs.
• Communications.  Were there presentation materials? Reference documents?  What information was shared?
• Format.  Was it a typical sit-down at the big mahogany table?  A brainstorming session?  How was the format decided?
• Scope.  For meetings that don’t occur regularly, what was the meeting created to address?  What steps did you take to keep the scope manageable?
• Facilitation.  Did you lead a discussion?  Handle objections?  Make sure everyone was heard?  Steer the discussion towards a decision?
• Hiccups.  Were there challenges?  Did the conversation stray?  How did you address the issue?
• Follow-up.  Were there minutes?  Action items assigned?

If you can demonstrate that you designed a meeting with an end result in mind, facilitated it in a way that accomplished that result, and didn’t bring down the company in the meantime, you should be in good shape.

Sample answer:

My supervisor asked me to facilitate a discussion of our options with the goal of creating a recommendation for the final product design.  I did all of the basics as far as setting up time and place and ordering bagels and the like.  The harder part was determining what information we would need to make an informed decision.  In the days leading up to the meeting I worked with my team to put together a summary of specifications and all the schematics for the design.  I put together an agenda, including a review of the design decisions made thus far, opportunity for questions and clarification, and then a mini-brainstorming session where we explored all of our options.  We’ve only recently begun to use more interactive meeting formats, so I knew my energy level, preparation, and encouragement would be key to working through the issue.  Our final recommendation was for a design that we all felt exceeded the specs and would be very competitive.  I received several comments afterwards about the positive outcome and the success of the discussion.  I was glad to see that the planning and strategy led to a high-quality product.

Related posts:

1. Interview Question of the Week: Tell me about your last supervisor.
2. Interview Question of the Week: What do you know about this organization?
3. Interview Question of the Week: What would your last supervisor say about you?
4. Interview Question of the Week: What can you do for us that others can’t?
5. Interview Question of the Week: Communication and project success

Tagged as: behavioral interviewing, Career, interview, interview prep, job change, job hunt, job search, Management, meetings