Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Building Confidence Through Data and Evidence Based Argumentation
Learn to overcome skepticism using data and evidence: ROI calculations with clear assumptions, case studies of similar companies achieving similar transformations, pilot or early-phase results demonstrating success, adoption metrics and employee satisfaction surveys, expert perspectives or analyst reports, quantified risks of inaction. Distinguish between informed decisions grounded in evidence and hopeful speculation. When you lack data: acknowledge it, explain how you'll obtain it, and establish timeline for getting evidence. Show comfort discussing uncertainty while remaining confident in approach.
Working With Managers and Leadership
Evaluate how the candidate partners with managers and leaders to align priorities and deliver outcomes. Topics include managing up and down, clarifying expectations, soliciting and applying guidance, communicating status and risks, escalating decisions appropriately, taking initiative within a defined scope, reconciling conflicting direction from multiple leaders, and building trust with managers. Interviewers will look for examples that show judgment about when to seek guidance, how the candidate translates direction into execution, and how they maintain alignment over time.
Building & Maintaining Executive Sponsorship
How you develop strong executive sponsors for transformation, keep them engaged over multi-year programs, leverage their influence to remove barriers, and maintain their commitment when transformation hits challenges.
Cross Functional Collaboration and Coordination
Comprehensive competency covering how individuals plan, communicate, negotiate, and execute work across organizational boundaries to deliver shared outcomes. This topic includes building and maintaining relationships with product managers, engineers, designers, researchers, operations, sales, finance, legal, compliance, human resources, and people operations; translating priorities and terminology between technical and nontechnical audiences; surfacing and resolving dependencies and handoffs; negotiating trade offs and aligning incentives and timelines; establishing decision rights, meeting cadences, and clear communication channels; designing inclusive processes for cross functional decision making; influencing without formal authority and building coalitions; resolving conflicts constructively and giving and receiving feedback; and measuring shared success and program outcomes. At more senior levels this also includes stakeholder mapping, executive collaboration and sponsorship, navigating organizational politics, managing multi functional programs that involve complex regulatory or compliance constraints, and sustaining long term trust across teams. Interviewers will probe for concrete examples, frameworks and tactics used to align stakeholders, the measurable outcomes delivered through collaboration, and how the candidate balanced competing metrics and priorities while maintaining momentum.
Influence and Persuasion
Skills and tactics for persuading and influencing decisions and behaviors when you do not have formal authority, and for scaling influence across teams and organizations. Candidates should demonstrate how to build credibility and trust tailor messages to stakeholder priorities, use data and customer insight to make the business case, tell compelling stories that connect to outcomes, recruit allies and champions, negotiate and compromise, and create operational changes such as standards processes or tooling to lock in gains. Interviewers will probe for examples of influencing technical and non technical stakeholders resolving disagreements building consensus and measuring the impact of influence on adoption quality speed or other business outcomes. For senior levels include examples of cross organizational influence and governance for sustained change.
Cross Functional Leadership and Influence
Covers leading and influencing across organizational boundaries without formal authority. Topics include building coalitions, stakeholder management, negotiating trade offs, aligning diverse teams around shared objectives, advocating for customer needs inside product and engineering discussions, and shaping strategic decisions. Candidates should be able to describe how they build credibility, navigate competing priorities, secure resources, and persuade partners across finance, operations, human resources, and business units. Emphasis is on interpersonal influence, stakeholder mapping, communication strategies, and examples that demonstrate measurable impact from cross functional initiatives.
Stakeholder Engagement and Management
Techniques and practices for identifying, prioritizing, and engaging stakeholders to secure alignment and adoption. Topics include stakeholder mapping and segmentation by interest and influence, designing sponsor and champion roadmaps, building coalitions and advisory forums, negotiating trade offs and requirements, co creating solutions with affected groups, operationalizing engagement through workshops and working sessions, establishing governance and accountability, and monitoring stakeholder sentiment and readiness. Candidates should be able to explain how they gathered diverse inputs, balanced competing priorities, maintained credibility when compromises were needed, and sustained engagement during planning and implementation.
Team Fit and Working Style
Evaluates a candidate's preferred ways of working and how those preferences align with a prospective team and manager. Core areas include autonomy versus structured workflows, individual contribution versus paired and cross functional work, preference for frequent touch bases versus independent execution, communication channels and cadence, feedback giving and receiving style and cadence, decision making and ownership boundaries, meeting cadence and structure, collaboration tools and handoffs, code review and onboarding practices, remote versus onsite expectations and availability, adaptability to different team norms, and approaches to conflict resolution. Interviewers will probe for concrete examples that demonstrate successful integration into new teams, alignment with a manager's style, adaptation to differing expectations, and the ability to articulate negotiation points for effective collaboration. Candidates should be ready to state their working preferences honestly, show flexibility, describe specific past scenarios and outcomes, ask clarifying questions about team norms and manager expectations, and propose concrete practices to ensure productive alignment.
Handling Ambiguity and Complexity
Covers how a candidate reasons and acts when information is incomplete, requirements are unclear, situations are complex, or interviewers pose unconventional open ended questions. Interviewers assess both thought process and execution: how you clarify ambiguous goals, surface and validate assumptions, ask the right stakeholders the right questions, and balance moving forward with minimizing risk. Demonstrate problem decomposition, hypothesis driven thinking, trade off analysis, and how you document decisions or fallbacks. For behavioral stories describe the context, the specific uncertainty or unusual prompt, the actions you took to gather information or make decisions, and the measurable outcome or learning. Also include how you handle pressure and maintain stakeholder alignment when requirements change, how you prototype or iterate to reduce uncertainty, and when you escalate or pause to avoid costly mistakes. For unconventional interview prompts explain your reasoning out loud, state assumptions, break the question into parts, show intellectual curiosity, and describe next steps you would take in a real situation.