Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
General Communication and Soft Skills
Covers broad communication fundamentals and general interpersonal skills such as active listening, engaging conversation, explaining ideas, asking thoughtful questions, professionalism, reliability, and eagerness to learn. Includes assessment style feedback on how a candidate presents themselves during interviews and general soft skill behaviors that support effective teamwork and stakeholder interactions.
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.
Adaptive Communication and Emotional Intelligence
Covers the ability to adjust communication style, tone, content, and level of detail to fit different audiences such as engineers, finance, customers, and senior leaders, while demonstrating clarity and purpose. Includes active listening, empathy, perspective taking, and the recognition of verbal and nonverbal cues to understand others emotional states and motivations. Encompasses responding to emotional needs with professional boundaries, building trust and psychological safety, managing difficult conversations, deescalation, and tailoring feedback or persuasion strategies to stakeholder preferences. Candidates may be asked to show examples of adapting messaging across roles, demonstrating compassion while maintaining business objectivity, and creating inclusive communication practices that foster collaboration and engagement.
Influence and Organizational Navigation
This topic covers the ability to effect change and gain buy in inside organizations where one may not have formal authority, and to navigate differing organizational cultures and political dynamics ethically and effectively. Key skills include building coalitions across functions and levels, stakeholder mapping and engagement, persuasive communication and framing recommendations in business terms, tailoring approaches to risk appetite and organizational structure, reading and adapting to cultural norms, maintaining integrity while navigating politics, and creating strategies to obtain sponsorship from skeptical leaders or resistant teams. Assessment may include situational judgment, examples of coalition building, techniques for framing proposals to nontechnical audiences, and approaches for adapting compliance or change initiatives to fit the organizational context.
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.
Communicating SEO Value to Non SEO Executives
Prepare to explain SEO strategy, performance, and ROI to executives who may not have deep SEO expertise. Discuss how you translate SEO metrics into business language and make a compelling case for SEO investment.
Conflict Resolution and Mediation
Approaches for diagnosing and resolving disagreements between stakeholders or teams to restore progress while preserving relationships. Topics include root cause analysis of disputes, reframing conflicts around shared objectives, structured facilitation and mediation techniques, interest based negotiation and principled bargaining, creating options for mutual gain, active listening and de escalation methods, escalation protocols and crisis handling, and follow up to ensure durable outcomes. Candidates should be able to explain frameworks they use to surface underlying interests broker compromises between technical and business priorities decide when to escalate and measure long term outcomes of resolved conflicts.
Business Partnerships and Influence
Focuses on the skills needed to establish and sustain trust based partnerships with business stakeholders, senior leaders, and cross functional teams, and to influence decisions without formal authority. Candidates should demonstrate how they discover stakeholder goals, constraints, and priorities by asking effective questions and actively listening; how they surface trade offs and negotiate competing priorities; and how they translate priorities between business and technical audiences. Interviewers probe for examples of setting shared goals, establishing collaboration norms, persuading and building consensus, maintaining credibility, and managing long term partner relationships. Candidates should provide concrete examples showing how partnerships influenced product or project roadmaps, produced joint outcomes, and improved measurable business outcomes or key performance indicators. At more senior levels emphasize strategic alignment, long term partnership management, and examples where the partnership shaped strategy or delivered sustained business impact.