Making hasty decisions

I disagree with Ian here and recommend to never give an answer like he recommended in his response. We are all humans that sometimes make decisions when agitated, emotionally charged or exhausted (especially the last one in this job ;). Stating that you don't makes you either a psychopath and I don't want you in my team. Or a liar that's full of yourself and I don't want you in my team.

Decisions in this question can refer to simple things like sending an email to your staffing team when being put on case you really don't like that you might have phrased differently if you had waited a day. It might be the decision to involve a supervisor into a process too early because you were too excited about preliminary results and you could have waited and refined a bit if you had waited. Might be you didn't put enough time into your homework assignment because you wanted to meet with your significant other....

We are making hundreds of decisions in a profession context every day. Stating that each and every one of them throughout your career was always rational and the best you could have made in light off all available info at that point is just not credible and shows your inability to self reflect.

Describe an honest situation, explain what the context and implications of that decision was and what you learned about yourself. That way you give it a positive spin and be constructive about it.

Hey there,

If you come up with such a story its important to have the following elements:

• Introduce the context and provide some reasons that partially justify your emotional reaction
• Discuss your actions and their impact with the important thing being that the impact was miniscule
• Discuss how you remedied your initial reaction, reversed the impact, and made sure to take away some learnings from it

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Florian

I couldnt agree more with Henning! My gosh... its time we are honest about those emotional situations we face pretty much every day and explain what you have learnt and how are you managing it. Please never ever say "I've managed to keep my cool throughout my career "- this is absolute BS and no one will believe you.

Hi there,

This is a classic "conflict" personal story. Personally, I would respond by saying I've managed to keep my cool throughout my career and not been emotionally charged. I know this sounds like a cop-out, but this is genuinely the case for me!

That said, if there is a real event when this happened to you, you should talk through this event. You need to pick a moment where the repurcusions of your emotionally charged decision were small. You need to articulate how you then fixed the problem. Finally, you need to explain why that doesn't happen anymore (i.e. now, I always do x,y , and z)

Agreee with Henning and Adi. The important thing is to actually answer the question but also restrospective on the learnings you had from that experience. I would avoid an example where the outcome is blantantly negative and your actions may raise alarm bells in terms of moral and ethics.