All questions tagged leadership and development - Consulting Q&A - PrepLounge.com

Hi Fred,

MBB have a wide variety of alumni who become CXO in some of the biggest companies worldwide, I would say thus you will be totally safe going into consulting if you target a senior management position. In general, coming from MBB will allow you to have a faster career track than going directly into the industry, therefore not only you won’t be stuck in a position, but could actually reach faster your goal.

There is one element though which is important to underline: it doesn’t make sense to go into consulting exclusively for the exit opportunities in the industry/faster career path if you are not passionate/interested in the consulting job per se. You need indeed to like the actual job to do well in consulting, which then will lead to good exits as well. Thus, if consulting is merely a faster way to reach your goal but you are not passionate about the job itself (whether you like or not case prep it’s a good initial proxy for that), it may be better to consider an industry role from the beginning.

Hope this helps,

Francesco

Hi,

1. When the consultants ask you to provide an example of leading others or working in teams, most probably they are looking for a leadership story

For those of you applying for junior positions, leadership does not necessarily mean being a supervisor. Organizing various stakeholders, being in charge of a study project, leading your team in a competition - all these examples will make a good story. Leadership is about finding an opportunity and managing people to achieve it.

Good leadership story should have a number of elements:

1. Did you take additional responsibility (more than it was expected from you)
2. Did the situation has a real problem?
3. Did you have your own team of direct reports / a group of external stakeholders whose work you had to organize?
4. Have you organized the process to structure and simplify the work of other people?
5. Did you motivate others?
6. Have you used the leadership tools that consultants usually use on their projects?
7. How big was the impact?

2. When the interviewers ask you to provide an example of resolving a team- or personal conflict, Changing someone's mind, Developing and implementing a solution or overcoming difficulties - it means they want to hear a personal impact story.

Personal impact is a story of influencing people and persuading them to follow your solution.

3. When you have to provide an example of Overcoming challenges, Achieving a personal goal, Failing something, Creating new approaches or doing something innovative - these are the stories about your achievement and entrepreneurial drive

What can be a good achievement? First of all, the achievement should be important for you personally. It should prove that you set ambitious goals and achieve them, very often over and above than planned with innovative solutions

Best

Hi there!

Based on your short description of the context, both examples are fine. However, the real question is: in which of those contexts did you encounter interpersonally challenging situations in a team setting, to explain your detailed "Actions" and "Decision-making rationale" (according to the PARADE framework) in those situation. The context as such is actually secondary.

Additional comment: As a rule of thumb, the more current your example is, the better - all other factory being equal, chose the more recent example.

(Why? Firstly, as an interviewer, I am interested in your current skillset and abilities. Therefore, I am not really so much interested in your actions and decision-making rationale several years ago as opposed to several weeks or months ago. And hopefully, you developed yourself further over the last couple of years, so that your actions and decision-making rationale were different today, given the possibility that you would be in the same situation again.)

Hope that helps!

Robert

Hi! I don't know if you are familiar with the STAR approach, but it is always a good base for any situational question. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result - it is pretty self-explanatory. Putting that framework more in line with your context of managing-leadership skills, I would answer the question by quickly describing the nature of the project and the diversity of the team, the conflict that arouse (or could have), and then how you dealt/fixed it. I just want to add that although consulting firms value team players, in these type of personal-interview questions they also want to hear about YOUR achievements, so make sure you let them know how YOU behaved as a leader. Hope this was helpful and good luck!