Leadership Palette

Question 1

Tell me about a time when you had to make a difficult decision. Specifically, what considerations were involved and how did you decide which ones to focus on?

Answer 1

Switching from Adobe Connect to Webex even though it didn’t have all the same features and meant re-training everyone.

Focus on the critical insights of the problem, acknowledge the tradeoffs

Question 2

Tell me about a time when you had to say no to something you really wanted to do

Answer 2

Instructor resources project - had to work Wrike to replace fw. Importance of focus , I was the only one who was able to do the fw replacement, where as a lot of people in the org could have worked on instructor resources

Question 3

Tell me about a time you made a mistake because you weren’t thinking clearly.

Answer 3

Missed using different task types (deferred, not just active and completed) in my report. This also works for dig into the details.

Question 4

Tell me about a time when someone delivered bad news to you at an inopportune time, and how you reacted to that.

Answer 4

Versioning control in our content repository for health regulated products

Question 5

Tell me about a time when you had to caution someone about taking a next step because you felt the timing wasn’t right. What was the result?

Answer 5

When we got the proposal for a new learning portal with all these feature requests, and we had to temper expectations and re-direct to making a strong business case.

Examples:
Learning journal
Jeopardy style game board
badging or achievement system

You can use this for a variety of difference answers, like company values or my own goals pushing aside someone else’s goals.

Question 6

Tell me about a time when you held on too tightly to a way of doing things when you should have changed.

Answer 6

Adopting Slack as a primary means of escalation because it’s hard to track and leads to frequent task shifting, and also tickets ask for info up front

Question 7

Describe a small detail in a product or service that you use frequently and that makes all the difference to you.

Answer 7

The training report card now offers the ability to see EOC survey status and time stamp

App-triggered focus for setting do not disturb or EAMES

Question 8

When was the last time your curiosity led you to discover something exciting? Tell me about it.

Stay curious

Answer 8

SF Symbols beta

or Eames

Question 9

Tell me about a time when you knew you were doing something a certain way because that’s how it had always been done. Why was that and what did you do?

Stay curious

Answer 9

Meeting attendance at our monthly OSV meeting. It was inherited that we did a roll call, but no one questioned it.

Or a data example, policing double-fail move into the role, when this turned out to be a very rare occurence.

Or the LMS Class Setup Report being emailed out every week

Question 10

Tell me about a time when you’ve had to modify your approach one or more times to a problem at work.

Approach problems flexibly

Answer 10

Instructor Feedback project started in Chorus and moved to Tableau, because Chorus is a knowledge-sarhing platform

Question 11

Describe to me the steps you take to ensure high quality in your work. Give me an example from your experience.

Fight for excellence

Answer 11

Get buy in from all levels of the organization (Sonar to Help Central), pre-mortem, communicate early and often especially about timing, understand “known unknowns”

The hardest thing I did was move farmerswife through an infosec review.

Question 12

Tell me about an experience where you had to go along with a decision you didn’t agree with at first. How did you deal with it?

Listen, challenge, and commit

Answer 12

Better to use supporting TPMs in Slack vs. forcing them to file tickets
“farmerswife” to “fw”

Question 13

Tell me about a time when you made a commitment at work that you could not keep. What were the consequences?

Foster trust

Answer 13

Quarterly compliance scorecards had to get postponed because of all the work getting everyone to remote training.

Foster trust with stakeholders, be up front with updated status whether good or bad

Question 14

Tell me about a time when your offer of help resulted in a much better outcome for someone else.

Give help

Answer 14

Coaching another instructor on their delivery – Don’t put more words where a comma goes

Or giving feedback to an instructor (observations)

Question 15

Tell me about a time when someone else’s advice or expertise made your project successful.

Seek expertise and experience

Answer 15

Either going to Tableau office hours for how to sort stacked bars according to a segment’s percentage

Or going to IDMS to ask for help on AppleConnect integration

Question 16

Tell me a success story about how you helped someone to develop

Attract, develop, and share talent

Answer 16

Coaching another instructor on their delivery – Don’t put more words where a comma goes

Question 17

Give me an example of a time when a team member had difficulty establishing a relationship that was critical to their project.

Know people

Answer 17

Gillian works more on the contract or budgeting side and doesn’t work directly with end users, so I acted as a conduit between her and the various stakeholders on the delivery team.

Question 18

While exploring new ideas and solutions, how do you ensure you have considered all the options?

Approach problems flexibly

Answer 18

Stakeholders from all levels of the organization. Pre-mortem and ask about how past projects have gone

Question 19

How do you prioritize projects and tasks when scheduling your time? Give me an example.

Answer 19

I generally follow a framework called Getting things Done (GTD), which isn’t a joke. It comes from a productivity consultant named David Allen and it just involves organizing all of your incoming tasks into a single channel, then prioritizing them based on urgency, who the requestor is, and LOE. I not only support long term projects but I also intake new tasks from Slack, email, ticketing systems like Radar and Help Central, new tasks from meetings.

Question 20

What are your three greatest strengths?

Answer 20

Approach problems flexibly
Facilitation / communcatino from background in training

Functional Expertise / Domain knowledge
Cultural Understanding
Core Competencies (deadlines, multi-projects, organization)

Question 21

When is the last time you tried something new?

Answer 21

Automating an email in Datalab

Question 22

Tell me about a time when the complexity of a task kept you from being successful. Thinking back now, what would you have done differently?

Answer 22

Instructor accreditation program was over-engineered, and even as it was trying to automated, it still required too many actions

Question 23

Tell me about your journey at Apple

Answer 23

I’ve Been at Apple 11 years, started as an Instructor with AppleCare, delivering everything from new advisor training to more advanced call center queues, to eventually train the trainer classes.

8 years ago I joined the LSOPs team where I am now. They were in the process of migrating from their old Learning Management System which was called iDesk on the front end and Plateau backend to our current LMS, the AppleLearn front end and Saba backend. And they were looking for an instructor to design and teach a class to the larger training org on the new LMS as well as do some user testing and reporting.

The role has evolved a lot since I started, originally it was intended to mostly be classroom, and while I still do some classroom delivery, I also balance that time with managing projects, being an LMS administrator, and data analytics work.

Question 24

See around corners and understand downstream impacts of decisions

Answer 24

Having 3 separate spaces for instructor schedules instead of 1 space for all 3 regions

Question 25

Tell me about a time when your intuition about something contradicted what the data said

Answer 25

OSVs passing advisors into the role even though they failed the exam was a very small number, not a big enough problem to pursue, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze

Question 26

Tell me about a time you were faced with a complex problem and didn’t know where to begin. What process did you rely upon to gain clarity and direction?

Answer 26

Getting fw to pass info sec. Start with what is published, then you can go into meetings more informed.

Ask for help, not just from SMEs but also from someone who has been there before.

Question 27

Tell me about a time when you saw a project in jeopardy due to conflicting data.

Answer 27

tracking hourly training delivery in JAPAC vs. training days in AMR

Question 28

When was the last time you felt bogged down by a lack of clarity? Tell me about it, and what you did, if anything, to respond.

Answer 28

Project to lower localization costs, but not knowing the full end to end process or how Apple’s AI initiatives might open new opportunities.
Come up with our “known unknowns”

Take the actions that we know for sure are necessary