Amazon Interview Coaching - Earn Trust

Hey folks, they won coach here. In this video, I will share with you a coaching call that I did with the candidate about the earn trust leadership principle. I think this time the candidate did pretty well. I thought the story was strong, delivery was logical. He generally followed the star format. I did have some feedback that he could take to improve his delivery, but generally speaking, I thought the example, the example was good. Obviously, whether or not he put a satisfy a specific bar for a particular level, that is something that's hard to judge. But it was generally in line with the kind of behaviors that I would be looking for in Canon, that's one I used to interview. That being said, I think my biggest piece of feedback, the more I listen to the recording is that I think the story would have been a much stronger example of behaviors on insist on the highest standards leadership principle. And that is because generally speaking, earn trust and the question here was describe a time when you needed to influence someone who had a different opinion about a shared goal. This is really about being able to build collaborative relationships at work and being able to influence direction by listening to someone else who has a different opinion and understanding where they're coming from and effectively packaging your recommendation so that it addresses their concerns and insights. It's not calling for public disagreements, it's not have background screen commit. It's about your everyday ability to build great relationships with folks at work and be able to influence as a leader. Nothing here, the candidate story was mostly about him recognizing that the status quo or the current situation that he found himself in was unacceptable. And there were a couple of big reasons why he wasn't acceptable. In this case, it was the main reason was productivity, but loss productivity would have had a big impact on the rest of the business. So that's something that I advise the candidate at the very end of the coaching call, but the more the more I think about this situation, the more I believe that it's actually a better example of insist on the highest standards. And as always, if you want to prepare yourself in the best way possible, the best way to do it is to really go under the skin of Amazon and social principles. And you can do that in many different ways. But the one that I recommend is if you take our signature course, which is Amazon interview bootcamp and the link is in the description of the video. So that you feel the delay I give you earn trust. Could you give me an example of a time when you had to influence someone else's opinion about a shared goal? The situation in this case was so I was working on this report called InFlight Reporting with my previous employer, employer. The employer is one of the biggest tax population in the US. And the InFlight Reporting essentially was reporting our in season number since we were in education industry. So they were like those 10 weeks windows where we had most of our revenue. Those 10 week windows were critical because it was called InFlight when the season was in flight. So the situation in hand was that I used to do the RWBR while the season was on, basically weekly business reporting. And I used to do the RWBR and before the situation, everything used to be manually in a way where all the numbers, all the data used to be imported in Microsoft Excel and then you, we had to apply formulas, etc., etc., to eventually write the commentary of what happened in the past week, give them insights and send it across to all the major stakeholders including director of e-commerce, director of finance and director of marketing ops. But as we were doing that, I realized that the better way or the better approach would be that instead of spending 10 hours which was taking a lot out of my week to create the report. What if I automated the whole report and in a way get all the numbers and possibly have the contextual commentary in the tabloid dashboard itself. I approached my manager and then although I approached the manager with this solution, with the goal that what if we change our manual approach of reporting these numbers into a more automated approach which can allow us to save like 8 to 10 hours of my work hours. And people will have a more like a direct approach of reporting or watching or seeing those numbers. My manager had a differing opinion on that in a way where he said that although the automated dashboard would be a great idea but considering that we were almost like three weeks away from our inflight reporting the next season basically. So and he kind of knew that automating everything would take a lot of my mind and a lot of matter sources. But after hearing his opinion, I was in a way able to give him an outline of things that I want to do and how I will be able to tackle it. So the action that I took was I had already previously interacted with that data engineer on how to get the data into a one aggregated source because the data was very granular. So I had already interacted with that attention in terms of data issues and to change the change the opinion of my manager, I knew that this would be a concern for him. So I went to him with the proper action plan. This is what I would be doing and these are the timeline for those tasks to be completed. And although he wasn't really comfortable but he kind of trusted me on that and I was able to convert our reporting from a manual approach to an automated approach, we still sent them a manual email, a commentary email of what happened in the week. But instead of me spending eight to ten hours every week on manually pulling out the numbers and you know calculating and we calculating and aggregating and then sending those numbers, my tablet as well as was able to do it automatically. So the result or the benefit of this project was that it allowed me to save a lot of eight to ten hours a week. It allowed also although my manager had a deferring opinion with me but with the approach that I took and structured structured methodology or structured task by task action that I had, he became confident and he allowed me to do the project and my cross-stakeholder is including the names that I mentioned. They were happy about it because instead of them seeing the numbers weekly now with the automated task that I had already built, they were able to see the numbers every day because our data refreshed overnight. So they were able to see the numbers every day and when you're in flight, when you're doing millions or dollars of business in a day, some VPs or some directors do want to check those numbers numbers daily. So the short term gain was I was able to save a lot of man-offs for myself as well as my team and overall I think the long-term gain was that instead of stakeholders coming and cross-questioning a lot of questions or requesting add-up data pools or a different cut for the data, the dash would allow them to do that automatically. Okay, thank you for sharing. So let me give you some follow-ups. So it sounds like you noticed some sort of a process during your weekly business reporting that was resulting in a lot of hours, right? There was some sort of manual report that you guys need to pull. I know that usually the old things that are manual and take a long time are a problem, but again, that 10 hours per week. How big would you was it? It essentially was a 25% of my total weekly hours, right? And there were projects which we were we were short-handed in a way because one of our senior analyst had already left the team right before the season started, so we were short-handed. So I had to come up with an approach and I was with Kalaabey. I had to come up with the approach to make sure that I kind of free up my time because as much as I wanted to work on the project, I continued working on the project, but I felt that my time can be better to utilize another project which allowed me to learn more and challenge myself more. Got it. And that makes sense, that's fair. And so I realized that your manager who had to approve you working on this project, she had some concerns and these concerns were mostly around the time that it would take. Precisely. Because as I mentioned, since this was so close to the season, because what happens is one of the things that you might think why did you decide to do this so close to the season and not get, let's say, the first time. for a month or two back. So the reason I decided because once the season ends, we have like two and a half months gap. Once the season ends, there's like four to six weeks period where we have to do the postseason analysis. So the team is swarmed with work that time. So the only window that I had was like four weeks window right before the season started. And about I worked on this process or the task acting, task that I mentioned for like a couple of weeks or two detention, et cetera, to see what the timeline would look like if I had to come up with the request and then reach out to my manager based on that. Understood. And help me understand please, how did you manage to convince your manager to allow you to run with this? And I know that you mentioned that you've presented exactly the outline of the work that you would do. But how did you know that these were the arguments or this is the information that your manager needed in order to bring her along? So I have had a similar experience with the same manager before. So there was another short story in a way, another project where everything was in-- so we were importing or we were using our Google Analytics data in tabloid dashboard. But there's a limitation in how tabloid and Google Connector works, Google Analytics Connector works. You can only import like seven dimensions and 10 measures. And then I read a lot about BI and data and general. So I saw that data studio, which is a Google tool, had no such limitation. And since we were already a Google customer, like we were using their G Suite app, we had data studio for free. So I had already previously pitched a similar-- pitched not a similar idea, but an idea of moving our web analytics reporting from tabloid to data studio, which was way more accessible. It was free and low cost. Like literally, there was no major costs associated. So I knew the kind of questions or concerns that my manager would have. That is how it helped me approach the problem in a way where I was mentally or I was ready to answer anything that she asked. He asked. Sure. It was here, was she? Just there. I'm there. So here. OK. But then again, what I'm not very clear on, and maybe even a little bit concerned about, is that it sounds like the manager was concerned about the timing. And then what I'm hearing from you in terms of what brought him along is the outline of the steps that you're going to take. If I was concerned about the timing, in order for someone to bring me along, that someone either needs to convince me that timing is not an issue, or that someone needs to make me comfortable that the job will be done by the time it needs to be doing. Absolutely. So in my story, I didn't narrate in a way where I had a specific action plan. I made him comfortable with the whole process in a way where I still had a buffer before I actually in flight report started. And I made sure to clarify where the bottleneck would be, where I might need it as well, and how I will get the job done before time. Got it. Understood. And so to self-understand the results. So it sounds like the dashboard was live. Sounds like there was a time saving. Was there anything else? You mentioned that you had-- you were hoping to redeploy the save time to other projects. What were these projects? Not exactly redeploy with other projects. So the way it works was whenever we had in flight reporting. So let's say we always used to deliver our in flight reporting on Monday. And over that coming over that week from Monday to Friday, we used to get add up questions on the reporting or the data from our cross take holders. So I created the report in a way. The long term achievement or the long term impact was that our number of questions that used to come every week, which used to be around 3 to 5 questions a week, they used to almost like almost 0 to 1 questions. And those questions were also most often the not part of the dashboard. It was just more the case about explaining them where to find it. So the short term was me saving time. The long term was VPs and directors and the CMs. Because this numbers were also reported to CM. So the CM could actually go and use the numbers or see the numbers themselves. I mean, there's no metric driven number for CM accessing the dashboard readily because that's something-- I mean, I doubt we can quantify it. But I'm pretty sure CMO appreciated the fact that it was live. It was updated every 24 hours. And she did not have to reach out to our team to get the numbers. Sure. OK. Well, let's focus on the story. So the question was, tell me about a time when you change someone's opinion or you influenced someone's opinion on a shared goal. And that is what makes the story Ernst Trust. Because there are two leadership principles where sometimes demonstration of these leadership principles comes down to changing someone else's mind. One of them is have backbone, the agree and commit. And another one is Ernst Trust or Ernst Trust. And in Ernst Trust, the difference is-- well, there are a couple of differences. But one of the differences is this piece about having a shared goal. Because when you find yourself in a shared goal, which is some sort of a shared direction, where to take influencing that direction where a team needs to go or business department is about winning people over building trust influencing. Half backbone's agreement commit is about making a powerful stance, sometimes in the real unpopular, the obligation to dissent, which is something that's baked into the leadership principle. And this one is an interesting situation because it doesn't kind of fall into either spectrum on the one hand. I couldn't see a shared goal. Maybe there was one, but it doesn't look like-- I think your goal was to save time. The shared goal was to improve the overall reporting too because whenever it's off season, so whatever it's off season, one of the goals across the team is how do we improve our reporting that we have currently in place. Because when it's off season, there's no not a ton of requests coming in from the team, members or stakeholders. Right. Well, I think he needs to be more clear about what was the shared goal. Because then if there isn't a settlement about a shared goal, there is essentially, it's a story where you had one agenda, which is you needed to improve productivity and save time in building the dashboard and you manage your probably didn't mind that you had this goal, but his biggest concern was timing that you needed to go into something else and do some other reporting. So that's something that I wanted to point out. And again, when you're evaluating your situations, always think about which is your best foot forward? This is the most interesting element of this situation about the unpopular stance, the putting the stake in the ground, being passionate about something disagreeing because you think something could be done better or something is about to be done wrong, or is this about influencing and negotiating. So that's the first one. The second one is where the main focus of the story should be. So the main focus of the story about influencing people needs to be about the method that you took to influence people. And this is a delicate one because it's a soft skill. But that's why I was probing you about, you know, it sounds like he managed to have a timing concern, but you know, you presented something to him that and they couldn't understand how is it either made the concern go away or it convinced that you could deliver and the person didn't have to worry about anything. I think you need to be super clear. The main thing that you need to demonstrate is that you took the time to understand the person who you were bringing along. Because if you and it's, you know, I'm hearing this again and again from various different coaching clients, especially when you know, in a situation when I was a manager, manager disagreed. or the team disagreed or some other group of people disagreed. I started pommeling them with arguments and explaining why they need to do the things they need to do. And then once I explained why, they all suddenly came on board. That doesn't happen in reality. In reality, well, it can, if you have. You know, you can. I don't know. You can make people do stuff because you're their boss, right? But that's not what we're talking about, right? In order to bring someone along by influence, it's a marketing process. You need to understand, first of all, to develop the insight. What exactly is the concern? And then, using that insight, you have to frame your proposal in such a way that it sells it. That it addresses the concerns. It's basically like marketing stuff to people. You understand, you start with a customer and you work backwards. In this case, you manage your customer. And it doesn't need to be complicated, right? I'm kind of going on and on about this, not to make it seem complicated, but I'm just trying to import the right mental framework. So, you could have gone on the lines of. So, I had a couple of conversations with my manager just to understand what exactly were these concerns because I didn't see them myself. And apparently, the manager was concerned about a couple of specific things. First, second, third. I registered the concerns that I went back. And I started, you know, I wanted to really understand what they all be able to deliver and whether I first, I can feel comfortable delivering the solution, knowing what the manager was concerned about. And then, obviously, you need to come up with a statement that says, "Well, actually, you know, the more I keep thinking about it, the more I, you know, my confidence grew, because I can definitely see that by doing one to three for five, I can deliver this project on the right timings, and so we had, you know, we'd have enough time to deliver this other analysis. And so, with these considerations in mind, I approached the manager again. And I said, "Look, I know that you're concerned about this. I know you're concerned about that. I know you're concerned about this. I've, you know, really taking the time to think about it. And here's why I think we should still do it." And then in the end, the manager might have said, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Go ahead. Oh, the manager could have said, "Do you know what? I don't feel completely good about it. But you know what? I'm going to gamble with you on this." So this is a disagreeing commit moment when the manager disagrees, but takes a gamble. So as you know what? I disagree with you better trust you. And I, I don't know which one. It doesn't really matter which one happened, right? But the most important thing is taking people with you has to always start with you trying to understand why other people are disagreeing. And then framing your solutions to, or your proposal rather, in such a way that it sells it to the person who, you know, took home you're selling it. Does that make sense? Cool. So that's something that you can, that will definitely strengthen the story. And then, and I think that, you know, it's an interesting point that you bring up that, you know, if you've dealt with the stakeholder before and you knew how the stakeholder operates, that's insight. That's valid insight. I think it's something that you should just mention upfront. And say, look, you know, I, A, I had a chat with this manager to understand their concerns. And, you know, because I worked with them before and I know what, you know, what kind of things that they, they're usually concerned about, turns out that, you know, they were concerned about roughly the same, the same stuff. So I went back, reframed the proposal, handled objections, and got to work. And then, I think, I think the, you were sort of, were factoring in the stakeholders at the end of the situation. I think you need to factor them in throughout the situation or at the beginning. Because it feels a bit force-fitted the moment, if I were to be very honest with you. Yeah, I think I did mention the stakeholders whom I was doing this for in a ways, at the start of the conversation where I was like, we sent this report to Director of E-commerce, Director of Finance, and a couple of other VP level executives. And eventually, also to the CMO. Okay. No, I might have missed it. Yeah, I don't know if you observed, but my second answer took the approach based on the feedback that you gave on the first question. Yeah, I remember, I remember making this mental note, but then that mental note disappeared. Probably, that's because it's, it's late during the day, but you're absolutely right. Hopefully you won't be interviewed at 8 p.m. in the evening. I think the feedback, I tried incorporating those feedback as much as I can. Obviously, I cannot change everything that's in my mental right away. But amazing. I mean, the feedback was amazing. I think, again, if you have any more feedback, please, please, Lail. And I'm more than happy to give those more, those feedbacks again, more. No, I think, I think, I think the result here is, it's fine. You know, you've, you know, you've built the report. I think it's kind of the same sort of guidance. Let's do. Make it clear. Make it make it clear with business impact that produced, again, without inventing stuff, right? Like, if you didn't don't have the hard data, that's fine. I also, I think just come think about it. If I were to completely nitpick, I would think, was it, was I clear what your goal was? And why? Because I think, I think, I think what could have been stronger is that before you got into action to start automating, it probably needed to be something along the lines of, there was this, the current status was so bad, that I knew, I knew I knew I had to do something. My goal was to, I had to get these, I had to get these 10 hours go away. That was my goal. Anything on top of that would be a massive bonus, but success is 10 hours saved. And then at the end of the story, you know, I have it to report, I saved 10 hours or more. And actually, that's the immediate goal, but you know, as a result of that, I could actually do something else or something better. It's like, it's this kind of goal up front, the goal needs to go up front before you start acting. And then when you mention the results, the results have to tie into the goal. And that's how you know, if you were successful or not. Now, I think I did touch on the goal part a bit. I probably wasn't in the perfect way, but I did mention the short term goal in terms of what I was trying to achieve. It might not have been a shared goal, as you clearly mentioned, but it was a goal that helped the team help me a lot. And I think I could have made it more clear, you know, when you asked me that problem question, like, how, how did, how did this goal help? Like, how did it help you personally? I could have said since I was so much work before and one of the senior artists already left, I needed to do something to clear up my schedule. And this was one of the approaches that I knew that I could handle. And that's great. I think, I think, yeah, and you did mention that again, you mentioned. And I think it's baked somewhere in your narrative that it was 10 hours. And I think, as I said, as I mentioned before, you can kind of strengthen like why this was, you know, a big deal. Although I don't think anyone's going to challenge the fact that, you know, 10 hours per week spent on, you know, manual processes, you know, is not worth automating. I don't think that's, you know, I don't think that that's not why I'm asking you to kind of think about it. And you're always thinking about this, they real size the problem rather than kind of just the, you know, the intuition behind it. But then I think as you, you know, as you sort of paint the picture of the solution, kind of, you know, the results essentially, when you present your results, it should be very always clear in the head of the interviewer, where you success or not, and why? And, and so if the goal was, save 10 hours and enable myself to do something else or something better, in the end, saved 10 hours or saved 50 hours and actually over achieved. Yeah, no, I, I did try to hit those, those goals and results like I tried, I started instead of giving a brief history about the company and the role, I started this decision. I think I did have decent job of giving goals out. And then eventually I, at the end, I did give the impact, what the short term impact was and what the long term impact was, you did probe me around long term impact. And then I gave, gave those numbers, yeah, like 3 to 5 probing 3 to 5 out of request every week, which which I didn't took like 3 to 4 hours every week. of what time was over then. So yeah, I think it's more like, so I know Amazon has an extremely structured approach of answering questions like you have to follow Star. I just don't want it to sound like a robotic. Oh, here's the situation. The situation was this, the goal was this. - Yeah, no, please don't. And by the way, to be honest, I do not suggest and please don't take this wrong way. Like don't, don't, there's no need to verbalize the headings of the star. No, no, no, no. But you can have colloquial normal spoken transitions and ways to underline important key packs. And for example, you can say like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I found myself in a situation where I realized that I was spending 10 hours per week and that wasn't acceptable because I had these other things to do. So at that point in time, I kind of knew that unless I saw it, I just won't be able to do all the other stuff. So I had to find a way to get these hours, you know, just 10 hours back and I wanted to do this by all automating. That is me following a star format, but doing it in a very colloquial way, spoken way without being too formal. So you can do that and that's absolutely fine. So structure and logic doesn't mean that you have to overuse on kind of the jargon. - Like if I was a little bit of someone came with the robotic kind of response, I would be best in a way. - Yeah, you know, absolutely. No need to be, don't try to be, yeah, be natural. I think you are very natural when you're presenting, you know, and when I do mention, for example, you know, make sure that you clarify what your goal is, it doesn't mean that you need to go and say, so my goal was this, you can say this, you can say exactly the same stuff by saying, at that time, I knew that I had to do it. So, you know, I had to find these 10 hours somewhere. Boom, that's a goal, that's a goal statement. - Yeah. - No, yeah, I think, yeah, I'm, for sure, appreciate the feedback on that, yeah. - My last bit of feedback, and this is not a feedback, it's just a side note. I think the story, you can also use it for insist on the highest standards, because you have an element of not being content with the status quo in this system, in this story. And this is one, so insisting on the highest standards is essentially continuous improvement, even in times of success. Obsession, complete obsession with continuous improvement. I think this can also go with disagreeing, cannot write in a way. - Yeah, disagreeing, if, you know, if this was something that was like a big deal, and disagreeing, commit is when, you know, you take it to public stance, you know, like you have a team meeting, and, you know, the manager says we should run this way, and you're like, you know what, no, guys. If you'd like, just read the definition of the LPE, right? It's the obligation to descend. Right, it's a dissenting opinion. There's this like uncomfortable in public element. Not always has to be public, but it's that sort of, it's the ability and the practice of leaders to stand up for what they passionately believe in, even if it's very uncomfortable and painful. So I don't know, I don't know if that's, this is the right situation. I think, you know, it's kind of in between our interest and disagreeing, commit. But it's definitely very much, I think it's very much usable for, yeah. - If I use the high standards. - If I use the stories, let's say in earlier part of the interview, let's say tomorrow I have three interviews and then on the day after I have two more, like there are five rounds, right? Five interviews. So if I use this tomorrow, I won't be able to end on Thursday, the same, if a different person comes and asks question on insisting on high standard, I won't be using the same story again. - Yeah, yeah, for sure. But I'm just, I suppose I am just mentioning this to you, so we have the flexibility. But otherwise, it's a strong story. And I think, you know, definitely should be a part of, you know, it's definitely one of those professional experiences that, you know, they you should definitely use an interview and I'll leave it up to you to pick which LP, you think you should the strongest in the story.