Intreview Questions - Part 2

Oral Communications

§ What types of experiences have you had dealing with irate customers or clients?
§ What was the hardest "sell" of a new idea or method you have had to make to get it accepted?
§ Tell me about a time when you "put your foot in your mouth" and what happened?
§ Describe a problem person you have had to deal with at work, what did you say?
§ What has been your experience in dealing with the poor performance of subordinates?
§ All of us feel shy or socially uncomfortable at times - when have you felt this way about communicating? Has that influenced your career?
§ Timing is very important in communications sometimes... tell me about a time when your timing was very good and one when it was bad?
§ The old proverb "silence is golden" is sometimes hard to live by - tell me about a time when you were proud of your ability to restrain yourself from saying something?

Teamwork

§ Tell me when you think it is important for a manager to use a participative style and involve work unit members in making decisions.
§ Describe the types of teams you have worked in and tell me what worked well and what did not.
§ Have you ever had to work with a team of people who did not work well together or did not like each other? Tell me what happened and how you reacted.
§ Give me an example of a situation in which you managed or led a team and were able to create a high morale, high productivity work group.
§ Tell me about a time when you had difficulty getting others to work together on a critical problem and how you handled it.
§ Some managers encourage people to work together while others encourage direct competition among their people. Tell me about the best manager you have worked for and what approach that person took and what you learned.
§ Describe a really difficult person you worked with and how you handled working with that person.

Enjoy,
Amjad Alqaisi

Soft Skills "Interview Questions" Part 1

Here are some soft skills interview questions, largely focused on a behavioral approach, you may want to use or adapt during your interview process.

Interpersonal Skills

• Describe how you developed relationships with others when you were new on your current/ most recent job?
• Have you ever worked for an extremely talkative manager? How did you ensure you were communicating effectively?
• Have you ever worked for a very reticent manager? How did you ensure you were communicating effectively?
• Describe a time when you had problems with a supervisor and had to communicate your unhappy feelings or difficult disagreements. Tell me what you did and what happened?
• What words do your current co-workers use to describe you and how accurate do you think these are? If they are not accurate, what do you think caused the person to choose that word?
• Tell me about a time when you became involved in a problem faced by a co-worker -how did it happen, what did you do and what happened?
• When you are dealing with co-workers or customers, what really tries your patience and how do you deal with that?
• Describe a situation when one of your decisions was challenged by higher management; what did you do and how did you react?
• Describe how you changed the opinion of someone who seemed to have a very negative opinion of you?
• Describe some of the most unusual people you have known - what was different about them and how did you work with them?
• Give me an example of how you handled a very tense situation at work?
• How skillful do you think you are at "sizing up" others? Give me an example.

Dears, Next is Oral Communication Questions..


Enjoy Learning,
Amjad T. Alqaisi

Tips to Improve Your Interpersonal Skills.

Recently i had a job interview with an International company, and despite testing technical / professional skills, a great importance on the interview process was given to the "Interpersonal skills".

Interpersonal Skills is one of the elements how you are perceived by your manager and coworkers, which play a large role in things as minor as your day-to-day happiness at the office and as major as the future of your career.

No matter how hard you work or how many brilliant ideas you may have, if you can’t connect with the people who work around you, your professional life will suffer.

Here are some tips, on how to improve our Interpersonal Skills.

• Smile. Few people want to be around someone who is always down in the dumps. Do your best to be friendly and upbeat with your coworkers. Maintain a positive, cheerful attitude about work and about life. Smile often. The positive energy you radiate will draw others to you.
• Be appreciative. Find one positive thing about everyone you work with and let them hear it. Be generous with praise and kind words of encouragement. Say thank you when someone helps you. Make colleagues feel welcome when they call or stop by your office. If you let others know that they are appreciated, they’ll want to give you their best.
• Pay attention to others. Observe what’s going on in other people’s lives. Acknowledge their happy milestones, and express concern and sympathy for difficult situations such as an illness or death. Make eye contact and address people by their first names. Ask others for their opinions.
• Practice active listening. To actively listen is to demonstrate that you intend to hear and understand another’s point of view. It means restating, in your own words, what the other person has said. In this way, you know that you understood their meaning and they know that your responses are more than lip service. Your coworkers will appreciate knowing that you really do listen to what they have to say.
• Bring people together. Create an environment that encourages others to work together. Treat everyone equally, and don't play favorites. Avoid talking about others behind their backs. Follow up on other people's suggestions or requests. When you make a statement or announcement, check to see that you have been understood. If folks see you as someone solid and fair, they will grow to trust you.
• Resolve conflicts. Take a step beyond simply bringing people together, and become someone who resolves conflicts when they arise. Learn how to be an effective mediator. If coworkers bicker over personal or professional disagreements, arrange to sit down with both parties and help sort out their differences. By taking on such a leadership role, you will garner respect and admiration from those around you.
• Communicate clearly. Pay close attention to both what you say and how you say it. A clear and effective communicator avoids misunderstandings with coworkers, collegues, and associates. Verbal eloquence projects an image of intelligence and maturity, no matter what your age. If you tend to blurt out anything that comes to mind, people won’t put much weight on your words or opinions.
• Humor them. Don’t be afraid to be funny or clever. Most people are drawn to a person that can make them laugh. Use your sense of humor as an effective tool to lower barriers and gain people’s affection.
• See it from their side. Empathy means being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they feel. Try to view situations and responses from another person’s perspective. This can be accomplished through staying in touch with your own emotions; those who are cut off from their own feelings are often unable to empathize with others.
• Don't complain. There is nothing worse than a chronic complainer or whiner. If you simply have to vent about something, save it for your diary. If you must verbalize your grievances, vent to your personal friends and family, and keep it short. Spare those around you, or else you’ll get a bad reputation.

Enjoy,
Ana

How to improve your memory: 5 simple tips

Believe in yourself

Don't let negative expectations defeat you. If you expect to fail, you won't even try. If you find yourself thinking, "I can't remember names," substitute "I may forget some names.

Focus your attention on what you really want to remember

No one can remember everything. So put effort and energy into those areas that are most important to you. Much of what is called forgetting is a lack of attention. Before you blame your memory, ask yourself if you were really paying attention.

Relax

Tension interferes with the memory process; relaxing often lets the memory come to the surface. When you feel anxious about the possibility of forgetting, you may become preoccupied with the anxiety and unable to concentrate on recalling the needed information. The solution is to take a deep breath and relax; often the information will come to you.

Give yourself plenty of time

People of all ages forget more frequently when they are rushing. In general, if you have enough time to think about what you need to accomplish, you are less likely to forget something. You may also find that you need more time for learning new information and for recalling information from long-term memory. Give yourself a little additional time and see if it helps in encoding and retrieving information.

Be organized

The old saying, "A place for everything, and everything in its place" is good advice for memory improvement. Make a decision to improve your organizational skills in whatever ways are important to you. If you routinely put your keys, glasses, purse, and bills in the same place, you will not waste time searching for them.

Reference www.bayt.com

6 steps to more productivity

Every one of us needs to organize his/her workload in order to be more productive below is a summarized steps on how to reach that. (summarized from reference below)
1-make a daily list: make a daily list of what you are going to finish today.
2- Segregate time for each task: give each task of your daily list a specific amount of time to be finished.
3- focus: The instant we break concentration, the entire problem that we were modeling in our head drops on the floor and shatters into a million pieces.
4- Take breaks: When you can’t figure out a problem, it’s time to put it on your mind’s back burner for a bit. Or, right after you solve a problem, have a 10 minute celebration before moving on to the next thing.
5- Take care of your equipment: Most of what you’re paid for is produced by your brain, so treat it like your most important piece of equipment. Caffeine may put some spark in it, but overdoing caffeine may make you think less clearly. Beer as well causes neurotoxins (nerve cell damages)
6- Follow through: If you have a choice between working on two projects, choose the one that is nearly finished even if the other one is more fun. When you complete a project, it creates momentum and reduces that long to-do list.

Reference: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/project-management/?p=193&tag=nl.e108

Personal Development!

Today as I was talking online to a very best friend of mine, I noticed his personal quote:

"Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Others stay for a while and leave footprints in our hearts, minds and steps we walk. We're never the same"

These words make me think for the people I have encountered up so far, and how different I was going to be would be without having shared those experiences and moments.
As I interact with people, different situations, I slightly changed myself. Interests change in my life. I have found new goals to pursue, at professional or personal level.
Sometimes I am more self motivated and at other moments not.
What I try to do on my daily life is to improve myself emotionally, spiritually, mentally and physically.

This is what the term "Personal Development" or "Personal Growth" is all about. Each of us can give its own definition for it.
I was searching online to come up with a scientific definition for the term "Personal Development", and I found a very interesting video on this topic, by Jim Rohn.

Jim Rohn-Personal Development_1.

Jim Rohn-Personal Development_2

Enjoy folks!
Ana.

Quote of the Day

Dears,
New section was added on the right, Quote of the day, It will be updated daily.

Enjoy
Fadi

"Twelve Angry Men" The Art of negotiation

"Twelve Angry Men" movie used by Harvard University in their course (The Art and Science of Negotiation) by Professor Brian Mandell, we learned a lot during the 3 full days course. Most of days were a real scenarios training plus watching and analyzing the movie.
The movie is basically about 12 random jurors from different backgrounds are summoned to give a verdict on a case concerning murder in the first degree. The vote has to be unanimous. The penalty for the guilty verdict is the death sentence. An 18-year-old boy accused of stabbing his father. All the jurors but one decide the young boy is guilty within the first few minutes of the film. Yet a few questions from one daring person, (Jack Lemmon) changes every thing slowly but steadily, the jurors' opinion sways, due to the very same factors that clinched the verdict of 'guilty' in the initial scenes. Finally all twelve jurors acquit the boy of the crime.

Lessons learned from the course
-You need to know when is a NO is not a real NO.
-People will not change their mind until they feel save to change.
-When negotiate people usually are (an ally, adversary or recruitable), so try to figure them out. It will make your job easy.
-When negotiating try to build a coalitions.
-During the negotiations others will try to pursuit your allies. So you have to be careful.
-Never leave the important things that need to be discussed until the end (endgame).

Enjoy negotiating,
Fadi and the team.