How to Answer Can You Describe a Time When You Were in Charge of a Project?

The ultimate question on leadership.

If you are interviewing for a management position, you will be quizzed about essential management skills, such as delegation, communication, and problem–solving.

There are a few reasons why interviewers ask this question. They want to see how well you can manage a situation, deal with challenges, and combine a team to achieve objectives.

This question is an open-ended question to get to know what your work ethic is like and, more importantly, how well could you handle stress when it comes to pressure situations.

After you answer this question, the interviewer gets a sound knowledge of your leadership skills and concludes why you might be the best fit for a managerial position.

To bring out the best possible outcome, you must pick the most appropriate example. First, write down the important projects you have worked on in your career.

Next, highlight the most impactful ones out of the list that highlights and amplify your leadership skills.

Then take one significant project out of your list, which you would use in your interview.

Next, apply the STAR method to construct the answer. A STAR answer is concise and covers all the areas regarding people management, decision-making, and delegation skills.

Ideally, the STAR method – Situation, Task, Action, and Results will portray your scenario in a very constructive manner.

The last thing you need is your example to affect your job prospects adversely.

Here is an example scenario for the question and how you can answer it with the STAR method.

Situation

I successfully led a website development project to meet an unimaginable deadline of 14 days through effective resource management bringing in a goodwill increase and new clients.

Task

The client wanted his online shopping platform built within 14 days for his website to coincide with his showroom launched.

I was tasked with leading the team working on a strict deadline to provide a completed product.

Action

A strict deadline meant that every single minute needed to be used efficiently by my team. I first plotted the timeline for each development sprint that we needed to do along the way.

Later, I assigned a roster for each team member so that they do not end up exhausting themselves and be unproductive due to the long hours.

I took on a few tasks and divided the rest of the team's work based on their job roles.

I scheduled a daily brief where all the responsible stakeholders provide an update on progress.

There was a major hiccup on the 4th day of development, with two of the front-end developers calling in sick due to food poisoning.

I could not delay the development, and at that time, I made the call to outsource the task until they return to work.

Results

The project reached completion on time.

The client was overwhelmed by the completed work, and the senior management applauded my effort in effectively managing the team and the deadlines.

Thanks to this development, the company received two more web platform projects due to the client's high recommendation on the launch date.