Describe your core personal values

My core values are integrity, perseverance, and adaptability to new information or circumstances.

Explain a situation where you have had an ethical decision to make. Discuss how you weighed up the values involved in that decision, the decision you made, and the consequences of the action you took.

When I was in University, I was struggling to live off savings from my summer job and was looking for part-time work. I found a listing for a telesales job that looked ideal – it was remote, well-paid, and had hours that would still give me enough time to study. I applied and was delighted to be accepted for an interview!

To give me an advantage in the interview, I began researching the company in depth. On the surface it looked fine, but then I started seeing a few questionable reviews and comments that alluded to predatory sales techniques.

I needed the job and at the time it felt ‘mean’ to be suspicious of this unknown company, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to work in an environment that took advantage of people. I decided I didn’t have enough information either way, so went to the interview to find out more. At first the interview went great and the interviewer was clearly pleased with me, but when I began asking questions about their sales tactics and how they chose customers to target, he became very evasive. Finally, I asked about the comments online and the interviewer deflected this without giving a straight answer. I thanked him for the interview, then went home and emailed him to withdraw my candidacy.

I was much less confident when I was younger so felt very stressed about this decision – both because I wanted a job, and because I didn’t want to be seen as rude. However, it felt good to stick by my principles, and I picked up a couple of odd jobs (that actually helped people) later on, so it worked out well in the end.

Describe how your culture has influenced your values and identity.

I’m a seventh-generation Pākehā New Zealander. I grew up in a rural context, and this has strongly shaped my identity and my perception of work. I feel strongly connected to the outdoors and like to spend time in nature to ‘recharge’, even if it’s just doing some gardening or going for a walk in the park.

My parents both worked full-time, but any free time outside of that (and parenting!) was spent looking after their land – moving livestock; planting, watering, or fertilising trees; researching or grafting new cultivars of plants; picking and preserving fruit and nuts – the list goes on. Because of this, I learned to appreciate the value of consistent work and the power of incremental changes when made every day.

Growing up, our house was always cluttered with books, and I was taught a lot of science quite young, particularly in relation to the natural world. Because of this, I tend to assume that everything has an explanation, and am quite data-driven.

Evaluate your strengths and limitations in terms of your learning and career development

My greatest strength is my ability to quickly research, absorb and work with information. This is particularly true if the information is related to processes, flow-on effects, or linkages between ideas.

My greatest weakness is having unrealistic expectations of myself, which, when combined with being very goal-oriented, means I have shut myself off from opportunities in the past because there was too much uncertainty about whether I would succeed. This also makes me lose motivation to finish projects sometimes, when the gap between what “should” be and what I have actually achieved looks insurmountable.

Identify which of your strengths might help you in your learning journey and how they might intersect with learning obstacles

Because acquiring new information is relatively quick for me, I suppose there is a low opportunity cost to researching reasonable benchmarks for “good enough”. I’m sure once I reach that point I will want to optimise things further, but at least it will ensure I reach that point instead of giving up in frustration.

Share an example from your experience of where you were trying to work productively with others, but there was resistance or tension. Discuss the strategies you used at that time, how effective they were, and your reflections on what other strategies you would try now, and why.

In my previous job I was an operations manager at an eLearning company, which involved managing a small team of video content creators. While it was a great team of talented people, at times creative differences would arise in how a section of a script should be structured or what visuals should accompany it.

This could be a bit of a balancing act, because my boss or I were usually the ones writing the scripts, but my team were the ones actually trained in content production and visual design (which isn’t my background, so respecting their expertise was important).

The easiest way to solve this was to foster an open culture where anyone could contibute ideas or object to an approach, and they would have their ideas taken seriously. For the most part this was very efficient and caught many slips, and there were only a handful of times in three years that insurmountable differences arose. When this happened, it was usually because of a deadline, the specific requirements of a particular client, or some other external event that was incompatible with my team’s creative vision. In these instances I would try to be as open as possible about why we were doing it that way, and acknowledge their dissatisfaction with the situation. By listening to my team and understanding why they felt that way, I was able to keep them as free as external constraints as possible and we never ran into the same problem twice.

I think these strategies were reasonable at the time, though if I could do a couple of projects again I would have divided some units of work into smaller chunks and distributed them among pairs or individuals. This would have avoided the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ phenomenon that cropped up a couple of times. On the other hand, it could also have led to us missing some of the extra insights and ideas that came from a collaborative culture, so it is very hard to say in retrospect which was the ‘optimal’ strategy.