Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Handling Rejection and Objections
Covers how candidates respond to rejection, sales objections, lost deals, and negative stakeholder responses while maintaining resilience and extracting lessons. Topics include objection handling techniques, negotiation adjustments, follow up strategies, learning from lost opportunities, maintaining motivation, soliciting feedback, adjusting go to market or product approaches, and turning rejection into future success. Useful for sales and customer facing roles but also applicable broadly to any context where proposals or ideas are refused.
Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
Covers techniques, frameworks, and interpersonal skills for resolving disputes and reaching sustainable agreements among stakeholders, teams, partners, and vendors while protecting organizational interests and preserving relationships. Candidates should demonstrate preparation skills such as defining objectives, identifying underlying interests, generating options, and establishing a best alternative to a negotiated agreement. The topic includes applying principled interest based negotiation as well as distributive and integrative tactics, concession planning, trade off analysis, and strategies for creating win win outcomes when possible. It also encompasses conflict resolution skills including active listening, reframing, mediation and facilitation, de escalation, stakeholder alignment, escalation management, handling power dynamics and cross cultural sensitivities, documenting trade offs and decisions, and measuring outcomes. Interviewers may probe judgment about when to compromise versus uphold standards, how to manage vendor or contract negotiations, how to balance compliance and business priorities, and how to preserve trust and long term partnerships while protecting the organization.
Collaboration with Other Teams and Leadership
Focuses on cross functional collaboration beyond the immediate team, including working with sales, human resources, executive leadership, and peer leadership. Topics include understanding the partner team's goals, adapting communication to different stakeholders, building credibility with sales and business partners, influencing without formal authority at the executive level, and operating as a bridge between technical and business functions. Candidates should provide examples of successful cross functional work and explain how they would prioritize and coordinate with stakeholder teams.
Cross Functional Collaboration and Coordination
Comprehensive competency covering how individuals plan, communicate, negotiate, and execute work across organizational boundaries to deliver shared outcomes. This topic includes building and maintaining relationships with product managers, engineers, designers, researchers, operations, sales, finance, legal, compliance, human resources, and people operations; translating priorities and terminology between technical and nontechnical audiences; surfacing and resolving dependencies and handoffs; negotiating trade offs and aligning incentives and timelines; establishing decision rights, meeting cadences, and clear communication channels; designing inclusive processes for cross functional decision making; influencing without formal authority and building coalitions; resolving conflicts constructively and giving and receiving feedback; and measuring shared success and program outcomes. At more senior levels this also includes stakeholder mapping, executive collaboration and sponsorship, navigating organizational politics, managing multi functional programs that involve complex regulatory or compliance constraints, and sustaining long term trust across teams. Interviewers will probe for concrete examples, frameworks and tactics used to align stakeholders, the measurable outcomes delivered through collaboration, and how the candidate balanced competing metrics and priorities while maintaining momentum.
Influence and Persuasion
Skills and tactics for persuading and influencing decisions and behaviors when you do not have formal authority, and for scaling influence across teams and organizations. Candidates should demonstrate how to build credibility and trust tailor messages to stakeholder priorities, use data and customer insight to make the business case, tell compelling stories that connect to outcomes, recruit allies and champions, negotiate and compromise, and create operational changes such as standards processes or tooling to lock in gains. Interviewers will probe for examples of influencing technical and non technical stakeholders resolving disagreements building consensus and measuring the impact of influence on adoption quality speed or other business outcomes. For senior levels include examples of cross organizational influence and governance for sustained change.
Negotiation and Stakeholder Influence
Covers the skills and approaches for persuading and negotiating with internal and external stakeholders who may have competing priorities. Candidates should be able to map stakeholders and their motivations, differentiate negotiable from non negotiable items, prepare objectives and fallback positions including the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, and design negotiation strategies that balance trade offs while protecting business constraints and preserving relationships. Topics include preparing options that create win win outcomes, sequencing concessions, using data and trade off analysis to support positions, identifying decision makers and blockers, and influencing without formal authority. Also includes cross functional consensus building and alignment before external negotiation across functions such as product sales legal finance and procurement, handling pricing and contract discussions, escalating appropriately when agreements conflict with policy or unacceptable risk, documenting limits and agreements, and closing and enforcing agreements. Interviewers assess communication style during difficult conversations, ability to synthesize competing requirements into a recommended solution, stakeholder prioritization and engagement plans, and measurable outcomes such as agreement terms reduced cycle time or preserved relationships.
Adaptive Communication and Emotional Intelligence
Covers the ability to adjust communication style, tone, content, and level of detail to fit different audiences such as engineers, finance, customers, and senior leaders, while demonstrating clarity and purpose. Includes active listening, empathy, perspective taking, and the recognition of verbal and nonverbal cues to understand others emotional states and motivations. Encompasses responding to emotional needs with professional boundaries, building trust and psychological safety, managing difficult conversations, deescalation, and tailoring feedback or persuasion strategies to stakeholder preferences. Candidates may be asked to show examples of adapting messaging across roles, demonstrating compassion while maintaining business objectivity, and creating inclusive communication practices that foster collaboration and engagement.
Advocating for Change and Challenging Status Quo
Examples of situations where you identified a better way and advocated for change, even when it meant challenging established practices or powerful stakeholders. How you built support for your ideas and persisted through resistance.
Team Fit and Working Style
Evaluates a candidate's preferred ways of working and how those preferences align with a prospective team and manager. Core areas include autonomy versus structured workflows, individual contribution versus paired and cross functional work, preference for frequent touch bases versus independent execution, communication channels and cadence, feedback giving and receiving style and cadence, decision making and ownership boundaries, meeting cadence and structure, collaboration tools and handoffs, code review and onboarding practices, remote versus onsite expectations and availability, adaptability to different team norms, and approaches to conflict resolution. Interviewers will probe for concrete examples that demonstrate successful integration into new teams, alignment with a manager's style, adaptation to differing expectations, and the ability to articulate negotiation points for effective collaboration. Candidates should be ready to state their working preferences honestly, show flexibility, describe specific past scenarios and outcomes, ask clarifying questions about team norms and manager expectations, and propose concrete practices to ensure productive alignment.