Why is team-working so hard?
And how to demonstrate it at your Assessment
Many of us read that title and think; ‘What?’ Team-working is easy!
If you have the right mix of personal skills and positive qualities, this is probably true for you. But it may not make it any easier to demonstrate it in practice at your Cabin Crew assessment day.
Most airlines will assess your team-working ability during your selection day. The term ‘team-working’ makes it sound like one thing, when actually it covers all sorts of things, like:
- Cooperation,
- Consideration,
- Empathy,
- Leading,
- Sensitivity,
- Relationship building,
- Rapport,
- Inspiring,
- Influencing,
- Morale boosting
and more!
So how do you prove you are good at all these things in the short time you have to impress your airline assessors?
Selection exercises
The selection day tasked are designed to give you the chance to show the skills the airlines are looking for. So the good news is you don’t need to worry about how to show you have these skills; to a certain extent, if you follow the instructions to the tasks you are set these should just come out naturally. It’s the assessors job to work out whether your team working approach is good enough or could be stronger. Of course there are ways to maximise your natural abilities.
Showing our skills
Team-working is something we do without really thinking about it. It’s how we see our place in relation to other people and the shared problems we encounter. Either we are naturally good at it, or we struggle, depending on how important the sort of skills listed above are to us.
In an interview candidates are often asked to about their approach to working in a team. A common mistakes is talking about the tasks and what the team as a whole has achieved but not really explaining what they have personally done which has had a positive impact on the team. In an interview, when asked a team working question you may find it useful to cover:
- what you needed to achieve as a group
- what you personally did (not just to meet the objective but to make sure the team worked well as a whole in order to achieve this)
- what you accomplished, with specific emphasis on your contribution to the way the team worked together to achieve this
Team skills
In terms of team-working, your personal impacts may have been:
- how you encouraged the group to cooperate
- how you got others involved
- what you did to motivate others to take actions
- how you established a culture of collaboration rather than competition
- what exactly you did to influence others and lead the team to achieve its goals
- how your actions led to a group of individuals achieving more than could have been achieved as individuals.
Individual differences
How one person does these things might look very different from how someone else does, but they can both be effective approaches to team work. So don’t worry that you need to fit a specific model. Whether in a group exercise, an interview or any other selection day activity you just need to make sure you are clear what YOUR approach is by both DOING it properly (in group exercises) and DESCRIBING IT in enough detail (in your interview).
Summary
Take a look at our online course for more tips and guidance on how to wow your panel at interview and soar ahead to begin your exciting cabin crew career.
