Leading without Asking
Tell me about a time when you took the lead on a project or initiative without being formally asked.
What is leadership? Many people mistakenly believe it's about having a certain job title—"Manager," "Director," "Tech Lead." But true leadership has nothing to do with the organizational chart.
Leadership is seeing a problem that needs to be solved, or an opportunity that needs to be seized, and taking the responsibility to rally people and resources to make it happen. It's about taking action when others hesitate. It's about creating clarity from ambiguity. This can happen at any level, from a junior engineer to a senior executive.
This is not a question just for managers. It is a question for anyone who wants to demonstrate their potential to make a significant impact. Your answer reveals whether you wait for direction or if you create it.
What Are They Looking For?
When an interviewer asks this, they are searching for core leadership competencies:
- Initiative & Proactiveness: Do you have a "see something, do something" mentality?
- Ownership: Do you take personal responsibility for improving your team, your product, and your company?
- Problem Identification: Can you spot inefficiencies, risks, or opportunities that others might miss?
- Influence & Buy-in: Can you articulate your vision and persuade others to get on board, even without formal authority?
- Execution: Can you take an idea from conception to completion?
What Constitutes "Taking the Lead"?
This doesn't have to be a story about you spearheading a six-month, company-wide epic. Leadership can be demonstrated on a smaller, yet equally impactful, scale. Great examples often involve:
- Fixing a Broken Process: Noticing that the team's deployment process is slow and manual, and taking it upon yourself to research, propose, and implement an automated CI/CD pipeline.
- Championing a New Technology: Realizing a new library or tool could solve a recurring problem for your team, building a proof-of-concept, and leading the effort to adopt it.
- Improving Team Knowledge: Seeing that many engineers are struggling with a complex part of the codebase, and creating documentation or leading a "lunch and learn" session to share your knowledge.
- Addressing "Undwned" Problems: Identifying a source of technical debt or a recurring type of bug that isn't on any official roadmap and organizing a small team to finally fix it.
The key element is that you initiated it. It was not assigned to you.
Structuring Your Answer using STAR Framework
You will use the STAR method, but with a narrative arc that emphasizes the transition from observation to action to influence.
S - Situation
Describe the status quo. What was the problem, inefficiency, or missed opportunity that you observed? Explain why it was a problem.
- Example: "Our engineering team had a manual, stressful release process that involved a 25-step checklist in a text document. It was prone to human error, and every release took a senior engineer half a day to complete."
T - Task
This part is different from a normal STAR story. Your "task" was not assigned. It was self-defined. State the goal you created for yourself.
- Example: "There was no official project to fix this, but I saw the negative impact on our team's morale and velocity. I set a personal goal to automate this entire process to make our releases fast, reliable, and stress-free."
A - Action
This is the story of your leadership. Detail the steps you took to bring your idea to life.
- Action 1 (Initial Research & Proposal): "I spent a weekend researching modern CI/CD practices and built a small proof-of-concept using GitHub Actions that automated the first few steps of our process."
- Action 2 (Gaining Buy-in): "On Monday, I did a quick, 10-minute demo for my manager and two senior engineers. I didn't ask for permission; I showed them what was possible. I focused on the benefits: faster releases and freeing up senior engineer time."
- Action 3 (Leading the Effort): "With their enthusiastic support, I led a small 'tiger team' of two other engineers. I created a project plan, broke down the work into smaller tickets, and we dedicated a few hours each week to building out the full pipeline."
R - Result
Quantify the impact of your initiative. Show the clear "before and after."
- Example: "The result was transformative for our team. We replaced the 4-hour manual checklist with a fully automated, one-click deployment process that took less than 15 minutes. This allowed us to increase our release frequency from once a week to multiple times a day. My manager was so impressed that this project became a key part of my promotion case to Senior Engineer the following cycle."
Example
Weak Answer
"I always take the lead. I'm a very proactive person. For example, I saw a way to improve our team's documentation and I just did it."
(This is a claim, not a story. It lacks detail, context, and impact.)
Strong, Leadership STAR Answer
(S) "When I joined my last team, I noticed our project onboarding for new engineers was a real struggle. The documentation was scattered across multiple outdated wiki pages, and it typically took a new hire almost three weeks to get their development environment set up and ship their first piece of code. This was a huge drain on both the new hire and their assigned mentor.
(T) There was no official ticket to fix this, as everyone was busy with feature work. I decided to make it my personal mission to completely overhaul our onboarding process with the goal of reducing the 'time-to-first-commit' to under one day.
(A) I started by being the 'new hire' myself. I went through the entire setup process, documenting every single pain point and confusing step. I then used this research to create a single, well-organized onboarding guide in our new documentation system. But I didn't stop there. I also wrote a 'one-click' setup script that automated the entire process of installing dependencies and configuring the local environment. I presented this new guide and script at our team's weekly meeting, showing how it could save us dozens of hours per year.
(R) The impact was immediate and significant. The next two engineers who joined our team were able to get their local environments running and ship their first line of production code on their very first day. My manager was so pleased with the initiative that he made my onboarding guide the new standard for the entire 50-person engineering department. It showed me that even without a formal title, you can lead a change that has a major positive impact on the organization."