How to answer interview questions about the Amazon leadership principle “Strive to be the Earth’s Best Employer”
The fifteenth Amazon leadership principle is “Strive to be the Earth’s Best Employer.” If you’re preparing for an interview at Amazon that involves managing people, practice answering questions based on this leadership principle.
If you don’t know about the 16 Amazon leadership principles, read this article about interviewing at Amazon first.
How Amazon explains the “Earth’s Best Employer” leadership principle
The fifteenth Amazon Leadership Principle is “Strive to be the Earth’s Best Employer.”
This is how Amazon explains the principle:
Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
What does the “Earth’s Best Employer ” leadership principle mean?
This new principle is related to leadership principle #6, Hire and Develop the Best, but takes the ideas in #6 a few steps further. “Hire and Develop the Best” says that a leader will “recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others.” “Hire and Develop” says that a leader should care about an employee’s success and be working with high performers to grow their careers. The new principle expands the duties of a leader.
There are a lot of new ideas packed into the principle, so I’m going to group some together to make it easier to process.
Safety
The new principle introduces the idea of safety / a safe work environment. This is a concept most relevant to the Level 1-3 employees, like warehouse workers, drivers, and so on. These are the workers that complained during the pandemic that the company didn’t care about their health, and they are the workers most at risk for accidents at work. A leader is now supposed to give more serious thought to their workers’ safety.
Diversity
The principle also introduces the word “diverse.” Many people had been calling for Amazon to hire more diverse employees, since most of the top level leaders are white men. Instead of creating a new principle for diversity, they’ve added the diversity idea into this principle. A leader should strive to create a more diverse team.
Just
The principle also introduces the word “just,” which the dictionary defines as “based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair.” Morality, the difference between right and wrong, is now important for leaders at Amazon.
Fun
Having fun at work yourself and creating fun for your employees is now a leader’s task.
Empathy
Empathy is taking into consideration what employees are feeling and going through. Leading with empathy means taking the time to understand their point of view. If you think about it, in some ways, this is like principle #1, which is “Customer Obsession” and has historically been the most foundational principle. “Obsessing” over customers means working to understand their problems and finding ways to overcome those problems. In other words, in order to show true “Customer Obsession,” leaders must have empathy for the customer. Now, with the introduction of this fifteenth principle, Amazon is asking its leaders to apply that same empathy for employees.
More productive / higher performing / focused on employee’s personal success, growth, and empowerment
These are fairly standard ideas for managing a team; they would just as much sense under “Hire and Develop.”
Interview questions related to “Earth’s Best Employer”
If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, he or she might ask one of the following questions:
What routines have you established in your workplace to improve safety?
Describe a time you constructed a team. What factors did you consider? Did you factor in diversity? How did you balance work requirements, team skill composition, and team stretch opportunities? How did you allocate work? How did you ensure team members were able to work effectively together?
What is the composition of your current team, and how is your team organized?
How do you deal with managing at team of different backgrounds, levels, and skills?
How do you tell the difference between “right” and “wrong” as it applies to your job? What does it mean to you to be a “just” manager?
How have you made your employees excited about coming to work?
Tell me about a time when you made the wrong assumptions about a direct report or a peer. How did you unearth the wrong assumption? How did you correct it? How did you prevent it from happening again?
Tell me how you help your team members develop their careers. Can you give me two to three examples of a specific person in whom you invested and how you helped them develop their careers, including one who wasn’t being successful but in whom you saw potential and chose to invest?
Give me an example of a time you provided feedback to develop and leverage the strengths of someone on your team. Were you able to positively impact that person’s performance? What were your most effective methods?
How do you manage your top performers differently?
Give me an example of someone who was promoted one or two levels up in the organization, not just because they were a star who would naturally rise, but due to your coaching efforts.
How have you been successful at empowering either a person or a group to accomplish a task.
Tell me about a time when you were able to remove a serious roadblock preventing your team from making progress.
How many stories do I need for this principle?
Most people say that you should have two examples for each principle. That’s a good benchmark, but doesn’t really work for this one. You need to have stories to answer questions in all of the categories under this principle — safety, diversity, productivity, managing low and high performers, and so on. If you’re going for a manager job, you need to show all of the skills a manager needs, not just one. And these categories tend to be unique — a story about improving workplace safety isn’t going to work for a question about having fun at work, for example.
How to answer interview questions about the “Earth’s Best Employer” Amazon leadership principle
The key to answering these questions is to demonstrate certain skills in your answers. You’ll want to show that:
You care about safety
Safety is a broad category that can be very different depending on which industry or job function you work in. Ask yourself what employee “safety” means in your line or work and/or for the job you’re applying to.
If you’re an Area Manager at a warehouse, you should be able to talk about the safety processes you have implemented and how you measure them. This example is relatively straightforward since you can speak to how you prioritized the physical safety of your peers or your reports.
What about less straightforward examples? Keep in mind that “safety” can take on other meanings, for example, “emotional safety” or “psychological safety.” If you’re a Development Manager, for example, the physical safety of your employees is relatively less important than it would be for, say, an Area Manager. But emotional and psychological safety are just as important. How did you create and contribute to a work environment that is emotionally safe? How did you make it clear to your reports and your peers that they can express their professional opinions, even ones that you dislike, without fear of repercussions? How did you, as a Development Manager, respond to what you perceived as poorly written code? Or when an employee failed to meet clear expectations?
Those are just a couple of examples to help you brainstorm. As you prepare for your interview, just remember that there are many types of “safety,” and you should think about which is most important to your line of work.
You value people who are not like you
Tech has a diversity problem.
If you’re a white man (which many of my clients are), you may not be very aware of the diversity issue. If you’ve created a team that isn’t all white men, consider it an accomplishment and be prepared to speak to it. How did you make diversity a priority?
If you’re an Indian man working in tech, you may not be used to working on a team with many women. If you’ve created a team that has women on it, be sure to include them in your answers. Make sure you don’t refer to your team as “guys.” When you talk about your users or your clients, do you always refer to them as “he”? I have so many clients who tell story after story and there are no women in any of them. If you’re a team leader, this reflects badly on you.
A diverse team will give you teammates who can understand your customer better than you can. It will also provide more, different skills for you to draw from in creating better products for your customers. A savvy manager understands that having multiple viewpoints on a team makes the team better able to help more customers. Ultimately, if you can understand the customer you can probably sell to them, but if you can’t relate to the customer (because you don’t have anyone on your team with the right viewpoint or skills) you can’t sell to them.
You recognize strong performers and mentor them
If you currently work at a company where the attention goes to low performers, you should reorient yourself. Amazon believes that spending time on top performers is one of the best uses of a leader’s time, so don’t say that you spend an equal amount of time mentoring low performers. Low performers should be coached to improve their performance quickly or managed out quickly. Avoid stories where you coach an employee for six months or a year before their performance improves.
You try to help your people grow. You make it a priority to coach and teach employees. You provide regular feedback.
Show that you know what each employee wants and that you are trying to help them achieve that goal. You help employees drive their own development and learning by regularly discussing career goals, strengths, and areas for development. Show that you identify development activities and career moves for all employees.
Sample answers for the “Earth’s Best Employer” principle
Question: Talk to me about how you’ve prioritized hiring a diverse set of team members.
Answer by a Director of Engineering
“When I was hired as Director of Engineering at my current company, I was concerned by the lack of diversity on the staff. My predecessor hired software developers two years out of specific university programs that he believed were the best. What we had as a result was a team of smart people in their early to mid 20s with very similar backgrounds and ethnicity who had only learned about enterprise scale architecture in an academic setting or had limited exposure via internships. But based on where the organization was headed, I needed people who had already built enterprise scale architecture, shipped it, maintained and upgraded it over years, and replaced it when needed. Also, I knew that a more diverse team brings a wider spectrum of approaches for solving problems, which in turn yields higher productivity and more robust systems, as long as you build a culture where different points of view are valued.
My first step was to categorize my 50+ team members in terms of age, race, experience, sex, educational background, and several other data points. I enlisted my HR team for help, and it turned out that they had helped other managers in the company with similar efforts. I learned my team was 83% male, 92% white, 87% had come from the same four schools, and no one was over the age of 27. Only 10% of them had worked in an enterprise software setting for more than two years.
Based on this data, I worked with HR on a new recruiting program. We discarded the university background requirement, opening up the possibility of candidates with less traditional backgrounds (e.g., not in computer science). Experience was given the same importance as education. We also set targets related to demographics. For example, we set a target of increasing the number of female hires. In setting these targets, we compared ourselves to our peers in the same industry and sought to exceed industry standards.
After a three year effort I managed to hit my initial targets. I built the most diverse team in the company. In terms of impact, because we had a rich set of experience and backgrounds, we created something entirely new, an open source framework for managing distributed data at scale. I’m convinced this wouldn’t have been possible had we stayed on our previous trajectory. Our number of male employees dropped from 83% to 73% within one year. Also, a huge bonus was an increase in retention. The average amount of time a developer stayed at the company increased by 32%. The HR team started applying my team-building approaches more broadly.”
Story Analysis: Note that, just because the leadership principles changed in 2021, the structure for answering behavioral questions about the principles is the same. When creating your own stories about these new principles, remember to use the PAR structure, just as the Director of Engineering does in the answer above.
Question: Tell me how you motivate your team to meet key performance indicators while still having fun and keeping morale high.
Answer given by a Plant Manager
“In my current role, I manage a print on demand plant, which consists of ten printers running simultaneously, with a crew assigned to each printer. The team is experienced and has hit its numbers pretty regularly, until recently. Starting last year, we started receiving order sizes that were on average much smaller than what we had seen in the past. Smaller orders take longer, and so we started missing our numbers. Something had to be done.
After a few weeks of this, I started to think maybe we needed to change the KPIs for the new normal. Instead, I decided to have an “idea” competition, where each crew would propose an idea for working differently for one week. We’d try it, and if we saw an improvement, we’d double down on the idea. This competition wasn’t a tough sell. The crews love to compete and many of them had ideas to improve production rates. Tired of the doom and gloom from not meeting our numbers, I decided to make things fun. I decided that each team should name itself after the superhero that best represented their idea. For example, the team who experimented with new technology called itself The Batman because he always used high-tech gadgets. Everyone got into it, and we even went so far as to create a competition bracket, which was pretty funny with the different team names. On this bracket, you’d see, like, Wonder Women versus Groot and all sorts of hilarious stuff like that.
But it wasn’t just a joke. I was deadly serious about getting us back to hitting our numbers under these new conditions. The best idea came from a crew called the X-Humans, which introduced the idea of flexible crew sizes based on order size. They called these new teams “Mutant Crews.” This meant that, on any given day, crew makeup and size would shift according to need. It sounds simple, but truthfully, it never even occurred to me. I thought crews were tight and needed to operate as units. Turned out, we needed something totally new, and these Mutant Crews adapted quickly. We started hitting our KPIs again, and I even started to think they were too low. Senior management loved hearing that.”
Story analysis: Elements of this story are silly, but it takes confidence to show you’re not afraid to be silly if it means hitting a KPI, while simultaneously having fun. This story really captures the spirit of the fifteenth principle.
