In the Personal Experience Interview, McKinsey is testing three distinct dimensions. Those dimensions are closely related to the way how McKinsey is working.
The three dimensions tested are:
- Leadership
- Personal Impact
- Entrepreneurial Drive
Please note that “Problem solving” is clearly not covered as a McKinsey PEI dimension. You might find misleading (not so say outright wrong) information on that on other ‘professional’ interview prep sites. I leave the judgement about those other websites up to you. Let’s focus on our subject here, which is preparing you well for the McKinsey PEI.
Leadership
“McKinsey delivers the greatest amount of expertise available around the world by assembling powerful teams”
What McKinsey is looking for:
Ability to lead effective teams as well as building strong relationships with clients and colleagues.
Personal Impact
“McKinsey helps its clients with difficult tasks mainly on a strategic level within high-impact projects”
What McKinsey is looking for:
Influence and persuade other people in tense business situations, thus also influencing the overall outcome
Entrepreneurial Drive
“McKinsey consultants work intensely with the client management to solve problems and achieve exceptional outcomes”
What McKinsey is looking for:
Set and achieve challenging goals by working hard with a high level of energy along the project
Obviously this is just the high-level definition from McKinsey’s perspective how McKinsey is working, and what they are looking for when interviewing candidates. And this is clearly not enough to really understand the specific core elements which you need to consider in your PEI examples. So let’s look next into that.
Core elements to cover in your McKinsey PEI examples
Leadership
- Leading a team (formal or – even better – informal leadership role)
- Challenging situations in terms of interpersonal conflicts (not difficult content-related goals of team) – affecting whole team and bilaterally between two team members or between you and another team member
- Working together with this team over a certain period of time to cover changing interpersonal dynamics
Personal Impact
- Convincing one specific other person (not multiple persons at once, no team included in this dimension) about a topic, so that he finally changes his opinion
- Strong underlying conflicting interest – both parties have a strong interest in the outcome of the situation
- Example is going on over at least several days, better weeks for showing a strategic masterplan on how you convinced this person
Entrepreneurial Drive
- Achieving a goal which is clearly outside your regular role and responsibilities
- You wanted to achieve something by yourself (and no one else imposed this task on you) and can explain a strong motivation behind
- Several big obstacles which you needed to overcome
This should already give you a clearer picture about how McKinsey is working, what they are looking for in each McKinsey PEI dimension, and more specifically which core aspects to include in your McKinsey PEI. Among others, you can find many more details about each of those aspects in the Ultimate McKinsey PEI Prep eBook.
Now that we have a basic understanding of the McKinsey Personal Experience Interview and it’s dimensions, we will look into finding good examples for your in the next email.
– Robert