Bypassed
The situational judgement test has 12 scenarios, 30 minutes, one attempt. For each scenario you rank five responses from most to least effective. No answer key is published; scores are benchmarked against current Fast Streamers. Scenario 4: you lead a small project and a senior colleague keeps bypassing you, emailing your team directly with instructions that conflict with your plan. The options are: (A) email the whole team restating your plan and asking that requests route through you; (B) speak to the colleague privately, ask about their concerns and agree a way of working; (C) raise it with your manager and ask them to intervene; (D) tell the team to ignore the colleague's emails; (E) wait, since the colleague is senior and may have context you lack. You place B first. You are unsure whether A or C should be second.
1. Rank the remaining four options and justify the order using principles rather than guessing what the test writer intended.
Read the worked answer
My ranking: B, A, C, E, D
B first. Private, direct, curious. It addresses the cause rather than the symptom, and asking about their concerns may reveal information you lack. It also preserves the relationship, which a public restatement does not.
A second. Restating the plan to the team is legitimate and low-cost: it reduces confusion and clarifies routing. It ranks below B because on its own it treats the colleague as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be understood, and it will be read as territorial if it arrives first.
C third. Escalation is not wrong, but using your manager before you have made one attempt yourself signals low autonomy. Managers expect to be a backstop, not a first move - unless there is a safety, legal or reputational issue, which this is not.
E fourth. Waiting is defensible - the colleague is senior and may have context - but it leaves the team receiving conflicting instructions for as long as it lasts. It is a passive option, not a destructive one, which is why it sits above D.
D last. Telling the team to ignore a senior colleague creates exactly the confusion you are trying to resolve, exposes them to a conflict they cannot arbitrate, and will be discovered. Nothing ranks below an instruction that makes subordinates carry your dispute.
On A versus C specifically: A acts on the situation within your control; C acts on the colleague through someone else. Prefer the former when you have not yet tried it.
2. With 8 minutes left you are only on scenario 9. What is your method for the remaining scenarios?
Read the worked answer
Two minutes per scenario, and a fixed order of work
- Read once, then place the extremes first. Identify the clearly most effective and clearly least effective responses before touching the middle three. The extremes carry most of the discriminating signal and are usually obvious within 30 seconds.
- Arrange the middle three relative to each other. Ask of each pair: which would a competent line manager defend in a meeting? That question resolves most ties.
- Answer every scenario. An unattempted scenario scores zero and there is no credit for neatness.
What you do not do
- Do not revisit earlier scenarios. With fewer than eight minutes left you will change answers under time pressure, which is the worst of both worlds.
- Do not slow down to be philosophically precise. The benchmark is not looking for a perfect ordering, only one that is better than the median.
- Do not leave the last scenario to the final ten seconds; the last two are the ones people lose to the clock.
Afterwards
Note which scenario types felt uncertain - that is useful for any future judgement-based assessment, even if you cannot retake this one.
3. You realise your ranking of A second and C third was influenced by the fact that, at work, your own manager is unresponsive and you have learned not to escalate. Should you adjust for that?
Read the worked answer
Yes - notice it, then decide deliberately.
The scenario asks what is most effective, not what you have learned is safe in your current team. Those diverge whenever your environment is unusually poor, and an assessment benchmark is drawn from a broader population than one workplace.
How to correct without overcorrecting
- Ask the counterfactual: if I escalated, what would I expect to happen in a well-run team? Escalation being reasonable in principle is what the ranking should reflect.
- Do not swing to putting C above A. A is still the action within your own control, and the reasoning that put it second stands independently of your manager.
- Do not rank B anywhere but first just because your own experience makes private conversation feel futile. The test is not measuring your workplace's dysfunction.
The general principle for the remaining scenarios
Answer as the manager you intend to be in a functioning organisation, then check the ranking is internally consistent. If you find yourself repeatedly demoting every action that requires someone else to respond well, that is a pattern worth recognising about yourself - and a useful thing to have identified before an assessment centre, where you will be observed doing the same thing in the room.