Amazon Leadership Principle - Learn and Be Curious

The Thought - “Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them”

What is “Learn and Be Curious” at Amazon

Work environment in Amazon is dynamic because of its business model. As Amazon scales its business to other countries and other businesses, yesterday’s solution may quickly become obsolete tomorrow. Hence, along with invent & simplify and are right a lot, Learn and be Curious is an important leadership principle. Constant curiosity and learning ability to improve knowledge and develop new skills is a key trait one should have to keep up with agility.

Learn and Be Curious Amazon interview questions

• Talk about a time you invested time and effort to learn new things to solve a customer problem ?

• Have you ever worked outside of your area (sounds like ownership question)? How did you decide what you need to learn to contribute or succeed in a new area?

• Talk about a challenging problem you worked on (sounds like an invent and simplify question)? How did you gauge the learning you need to solve this challenging problem?

• Talk about a scenario when you pushed yourself to think differently ? How did you inculcate this change to think differently?

Interviewers expectations from your answers on “Learn and Be Curious”

• Are you a person who learns from mistakes?

• Are you a person who is willing to invest time and effort to learn new areas of business?

• How conscious are you for self-development, reading books, watching knowledge enhancing videos or steps you take to expand your awareness?

• Are you a person who builds structures where your team is learning new things?

• Are you a person who understand your and your team’s strength and weakness and have a clear action plan to build strengths and awareness?

Must have in your answers on “Learn and Be Curious”

• You are open for constructive criticism; you are intentional in seeking inputs from people who can showcase your area of improvements

• Mention about how you use every new scenario that you come across has given you new insights and learning that you could use further.

• Mention about some problem you felt was there in other process but you did not know how to solve for it, what did you do to learn that new area and how did you contribute.

• Intentionally quote if you have learnt anything new over the web or from a book that you felt was of use in office and you used it improve or change something at work.