McKinsey PEI example answers (one per dimension)

How to read these examples

Each McKinsey PEI takes one story on one dimension and probes it for 10–20 minutes, according to candidates and coaches. The four dimensions are Leadership, Connection, Drive and Growth (formerly Inclusive Leadership, Personal Impact, Entrepreneurial Drive and Courageous Change; coaches and candidates report the rename in 2025, and McKinsey's localized careers pages still show the old names).

The four stories are original illustrations we wrote, not transcripts or templates. Each opener runs 150–220 words, one to two minutes. Each debrief scores our six criteria from 0 to 4 (dimension fit, ownership, specificity, obstacle, impact, reflection); 4 means specific, quantified and held up under probing. The overall is the lower of dimension fit and the average of the rest, because coaches say an off-dimension story fails regardless of quality.

All opening questions and probes: the McKinsey PEI questions guide.

Leadership example: a business analyst candidate

Candidate: final-year undergraduate, business analyst application. Opening question, paraphrased: leading people from different backgrounds through a difficult situation.

In my third year I led a four-person team on a semester-long practicum for a food bank, ranking their 11,000 lapsed donors for re-contact. The team was a statistics major, a design student, an exchange student from Korea who rarely spoke, and a classmate there for the credit. By week three we had no shared plan: two people wanted different methods and nobody had asked the exchange student for hers.

I changed how we met: 20-minute one-to-ones first, then a short joint session. In hers I learned she had done donor segmentation at a nonprofit, so I gave her the segmentation and asked the statistics major to build his model on top of it. The disengaged classmate got the smallest, most visible job, the Friday client update, and I told him on time mattered more than perfect. We delivered a ranked list in week 12. The food bank re-contacted the top 900 names and recovered 140 donors that quarter.

Debrief (our simulator scale, not McKinsey's). Dimension fit 4: different backgrounds, an approach per person, a result through others. Ownership 4: three personal decisions with what was said. Specificity 3: roles and durations, one line of dialogue. Obstacle 3: real disengagement, nothing tried first that failed. Impact 4: 900 contacts, 140 donors, client-measured. Reflection 3: one concrete change, untested since. Overall 3.4.

• Probe: "You said we. What did you decide?" Answer: "To stop group meetings for two weeks and talk to each person alone."
• Probe: "What exactly did you say to the disengaged classmate?" Answer: "Close to: I need the Friday deck on time, every week. He was late once."
• Probe: "Why one-to-ones instead of the group?" Answer: "In the group one person talked and three went quiet."
• Probe: "The model was his. What was yours?" Answer: "The team around it and the segmentation under it."
• Probe: "What would you do differently?" Answer: "One-to-ones in week one. I lost three weeks assuming people would speak up."

More Leadership openers: the Leadership guide.

Connection example: an MBA associate candidate

Candidate: second-year MBA student, formerly an analyst in consumer goods. Opening question, paraphrased: a challenging situation with someone holding the opposite view.

Before business school I worked in trade marketing. A regional sales director with twenty years there, call him Marco, had run the same end-of-quarter volume promotion for six years. My analysis said it lost money: we were discounting cases retailers would have bought at full price anyway. I presented the numbers in a quarterly review; he dismissed them in one sentence.

I asked him for thirty minutes and did not bring the deck. I asked why the promotion mattered to him. It was not margin: his team's bonus was tied to quarterly volume, and the promotion was how they hit it. So I changed the proposal and built the replacement with him: a smaller promotion in the quarter's two weakest weeks, plus a case to finance for a margin-and-volume target for his team. He took the finance meeting himself. Over two quarters volume held within two percent and promotional spend fell by about 380,000 dollars.

Debrief (our simulator scale, not McKinsey's). Dimension fit 4: one person moved from no to yes through his reason, not the analysis. Ownership 4: meeting, question, reframe and fallback were the candidate's calls. Specificity 4: quoted dialogue, durations, mechanisms, consistent under re-asking. Obstacle 4: a twenty-year incumbent with a bonus at stake; first attempt failed. Impact 4: 380,000 dollars, volume within two percent. Reflection 3: a concrete change, this story only. Overall 3.8.

• Probe: "What did Marco say in that first meeting?" Answer: "Close to: analysts have told me this for years; none carried a quota."
• Probe: "Why one-to-one instead of escalating?" Answer: "Escalating wins the quarter and loses him. I needed him running the replacement."
• Probe: "What if he had still said no?" Answer: "Pilot it in one of his five regions for a quarter."
• Probe: "Was he on board, or just conceding?" Answer: "He took the finance meeting without me and later proposed cutting it further."
• Probe: "What went badly?" Answer: "The quarterly review. Ambushing him in front of his peers cost me a month."

Why analysis stories fail here: the Connection guide.

Drive example: an experienced-hire candidate

Candidate: operations manager, eight years in logistics, experienced hire. Opening question, paraphrased: working hard to achieve something in particularly tough circumstances.

I ran a 60-person depot. In July our largest retail customer said they would leave for a competitor offering same-day delivery unless we matched it by peak season in mid-November. Head office said no new budget that year. I decided to build the lane from what the depot already had.

The first plan failed: the subcontracted carrier I had lined up pulled out after three weeks, and my fleet had no spare vans. I borrowed four from a sister depot in exchange for two drivers in December. Then systems failed: our dispatch software could not schedule a same-day wave, and IT quoted five months. I built a manual dispatch sheet with the two shift leads and ran it by hand twice a day for eleven weeks. We launched three weeks before peak. The lane carried 4,100 parcels in its first month and was margin-positive by month three. The customer renewed for two years.

Debrief (our simulator scale, not McKinsey's). Dimension fit 4: self-owned goal, two distinct setbacks, resourcefulness, outcome in doubt until the end. Ownership 4: decisions named, the shift leads' share stated honestly. Specificity 4: dates, counts, durations; consistency check held. Obstacle 4: budget refusal, carrier exit, systems gap, first plan failed. Impact 4: 4,100 parcels, margin-positive by month three, a two-year renewal. Reflection 2: a plan-level lesson, nothing on how the candidate works now. Overall 3.6.

• Probe: "Who told you to do this?" Answer: "Nobody. The budget answer was no, so I went without one."
• Probe: "You said we launched. What was yours?" Answer: "The decision, the van deal and the customer calls. The shift leads built half the sheet."
• Probe: "What options did you reject?" Answer: "Leasing vans, which needed sign-off I could not get, and a January launch, which loses the customer."
• Probe: "What would you do differently?" Answer: "Sign the van deal first, the carrier second. I started with the fragile option."
• Probe: "How many parcels in the first month, again?" Answer: "4,100."

More Drive openers: the Drive guide.

Growth example: a PhD candidate

Candidate: fifth-year PhD in materials science, advanced degree route. Opening question, paraphrased: rapidly learning something new to tackle a challenging situation.

In my fourth year, the postdoc who wrote our group's image-analysis code left for industry. Our grant renewal, due in ten weeks, depended on one figure only his pipeline could produce: particle-size distributions from 2,000 microscope images. I had never written more than a few lines of Python. My advisor told me to make the figure happen.

I gave myself three weeks to learn enough to run his code. That failed: the pipeline needed a library version nobody could install, and I spent the time debugging. A postdoc from another group looked for twenty minutes and said I was reproducing a tool when I needed a result. That changed my approach. I rebuilt the analysis with a standard image library, 200 lines instead of 3,000, and validated it on 50 images he had analyzed; the distributions matched within four percent. The figure went into the renewal with a week to spare, and the grant was funded.

Debrief (our simulator scale, not McKinsey's). Dimension fit 4: real starting gap, visible change of approach, changed habit afterward. Ownership 4: the rebuild and validation were the candidate's calls. Specificity 3: counts and durations, but unnamed people, one quoted line. Obstacle 3: three lost weeks, but the advisor's pressure is asserted, not shown. Impact 2: grant funded, but the candidate's share is unmeasured. Reflection 4: a concrete habit, evidenced twice since. Overall 3.2.

• Probe: "How much Python did you know?" Answer: "Enough to change a parameter in someone else's script."
• Probe: "What did the other postdoc say?" Answer: "Roughly: you are resurrecting his tool when you only need his number."
• Probe: "Why three weeks before asking anyone?" Answer: "Pride. I assumed asking would look like I could not cope."
• Probe: "How did you know it was right?" Answer: "Fifty images he had already analyzed, compared distribution by distribution."
• Probe: "What has changed in how you work?" Answer: "I ask for a twenty-minute review in the first week of anything new. It has saved me twice."

Put your own story through the same probes and debrief; the first full mock is free. Run a free PEI mock.