Do you bite your tongue or tell it like it is when your boss makes a mistake? Your next interviewer may want to know.
It can be a tough situation when you see your superior doing something wrong. You want to be tactful and respectful to your boss but at the same time you don’t want to let a mistake slip through. It could be a mistake that could damage the company.
This may be something you have struggled with in the past, but when you’re sitting in an interview and a recruitment manager asks, “If you know your boss is 100% wrong about something, how would you handle this?”, what do you do?
According to The Balance, there’s no point claiming it has never happened; everybody makes mistakes, even your boss.
The question is a way for interviewers to find out how you handle difficult situations. If you have called out your boss in the past, the best way to answer it is to:
- Provide an example of when it happened.
- Elaborate on how you told your boss (assuming you did it in a polite way).
- Explain the outcome of bringing up the mistake to your boss.
If your former boss was an absolute nightmare, resist the urge to bad mouth them; it may feel good to unload, but your interviewer is not the right audience for it.
If you’ve kept your mouth shut when it came to your a boss’ mistakes in the past, give the interviewer some context as to why you were reticent and explain your reasoning.
You can read a few sample responses from The Balance.
How would you tackle this question? Let us know in the comments.
Comments