Tell me about a time you delegated something and it went wrong. Where did the failure actually start?
Why this works
Failed delegation gets retold as the other person's failure; asking where it started forces the harder audit — the match of person to work, the context withheld, the check-in skipped. Whether the candidate changed how they hand work over afterward is the durable signal.
Follow-up probes
- What did the person need that you didn't provide?
- When did you first sense trouble, and what did you do?
- What do you now do differently when handing work over?
What good looks like
Their own contribution named without prompting — a rushed handoff, missing context, the wrong match of person to work — early warning signs acknowledged, the recovery handled without scapegoating, and a changed handover habit since.
Red flags
A story entirely about the other person's shortcomings, a first check-in that turned out to be the deadline, or the lesson drawn being "do the important things yourself".
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