Tell me about a time your team's morale genuinely sank — a bad stretch, a loss, a departure. What did you do about it?

Motivation is where interviews produce the most theater — pep talks and pizza. Real morale repair starts with finding the actual cause and usually costs something: an irritant removed, pressure absorbed, a workload renegotiated. Genuine fixes are specific; theater is generic.

• What was actually behind the dip, and how did you find out?
• What did you change, as opposed to say?
• How did you know it was working?

The cause diagnosed by asking and watching rather than assumed, at least one structural change alongside the encouragement, bad news still delivered straight through the rough patch, and a believable account of when and how the team turned.

Morale treated as an events problem — team lunches while the cause stayed untouched — relentless positivity that ignored what everyone in the room knew, or the dip blamed entirely on the people feeling it.