In a team meeting, your manager singles you out for praise on a result that mostly came from a quieter teammate. Everyone's looking at you — what do you do?
Why this works
There's no free move: absorbing the praise is theft by silence, and an elaborate public correction can embarrass everyone including the teammate. Candidates without much work history still produce a scoreable answer about who they think results belong to when saying so costs them something.
Follow-up probes
- What do you actually say, right there in the meeting?
- Does anything change if the teammate isn't in the room?
- What do you do after the meeting ends?
What good looks like
Credit redirected promptly and specifically — naming what the teammate did — without theatrical self-deprecation, plus a check afterward that the correction registered where it matters, and no fuss made about having done it.
Red flags
A vague "it was a team effort" that keeps the spotlight where it landed, a correction that happens only in private later if at all, or an answer optimized for how the candidate looks rather than for the teammate getting their due.
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