Tell me about a team effort that failed. Walk me through your own part in the failure.
Why this works
Failure stories reveal how a candidate divides up a shared outcome: weak answers audit everyone else's contribution and exempt their own. What they did as it sank — raise the alarm, double down on helping, or watch — separates people who own a team result from passengers.
Follow-up probes
- When did you first suspect it was going wrong, and what did you do?
- What did you personally do that you'd now do differently?
- What did the team do with the wreckage afterward?
What good looks like
A concrete personal contribution to the failure named unprompted, evidence they raised the alarm or leaned in rather than spectated, and something specific they carried into the next team effort.
Red flags
The failure is fully explained by other people and circumstances, their own role shrinks to bystander, nothing was said at the time because "it wasn't my call", or the lesson is a platitude.
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