Tell me about a situation when your work was criticized (difficult).

Why ask this question: 

The interviewer isn’t asking you whether you can cope with stressful situations at work, but how you meet them. This is a tough question because it’s a more clever and subtle way to get you to admit to a weakness.  You can’t dodge it by pretending you’ve never been criticized.  Everybody has been.  Yet it can be quite damaging to start admitting potential faults and failures that you’d just as soon leave buried.

This question is also intended to probe how well you accept criticism and direction.

Most Effective Answer: 

Try to think of a failure that took place relatively early in your career and/or one that would seem completely unrelated to the work you would be performing for your new employer. Begin by emphasizing the extremely positive feedback you’ve gotten throughout your career and (if it’s true) that your performance reviews have been uniformly excellent.

No one is perfect and you always welcome suggestions on how to improve your performance.  Then, give an example of a not-too-damaging learning experience from early in your career and relate the ways this lesson has since helped you.  This demonstrates that you learned from the experience and the lesson is now one of the strongest breastplates in your suit of armor.

Radiates experience and self-confidence in all communication situations.

If you are pressed for a criticism from a recent position, choose something fairly trivial that in no way is essential to your successful performance.  Add that you’ve learned from this, too, and over the past several years/months, it’s no longer an area of concern because you now make it a regular practice to…etc.

Another way to answer this question would be to describe your intention to broaden your master of an area of growing importance in your field.  For example, this might be a computer program you’ve been meaning to sit down and learn… a new management technique you’ve read about…or perhaps attending a seminar on some cutting-edge branch of your profession.

Again, the key is to focus on something not essential to your brilliant performance but which adds yet another dimension to your already impressive knowledge base.

Remember: 

Don’t ever admit to any personal quality that might hamper job performance, such as procrastination, laziness, or lack of concentration.

This question can be ask as under also.

• How do you cope with job stress?
• Have you ever had a conflict with a superior? How was it resolved?
• Give us a recent example of when you came up with a different approach/solution to a situation or problem.
• Describe a situation when you found it difficult to focus the work of a team on an objective.
• Tell me about the most competitive situation you have experienced and how you handled it.
• Describe a situation when you had to tell someone bad news.
• What Is the Biggest Failure You’ve Had in Your Career? What Steps Have You Taken to Make Sure Something Like That Doesn’t Happen Again?
• What’s the Most Difficult Part of Being a Manager or an Executive?

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