TRAPS: 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.
BEST ANSWERS: 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.
Of course, 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.
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.
0 comments:
Post a Comment