■“I don’t know that this would qualify as a crisis, but it
was a big deal for me. In my first job I inadvertently sent
out the wrong project information to the wrong customer.
It was big because there was proprietary information
included. I quickly contacted the delivery service as soon as
I realized the mistake, and I was able to retrieve one of the
two packages before it was opened.The other package
unfortunately was opened, and I had to take the responsi-
bility for my mistake. I can tell you that I never made that
error again.”
■“I can’t remember a real crisis, but I have had some
unpleasant moments when I’ve made mistakes. One time I
forgot to include some expensive software in a pricing cal-
culation, and the company had to stand behind my quote
even though it took a loss. That particular day it felt like the
biggest crisis of my career. I learned a valuable lesson
about taking my time and checking my figures twice
before making commitments.”
“Give me an example of a time when you weren’t
able to deal successfully with a problem.”
■“We were having a problem meeting a deadline at my last
job. My boss told us that for each day over the deadline,
there would be money subtracted from the bonus we
were promised. You can imagine how that news went over.
But there is nothing like money to motivate a team of
workers. I came up with the idea of cross-functional teams
to complete our task. Each person paired up with a person
who did a different job. By working in tandem, we were
able to do twice the steps in half the time. It was a bit
confusing for the first couple of days, but it really boosted
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