This is a common interview question for project managers, team leaders, or supervisors. This is a very good opportunity for you to insure the interviews that you have skills and experience to handling difficult management situations. The best way to answer is to give an example from your previous experience for how you have dealt with under-performed employees. However, your example must provide a positive outcome, that means you’d better no say you fired the employee. You should rather explain how you helped the team member achieve better performance and reached the team’s project goal. A recommended answer would like this one:
“As the team leader I am interested in the success of every team member. I don’t want anyone from my team left behind therefore I always do my best to get my team work together to achieve our project goal. As for under performing, there could be many reasons behind it, such as insufficient skill, lack of training, motivation issues, personal problems, team communications, etc. In most cases, I am able to manage the case and work with the individual employee to help him or her catch up. In a previous project of 12 team members, I noticed a poor performing team member after couple of weeks of the project start-up. The first thing I did was to determine the reason he was not performing. I had a private conversion with him and let him be aware of expectations. I also ensure him that I was there to help him achieve the expectations. From this conversion I learned that he didn’t have enough hands-on skills to perform the tasks, and also he was afraid of communicating with other team members because he didn’t want to be looked ‘stupid’. Actually he was worried about his job and didn’t know what to do. In this case, I needed to give him a lot of encouragement, I provided personal mentor to help him speed up on skills. I also met with a few core techies from the team and asked them to provide necessary support to help the problematic individual do him job. It happened that he was a quicker learner, once he got the basic skills, he gained the confidence and communicate well with the rest of the team. Finally he became a significant contributor to our project success.”
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