By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

This is one of the most obnoxious interview questions I have ever heard. I offer many ways to answer including the one I believe is the best way.

“The Importance Of Intergenerational Connection”

How long are you willing to fail at this job before you succeed? God, what an awful question. I say awful because it’s designed to fry your circuits. Fail? Fail? Who’s talking about failing here? That’s the first instinctive reaction that people have, including some of the predictable responses, but the predictable ones aren’t really good.

I’m willing to do whatever it takes in order to get results, or I learned from my mistakes and move forward, or I don’t believe in failure. When I fail, I fall forward and thus don’t believe in quitting. You know, these are mediocre answers, because Detroit, of course, you’re not going to fail.

Of course, you don’t want to give up, but you’re not really telling them anything. And I know implied in the question is, how long are you willing to to fail before you succeed? But the more important thing is, what do you do here? And the answer for most of you, I’m going to say, this is more likely to be asked of someone at the manager level and above. And invariably, it can be asked in the C-suite, where it’s a very powerful question, but it can also be asked of junior staff.

And junior staff will often instinctively go for one of the mediocre answers. Here’s the way I’d like you to approach it if you’re in some version of management or leadership role. You know, when things aren’t working out, I’ve got to take a pause for a second and do a critique.

I’m first going to look at myself to see if I’m missing something. So I’m going to talk with people. I’m going to see if I’ve got a deficiency here, in some way, shape or form, or a blind spot.

What am I missing here about myself and my own leadership? Then I’m going to turn around and start looking at the people assigned to this, the people who I’ve charged with getting this done. Where’s the problem there? Was it that, frankly, we were too ambitious in our objectives and our timelines? Are there skills deficiencies? What’s really going on that’s causing this problem? And then we’re going to do corrective action. You see, to me, what’s more important than how long I’m going to fail because I obviously can’t give you a number of days I’m going to tolerate mediocrity.

But what’s more important is what we do to correct it. It starts with me, because I could certainly be the problem. But it can also be a part of the staff.

Designing Career Experiments

I’m going to take input from others that make sense for me to apply. So notice what I’ve done. I’ve textured the answer from the more mundane ones that most people would give so that there’s something real there that people can sink their teeth into that allows them to detect your emotional intelligence, your savvy and your ability.

So I hope you found this helpful. If you’re interested in my coaching, my name is Jeff Altman. I’m known as The Big Game Hunter.

And if you can look me up on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com forward slash IN forward slash The Big Game Hunter. Mention that you saw the video because I like knowing I’m helping folks. Once we’re connected, send a message that you’re interested in coaching.

We’ll set up time for a free discovery call. Also want to mention, I’ve got a ton of great information at TheBigGameHunter.us. You can go over the site, go to the blog and go exploring. You’ll see over 7000 posts at this point with advice about job hunting that you can watch, listen to or read that will help you find a lot more quickly.

Lastly, if you go to JobSearchCoachingHQ.com, that’s a curated site where the best of my information is there. It’s focused more on interviewing than anything. But if you take out a lifetime membership, what I offer is an hour of free coaching that could be done as two 30 minute sessions.

And frankly, that equals the price of an hour of coaching with me. So you get the website for free, as well as the hour of coaching. Hope you have a great day and take care

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