It is true – if you delegate a task to someone and they are unsuccessful to complete it, it is highly your fault. That is believed to be one of the main responsibilities of a manager – to make certain that you’re always assisting others succeed around you. But you also cannot sit there and watch everything they do. You’ve to have trust – trust that they are going to make good decisions, and trust in yourself that you made the right choice in selecting them for their specific role.

You might be confronted with delegation behavioral interview queries such as this one. Yet it’s not always what it seems.

Behavioral Interview Query: Tell me about a time when you delegated a task to a team member who didn’t perform the task as you would have performed it. How did you manage this?

This is often a tricky query. When you first read it, it makes you feel like you have to reprimand the worker and tell them how to do it right. But dig deeper – if you look at the query, the best answer is not that the employee did it wrong, but that YOU were wrong, and had the awareness and trust to realize that the individual had a great notion.

“You know, with the best workers that will happen all the time. I remember one time I had inquired Bill to program a new website for one of our clients in WordPress. He initiated, but realized it would have limited functionality and that, since the company we were developing it for was tech savvy, he created the site exactly as the client described in Joomla. He kept me informed throughout the way. I told him that I needed to see him start to put it together first, and when I could tell he was right on the money I applauded him for his great work and let him move onward unimpeded.”

No one said the worker did something wrong. In the query, the employee simply took a different route, and you did what you should – trusted him to see what he could do, and moved forward. This is an impressive answer.