Tell me about the biggest failure in your career.

"I was leading a development team charged with debugging a software product that had had a lot of problems, and it was one of several teams managing different parts of the process. The timeline was extremely tight. As we got close to the deadline, it became clear we wouldn’t make it, but I met with the other team leaders and found that much of the work that was holding us up was part of the expertise of one of those other teams. Once I knew that, I was able to bring that expertise into our process. We ended up missing that deadline, but it wouldn’t have happened if we’d shared our experiences earlier on. For future projects, we set up structured inter-team progress meetings that made knowledge-sharing a normal part of things so that we could take advantage of expertise anywhere in the company, not just in our own limited group. "

What not to say: Honestly, I can’t think of anything. Failure’s just not in my vocabulary.