Solving the problem collaboratively and coming to a compromise is always the preferable way of approaching this scenario.
To prepare for your interviews, try to find an example where you negotiated a compromise that got you and your colleague our of a sticky situation and use that as your story during the interview.
(From my answer on Quora):
Rob Svilpa
Staff Tech Program Manager/Career Coach – https://prodigy-cc.com1m
How would you handle a coworker not doing her job interview question?
I’ve run into this question myself in my past, so it would be written as a story in this fashion:
- Situation:
- My project is dependent on my co-worker delivering key functionality for me to proceed
- Task:
- my specific component that is critical to building the intermediate artifacts for compilation requires co-worker A to deliver the parser
- co-worker A is already a week behind, and being evasive about delivery timeline
- Actions:
- I approached co-worker A’s desk and asked if they had time to grab a coffee, where I planned on having a non-confrontational discussion about the issue. Co-worker A agreed and we went to the cafe area where we were able to informally sit and chat
- Co-worker A (colleague TPM but more junior) started to unburden herself, saying that her Eng Mgr had underestimated the effort and overestimated the skill set of the team resulting in issues meeting even early sprint commitments. They were only 60% through the MVP with their own blocking issues due to Cloud Services not getting containerized environments delivered in a timely manner.
- I offered to help – we met with the EM and I said I could provide some resources since half my team were not able to proceed with our work until this component has been delivered. They also were pretty senior and could contribute with little ramp up, so no additional delay imposed up front.
- I also suggested we look at potentially re-sorting the backlog to allow us to get some functional but incomplete version of the component earlier that would return mock data for the interim, and then the group could go back and get key functionality completed and tested while we were able to continue our integration work.
- EM was anxious about the plan but agreed – he recognized this was a difficult situation from a project and also his own team’s performance perspective, but this compromise would allow everyone to move forward more quickly.
- Co-worker A also recognized the value in this compromise plan and lobbied the EM hard to accept this. Their own performance review was affected as well, so they had skin in the game to make the accommodation work.
- Result:
- My team’s resources were able to dive in and take out a significant chunk of the resorted backlog items in the first sprint following this plan implementation. Half of the loaned resources were then able to return to our backlog work now unblocked and start the integration, with the remaining 2 resources staying back on Co-worker A’s team to guide and lead the remaining work items to completion.
- End result was that we were able to also resort our backlog and get stakeholder approval so that the integration would be done more quickly with our internal resources, delivering a slightly reduced functional MVP but still meeting 95% of the original goal. The remaining 5% was delivered in a fast follow release in the next sprint following the MVP release.
It is *always* preferable to give an example where you took the lead, discovered the issue without escalation and then provided a compromise solution that brought peaceful and successful resolution to the issue. There are surely some people here who dont have examples of this, or work in cultures where escalation is the first course of action, but as a general rule no matter where you’re at, being able to take the initiative and solve the issue without needing to involve the next level of management is far preferable overall.
