- What makes a team or a workplace a good one?
- What motivates you to seek change?
- Do you have self awareness of your own strengths and weeknesses?
- How do you respond to constructive, but perhaps difficult, feedback?
- Can you provide direct, actionable feedback to others?
This is all still valuable information for a hiring decision.
As a hiring manager of some time, I myself ask a similar question but in the form of:
- Given this previous situation we've just been talking about, how would you improve it? Did you attempt to make those changes? Why or why not?
I'm looking for someone who demonstrates:
- The ability to think beyond the current situation and look for ways for improvement
- Possible ability to affect change via influence rather than direct control
- A great answer might reveal how they championed changes or dealt with push back from management
- A great answer may also reveal an understanding of explicit and implicit power structures in an organization, i.e.- what changes are feasible versus unrealistic.
This question is better asked to someone with more experience as I expect a more nuanced answer from a "senior" compared to someone with just a few years of experience. If I don't get a good answer from someone with a decade or more of experience, I will probe further to understand if they are an agent of change in an organization or just go with the flow.
I'm totally open to feedback that I could be doing this all wrong, but one other thing to consider:
My approach to interviewing is to first and foremost gather data. I need a fair bit of data to make a hiring decision. In the moment, I'm not trying to make deep value assessments on the answers. To do that, I need a more comprehensive view of the data in context. Maybe I'm fine with someone who goes with the flow given other aspects of this person's skillset or the composition of the team or the mentality of their manager. Maybe just an attitude would be setting the person up to fail. All of that assessment is made later by the hiring manager or committee using as much data as we can possibly and reasonably gather during the interview process.