Tell me about a time when you had to address underperformance in your team
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What is this question about
Interviewers use this question to assess whether you can recognize underperformance early, diagnose it fairly, and take ownership of improving the situation rather than avoiding it or blaming the person. They are also looking at your judgment: how you balance empathy, accountability, and results, and whether your actions match the scope of your role. For more senior levels, the question increasingly becomes about how you create clarity, support, and consequences for others—not just how you personally worked around the problem.
Key Insights
- You should treat underperformance as a diagnosis problem before a judgment problem. Strong answers show that you separated skill gaps, clarity gaps, motivation issues, and external constraints instead of assuming the person was simply weak.
- You do not need a dramatic failure story. A strong example can be a quiet but real performance gap that mattered, as long as you show timely intervention, direct communication, and follow-through.
- For seniority-calibrated answers, be careful about scope. Mid-level candidates usually shine by improving a working relationship or helping a struggling teammate directly; staff and manager candidates are expected to show repeatable support structures, clearer expectations, and decisions affecting multiple people.
What interviewers probe atlevel
Top Priority
You are not expected to manage someone, but you should show respectful directness instead of avoidance or gossip.
Good examples
🟢I set up a quick one-on-one and shared the specific places I was blocked, then asked what was making the work difficult for them.
🟢I approached the conversation carefully and focused on the work impact, while also asking whether there was missing context or something I could clarify.
Bad examples
🔴I mentioned to my lead that working with them was difficult and let my lead handle it.
🔴I mostly worked around them because I didn't want to make things awkward.
Weak answers avoid the conversation or make it indirect; strong answers show respectful candor and curiosity about the other person's situation.
Valuable
Example answers atlevel
Great answers
On a small feature project, I was paired with another engineer who was responsible for one part of the implementation, and after the first week I noticed they were missing the check-ins we had agreed on and seemed stuck when requirements changed. Instead of assuming they were disengaged, I asked if we could walk through the task together, and I learned they understood the codebase less than I had realized and were unsure when to ask for help. We split the work into smaller milestones, and I started sharing earlier drafts of my own work so they had a clearer model for what 'done' looked like. I also kept my lead informed because the timeline mattered, but I stayed involved rather than just escalating. Over the next two sprints they started asking for help earlier and hit their smaller milestones more consistently, and we finished the feature only a little behind schedule. The big thing I learned was that direct, specific conversations are much more helpful than silently getting frustrated.
During a campus recruiting season project, I was working with a teammate who had strong ideas but kept missing the small deadlines we had set for updating the shared slides and tracking sheet. Since I was the most organized person on the team, it was starting to fall on me to clean up everything the night before our presentations, which was frustrating but also a risk to the team’s reputation. I asked to meet one-on-one and found out they were also balancing a heavy course load and didn’t realize how much their delays affected everyone else. We agreed on much smaller due dates, and I started sending clearer reminders with exactly what needed to be done instead of just saying “please update this.” After that, their follow-through improved, and we were able to keep the project on track without last-minute scrambling. That experience taught me that with junior teammates, underperformance is often more about unclear expectations and competing priorities than lack of effort.
Poor answers
I had a teammate once who wasn't delivering their part of a project on time, so I mostly took over the important pieces to keep things moving. I let my lead know that the person was struggling, and after that I focused on my own work. The project ended up shipping because I covered the critical tasks, so I think that was the right approach. Sometimes it's more efficient to just have the stronger person handle the work.
Question Timeline
See when this question was last asked and where, including any notes left by other candidates.
Early August, 2026
Early July, 2026
Late February, 2026
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