TRAPS: This is a tough question because it's a more clever
and subtle way to get you to admit a weakness.
You can't dodge it by pretending you've never been criticized. Everybody has been. Yet it can be quite damaging to start
admitting potential faults and failures that you'd just as soon leave buried. This
question is also intended to probe how well you accept criticism and direction.
BEST ANSWER: Begin by emphasizing the extremely positive
feedback you've gotten throughout your career and (if it's true) that your
performance reviews have been uniformly excellent. Of course, no one is perfect
and you always welcome suggestions on how to improve your performance. Then,
give an example of a not too damaging learning experience from early in your
career and relate the ways this lesson has since helped you. This demonstrates that you learned from the
experience and the lesson is now one of the strongest breastplates in your suit
of armor. If you are pressed for a criticism from a recent position, choose
something fairly trivial that in no way is essential to your successful
performance. Add that you've learned
from this too, and over the past several years/months, it's no longer an area
of concern because you now make it a regular practice to ... etc.
Another way to answer this question would be to describe
your intention to broaden your mastery of an area of growing importance in your
field. For example, this might be a
computer program you've been meaning to sit down and learn...a new management
technique you've read about...or perhaps attending a seminar on some cutting-edge
branch of your profession. Again, the key is to focus on something not
essential to your brilliant performance but which adds yet another dimension to
your already impressive knowledge base.
