Why interviewers ask this
When an interviewer says tell me about a time you showed leadership, what arrives is usually a story about alignment. The candidate saw a team pulling in different directions, brought people together, established a shared goal, and delivery improved. Every word of that can be true and it still describes facilitation. Facilitation is a real skill, worth hiring for, and it is not the one this question is aimed at. Leadership becomes visible at the point where you decide something that part of your team thinks is wrong, and then carry it, and then live in the same room as the people who disagreed with you. Interviewers ask this because the alignment story is available to anybody who has run a workshop. The disagreement story is only available to people who have decided something and stayed in the room afterwards.
An answer that sounds fine
When I took over our reporting squad, the four engineers were each working to their own idea of what good looked like and we were shipping slowly because everything got relitigated in review. I set up a session where we wrote down what we actually agreed on, rather than what we were arguing about, and we came out of it with three shared standards for how we structure a pipeline. I made sure everyone contributed rather than imposing it from the top. After that, review time dropped a lot, people stopped arguing about the same things every fortnight, and we shipped the quarterly roadmap on time for the first time in a year. Leading by building consensus rather than dictating is genuinely how I prefer to work with a team.
Where it breaks
Read the account for a moment where somebody lost, and there is not one. The session produced standards everybody agreed on, which means either the disagreement was never substantial or the candidate is describing the part of the process where the hard thing had already been avoided. Teams that relitigate the same argument every fortnight are not short of a document. They are teams where two people want incompatible things and nobody has chosen between them. The phrase I made sure everyone contributed rather than imposing it from the top is presented as the method and functions as an alibi, because a standard everyone contributed to is a standard nobody has to own. Anyone answering an interview question about leadership this way is describing a meeting they ran well. Running the meeting well is worth something. It is not worth what they think it is worth in this particular conversation.
The follow-up
What decision did you make that the team disagreed with?
The one that actually mattered was not in that session. Two of them wanted to keep building custom pipelines per client and two wanted one shared framework, and the workshop produced standards that were vague enough for both to keep going. I chose the shared framework about six weeks later, on my own, because the standards had not stopped anything. One of the engineers who wanted custom builds was pretty unhappy about it and told me the framework would not handle two of his clients. He was right about one of them.
That is the leadership moment. It sits six weeks after the story he prepared, he made it alone, and it cost him something with a person who reported to him. It is also the only part of the account that could not have been done by a competent facilitator. Notice too that he concedes the dissenting engineer was right about one client, which means the decision was correct overall and wrong in a specific place, and he can say that out loud. A candidate who can name the person who disagreed, and the part where they turned out to be right, is describing something a hiring manager can actually use.
An answer that holds up
I took over a reporting squad that was relitigating the same architecture argument every fortnight. I ran a session to write down shared standards, which helped with review time and did not touch the real split, because two engineers wanted custom pipelines per client and two wanted a shared framework and the standards were vague enough to accommodate both. Six weeks later I chose the shared framework and told them it was not going to be revisited. One engineer disagreed strongly and said it would not handle two of his clients. He was right about one of them, and we ended up handling that client as a documented exception rather than pretending it fitted the framework. Delivery got predictable after that, and the fortnightly argument stopped. If I had run the session and stopped there I would have had a nice document and the same argument in January, and the thing I would do differently is make the call in week two rather than week eight.
The interviewer asks who on the team would describe it differently.
The engineer who wanted custom builds. He would say I overruled him on something he understood better than I did, and on one of his two clients that is a fair description of what happened.
Practice this question
Say your answer to this question out loud, then get asked what you decided that your team disagreed with. Answer it now, free, no account.
Related questions
Tell me about a time you took initiative
Tell me about a time you influenced someone without authority