The interviewers WANT to know how well you deal when your IDEAS are disagreed by your manager/supervisor. Disagreements are part and parcel of working in a team. Hence, the recruiter wants to know if you are capable of handling such disagreements and how well you plan to develop the relationship with the manager.

Some tips to answer this question:

• Explain what the DISAGREEMENT was.
• How did you overcome that?
• What was your learning outcome?
• Do not speak ill or abuse your manager.
• You can not tell that you never had a disagreement before as it would just PROVE that you do not have a sense of leadership or you lack creativity.

Sample answer:

This reminds me of an instance where I and my manager had a disagreement on why a certain feature has to be included in the product and he was against it. We had lots of discussions regarding the pros and cons of that feature. During this, I explained to him why adding that feature to our website would be the best thing to do and how it would make the lives of our users easier. I gave him various scenarios and good reasons why that feature would be a great idea. My manager was convinced as he felt the reasons were good enough and we got his green signal to work on it. In the end, when we unveiled this feature to our client, the clients were indeed very happy and praised us all as we went out of our way to add this feature. My manager was very happy with the result. I learned that effective and graceful communication is the ultimate key. Ideas should be respectfully conveyed to people when there are disagreements as we belong to a team and the collective vision of the team is to LAUNCH the project successfully. In case my manager’s idea was best for the project, then I would gracefully accept that too.