Flock offered its 'most generous' buyouts to shrink a demoralized workforce. The question that tests who raises the bar.
On September 19, 2026, TechCrunch, citing a report in Wired, wrote that the surveillance technology company Flock Safety had unveiled a “generous” severance package for voluntary employee departures. According to that report, Flock expects a significant portion of its 1,500-person workforce to express interest in the buyouts, and said it will grant them to a majority of those who are interested. The internal announcement described the packages as the “most generous” the company has ever offered. Wired also reports that without buyouts, the company would “almost certainly” need to lay off some staff. The backdrop is a backlash over license plate recognition technology. TechCrunch noted that in August The Washington Post identified 46 cases where police officers have been accused of misusing Flock technology, that Florida and Texas both said they will stop using it, and that an anti-surveillance advocacy group identified 90 cities that dropped Flock in August alone — a fourfold increase from the previous month. TechCrunch said it had reached out to Flock for comment. CEO Garrett Langley recently told the All-In podcast that the “biggest damage” caused by the backlash has been to “internal morale.”
TechCrunch's reading is that voluntary departures let the company say goodbye to team members demoralized by the backlash. Taken at face value, that solves only half of a problem. A buyout decides who leaves. It does not decide what the people who stay will accept as good work. When a team is tired, its standards rarely collapse. They drift. Reviews get shorter, a known defect ships because nobody wants another argument, and the definition of done loosens a little each sprint without anyone voting on it. Whoever manages the people who stay inherits that drift, and their response to it is the behaviour one of the most common leadership questions is trying to find.
Why they ask it
“Tell me about a time when you raised the bar” sounds like an invitation to describe excellent work. It is a question about dissatisfaction. The interviewer wants to know whether the candidate can look at something the organization has already accepted as fine, judge it not good enough, and then move other people to the higher standard without formal permission to do so.
That is a rarer skill than delivery. Plenty of managers hit the targets they are given. Fewer notice that a target was set too low, and fewer still will spend political capital on a gap nobody else is complaining about. The question also checks whether the candidate's standards hold when conditions are poor. Holding a high bar on a confident, well-funded team is easy. The useful evidence comes from a quarter when people were worn down and lowering the bar would have been forgiven.
The trap
The common failure is answering with effort instead of a standard. The candidate describes working harder, staying later, or personally rescuing a deliverable. That story is about one person's output. Nothing about what the team considers acceptable changed, and the bar went back to where it was as soon the candidate stopped pushing.
The second failure is the bar nobody else could see. The candidate raised quality by their own taste, such as cleaner code or a sharper deck, but cannot say who benefited or how anyone would tell. Interviewers hear this as perfectionism, and perfectionism is expensive.
The third failure is the answer with a villain in it. The old standard was low because the predecessor was lazy or the team was weak. This tells the interviewer how the candidate will describe their next team.
A strong answer names the old standard exactly, explains why reasonable people had settled for it, defines the new one in terms someone else could check, and shows it surviving after the candidate stopped enforcing it personally.
Applying STAR-T
Situation. Set out the accepted standard and why it was accepted. For example: our incident reviews had become a formality. After a hard year the team was exhausted, the reviews were closed within a day with a root cause of human error, and the same class of outage kept returning. Nobody was negligent. Everyone was protecting each other from more work.
Task. Say what bar you chose and why it was yours to raise. I decided a review was not finished until it named a change to the system and not a person, and until that change had an owner. No one asked me for this. The uptime target was still being met on paper.
Action. This is most of the answer, and it should be about other people. Describe how the standard was made visible: a written definition of a finished review, an example written by the candidate first, and the first uncomfortable conversation with a respected engineer whose review was sent back. Describe what was removed to make room, because a bar raised on a tired team without subtracting anything reads as another demand.
Result. Give the outcome you measured and the evidence that it lasted. Repeat incidents fell. More tellingly, a review was sent back by a peer and not by me, and a new hire assumed the practice had always been there.
Trade-off. Name the cost. Reviews took longer, a feature slipped, and one senior engineer stayed unconvinced for months. A candidate who claims a higher standard cost nothing has either not raised it or not noticed who paid.
The follow-up that breaks weak answers
The follow-up is usually some version of: who pushed back, and what did you do when they were right? Weak answers don't survive it, because the honest reply is that nobody pushed back, and that means nothing changed for anyone else. A real bar-raise creates friction. The friction is rarely pure obstruction. Someone usually points out that the new standard is too costly for a certain class of work, and the mature response is to adjust the standard without abandoning it.
The second probe is about what happens after the candidate leaves: is it still that way? A candidate who can answer it has shown the difference between a standard and a mood. They can point to the checklist that outlived them, the reviewer who now holds the line, or the metric that still gets reported. That difference matters most when a team has just watched colleagues walk out of the door.
Score your answer against the director’s bar
Q: Tell me about a time when you raised the bar.
Bank one story where you named the old standard, defined the new one so others could check it, and paid a real cost, then rehearse it aloud until the pushback follow-up no longer surprises you. Try it free →