Monica Cepak has a go-to interview question that tells her a lot about a job candidate: What’s the hardest problem you’ve ever solved at work, and how did you reach a solution?

The question itself is fairly common. But Cepak, the CEO of sexual and reproductive telehealth company Wisp, looks for something specific in each person’s answer, she says.

If an interviewee’s answer is “cross-functional in nature” — meaning it shows how they worked with other professionals to solve an issue — they’re probably a team player who regularly collaborates with their coworkers, says Cepak, 38, who has nearly 10 years of experience in executive-level roles.

An answer like, ”‘Oh, I did everything myself. Myself, myself, myself’” is a telltale sign that a person “can’t work well in an environment like ours because nobody can solve every problem [on their own.] We’re a team at the end of the day, and your ability to problem solve by working with others is key,” says Cepak.

“You’ll be surprised how many times people will say ‘I, I, I, I, I.’ If I don’t hear ‘we’ anywhere, that’s usually a red flag,” she notes.

Teamwork can make workplaces more efficient and productive, helping you fix mess-ups or find solutions to problems much quicker than you would on your own. And problem-solving skills are one of the “most important” traits Cepak seeks in employees, from entry-level 22-year-olds to people in executive positions, she says.

“The ability to problem-solve with curiosity, empathy [and] humility ultimately drives solutions forward, no matter how tough, no matter how many curveballs one gets thrown,” she says, adding: “That gives me the confidence that someone would thrive in a [company] like ours.”

The best way to answer Cepak’s question is to anticipate that it’s coming, and prepare examples of effective collaboration in advance, she says.

The following answer, for example, could make you sound self-serving or anti-collaborative: “One time, our team was behind on a major project because no one understood their role. So I just did the whole thing by myself over the weekend. It was exhausting, but I got it done.”

Instead, give an answer that showcases how you used your colleagues’ strengths, in addition to your own, to meet a common goal, Cepak recommends.

Try something like this: “At my last job, our team was struggling with communication and meeting tight deadlines. I suggested we create a shared dashboard to track real-time updates and ensure everyone is aware of deadlines. I collaborated with our operations lead to build it out quickly, and we got everyone on board in a day.”

Be sure to include problem solving and collaboration skills on your resume and to mention them on your job applications, advises LinkedIn career expert Drew McCaskill.

“When somebody says, ‘Tell me about a time that you solved a problem that your company was facing,’ they’re really asking you about innovative thinking,” McCaskill told CNBC Make It on April 2. “If my human skills are going to be a big part of these conversations, let me start to think about what the main ones are.”

Teamwork and problem-solving skills should be valuable to any prospective employer, Cepak adds.

“I think that’s a skill set that serves anyone in any company,” she says. “How you approach those situations in times of stress really defines an individual’s career.”

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Charles Coristine used to revel in working at Morgan Stanley. He loved the pace, even waking up in the middle of the night to trade in the Tokyo and London stock markets.

In 2011, after nearly two decades on Wall Street, Coristine burned out. He tried multiple remedies: switching to a vegetarian diet, meditating, enrolling in an MBA program. None of them worked.

At a barbeque, Coristine met an owner of snack company LesserEvil, who talked about wanting to sell his “flatlining” business. Coristine had no food industry experience, but was intrigued by the idea of a fresh start — and he liked that the company’s name was “synchronistic” with a healthy, mindful lifestyle, he says.

In November 2011, Coristine bought LesserEvil for $250,000 from his savings, plus a future payment of $100,000, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The risk was impulsive and ill-researched, he says: LesserEvil, which aimed to offer consumers healthier popcorn and snack alternatives, was losing money and bringing in less than $1 million in annual revenue at the time, the company estimates.

“I didn’t know anyone in food … to ask whether I was crazy or not, but that’s probably good,” says Coristine, 52. “If I had done a lot of research and looked into it, I would have realized that the probability of success was pretty low.”

Yet the Danbury, Connecticut-based brand grew significantly under his watch: Its popcorns and air-popped Cheetos-like puffs and curls now appear in major retailers and corner stores across the U.S. LesserEvil grew to $103.3 million in annual gross sales by 2023, including $82.9 million in net sales and $14.4 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA.

On April 3, The Hershey Company announced a deal to acquire LesserEvil. The sale is worth a reported $750 million, plus more if LesserEvil hits some performance milestones, according to the Wall Street Journal. Coristine will remain its CEO, a LesserEvil spokesperson says.

Here’s how Coristine is making LesserEvil into a household name.

When he bought LesserEvil, Coristine was working at TD Bank and pursuing an MBA at Cornell University Graduate School.

In 2012, he got his MBA degree and started his new full-time job as LesserEvil’s CEO. Among his first moves: hiring his graduate school friend Andrew Strife as COO and CFO, and his wakeboard instructor as head of marketing.

Along with the previous regime’s accountant, the small team worked from an office in Wilton, Connecticut, to update LesserEvil’s branding and create their own production line. The old-fashioned branding wasn’t attracting customers, and the company was paying about 20% of its revenue from each sale to co-packers who helped make and ship out the snacks, Coristine says.

Coristine’s savings had largely run out, so the team raised an undisclosed amount of money from their friends and family, and secured more financing through a connection Coristine had at a bank, says Strife. They moved into a 5,000-square-foot factory in Danbury in 2012, and filled it with used equipment purchased at auctions.

The team made “friends with welders down the street,” who could weld wheels and popcorn shoots onto the machinery, Strife says. They painted factory’s exterior black and plastering a yellow “LesserEvil” logo to the side of the building themselves. As Coristine recalls, drivers started pulling off the road, entering the factory and asking, “Is this a strip club?”

“Everything was scrappy and needed to be reinvented as we went along,” says Strife.

In 2014, when a neighboring carpet factory moved out, LesserEvil knocked down the wall and added 2,000 square feet and a production line to its operations.

That year, Coristine’s personal nutritionist offered a health-focused suggestion: Use coconut oil to pop the popcorn. Coristine was skeptical that coconut oil would stay fresh in a snack bag, so he literally shelf-tested it, he says: “We put it on the top of a fridge, which gets really hot [and left it for] for three months.”

The oil stayed fresh, and Coristine liked the surprisingly buttery taste, so LesserEvil launched the reformulated product with a new laughing Buddha logo in 2014 — calling it the Buddha Bowl. It brought in roughly $2 million that year, accounting for a third of LesserEvil’s annual revenue, the company says.

Kroger, the first major retailer to sell LesserEvil, started stocking its products in 2015. That partnership helped fund another move for LesserEvil in 2017 — this time, to a 20,000-square-foot factory, says Strife.

A year later, the company got its first outside funding — about $3 million, the company says — from sustainable food and agriculture investment firm InvestEco. Coristine and his team used the funds to add production lines to the new factory and update LesserEvil’s packaging again: Each product now features its own “guru,” from the ancient Greek poet Homer to Henry David Thoreau.

The rebrand, and added products, helped push the brand into profitability. Coristine started paying himself a salary from LesserEvil that year, the company says.

LesserEvil’s goal has always been to differentiate itself from competitors with non-standard ingredients like extra-virgin coconut oil and avocado oil, says Coristine.

Sometimes, using atypical ingredients can have consequences: A Consumer Reports investigation from June found “concerning amounts of lead” in two of LesserEvil’s cassava-based Lil’ Puffs snacks for kids. The company issued an apology, and has since relaunched the puffs with sorghum flour instead of cassava flour.

The company still brought in $62 million in net sales during the first half of 2024. It used another round of funding — $19 million, in a round led by investment firm Aria Growth Partners, LesserEvil says — to buy out prior investors and open a new factory in New Milford, roughly 15 miles from its Danbury facility.

Today, the company has 350 employees. Before the acquisition by Hershey, which also owns popcorn brand SkinnyPop, Coristine’s short-term goals involved growing LesserEvil further and launching new products. Longer-term, he simply wants the company to “be a brand that could be around for along time,” he says.

LesserEvil has already succeeded in helping Coristine solve a more personal problem, he adds — he works less, from about 7:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and feels happier since leaving Wall Street.

“It feels joyous, so it doesn’t feel like work,” says Coristine.

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Ryan Coogler’s new movie “Sinners” has garnered at least $71 million in box office revenue since its April 18 theatrical release — but it’s the deal he inked with Warner Bros. to make the movie that’s significant for a film director who was deep in debt roughly a decade ago.

Coogler discussed his personal debt history, which he said he experienced while directing the 2015 movie “Creed,” during an April 15 episode of the “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast. “Back then, bro, I wasn’t making no money,” said Coogler, 38. “I was $200,000 in debt for film school. It was bad.”

Now, his “Sinners” deal with Warner Bros. reportedly includes a provision that’ll give him the rights to the movie after 25 years, according to Vulture. By the time his kids are adults, Coogler could potentially receive royalties from streaming services or television broadcasts — that would otherwise go to the production studio — for the rest of his life. He could also snag merchandising deals and receive lump-sum payments from licensees seeking rights to the film for set periods of time.

Directors don’t typically obtain ownership of their films, even decades after their cinematic release, making Coogler’s “Sinners” deal a rarity in Hollywood.

Coogler attended the University of Southern California’s School of the Cinematic Arts, obtaining a master’s degree in fine arts in 2011. His struggle to afford the costs of filmmaking began even earlier, as he worked toward his undergraduate degree at St. Mary’s College of California and California State University, Sacramento, he told the “Ebro In The Morning” radio show in 2018.

“I was trying to write [movies] in Microsoft Word. It’s impossible because your format gotta be right,” Coogler said. “I was broke, playing football on the little scholarship money. And my wife scraped together some cheese and bought me Final Draft, which is the software that you write your movies on.”

DON’T MISS: How to change careers and be happier at work

While working on his master’s degree, Coogler made the film “Fruitvale Station,” which debuted at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and took home two awards: the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. That success helped him land a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios to create “Creed” with a $35 million budget.

The movie made $42.6 million on opening weekend, launching Coogler’s Hollywood career. He directed the 2018 Marvel film “Black Panther,” which netted $1.3 billion in box office revenue, making him one of highest-grossing Black filmmakers ever and the youngest director to lead a billion-dollar movie.

Coogler requested future ownership of “Sinners” because the movie — specifically, the two protagonists’ fight for ownership of a juke joint in the Jim Crow South — was directly inspired by his family’s history, he told Business Insider on April 7.

His Warner Bros. deal also reportedly gave him the power to decide the final version of the film, and a percentage of box-office revenue as soon as the movie hit theaters — instead of after the studio makes a profit. He doesn’t plan to make similar requests for future films, he told Business Insider.

“That was the only motivation,” said Coogler, adding: “It was [only for] this specific project.”

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Social discomfort is so universal that social psychologists like me have made careers out of studying it. We can find it almost anywhere, like in salary negotiations or small talk conversations that have one too many awkward pauses.

Almost everyone will at some point find themselves in an interaction that makes them feel uncomfortable. And at work, these situations come up daily. We give and take feedback, manage team dynamics, and navigate status differences. 

Most of us take a simple approach to quelling the discomfort: We smile as hard as we can, laugh (even when nothing is funny), and bend over backwards to convince people: There’s nothing to worry about here. This interaction will be a positive one. I am nice. 

Maybe too nice?     

There is a sad irony here: The harder we try to use niceness to cover up our discomfort, the more people can see right through us.

Humans are good at picking up on emotions, which leak out through our nonverbal behaviors, like tone of voice. We think we’re doing a good job of masking anxiety by layering on the compliments, but when those compliments are delivered through artificial smiles, no one is buying it.

DON’T MISS: How to successfully change careers and be happier at work

Often, we regulate our discomfort by giving feedback that is so generic, it’s not useful. Think of your classic, “Great job!” In many cases, it’s also unearned. 

Overly positive feedback signals that you’re not paying attention — and you probably aren’t, if you’re too busy trying to regulate yourself. Over time, the person on the receiving end becomes distrustful of you. They need specific information that would actually help them improve their work. 

Many people work in environments where being overly nice is the norm. Here are three things you can do to shift that culture to one in which honest, useful feedback is valued instead. 

1. Question the ‘niceness culture’

Ask yourself: Does everyone around me enjoy this overly nice culture, or are they doing it because everyone else is doing it? 

Social norms are a big driver of behaviors, and the quicker newcomers adopt those norms, the sooner they’ll be perceived as “fitting in.” If a newcomer observes everyone laying on compliments after a subpar presentation, they’ll do the same.

If no one explicitly questions this behavior, the result is what social psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance”: Everybody assumes that everyone else is engaging in overly nice feedback because they want to. But secretly, nobody likes it.

Start a conversation around change. Get a sense of what people really feel about the nice culture. One way to do this is by proposing alternatives. 

Before the next presentation, for example, you might ask people: “How would you feel if we each wrote down three specific things that you could improve and three specific things that you should definitely keep at the end of the presentation?” 

2. Be precise and particular

It’s natural for us to extrapolate from behaviors to form impressions and make assumptions. For example, we might decide that someone who is chronically late is lazy. But impressions are often too general to be useful, even if they’re positive. 

Strive for specific, behavior-based feedback instead. The more precisely you can pinpoint the issue — that a presentation that had too much jargon, for example, rather than “it was boring” — the more useful the feedback will be.

The same goes for praise. If you tell someone exactly what they did well or why their work was excellent, you’ll come off as more genuine and your feedback will be more meaningful.  

Removing broad generalizations from the equation has the added benefit of reducing threat for the person on the receiving end, especially if that feedback is critical. 

3. If you’re new at this, start small and neutral

It can feel like jumping off a cliff, moving from an overly nice feedback culture to an honest one. 

Start small. Pick issues that are mundane, but that people still care about, like what to stock in the office kitchen. Nothing that will get anyone’s blood boiling. The goal is to build the feedback muscle. That way, once you jump into the tougher stuff, the norms around honesty have already started to change.  

As you work on shifting the culture around you, be patient. Norms take a long time to form, and a long time to change.

Tessa West is a social psychologist and professor at New York University. She has spent years leveraging science to help people solve interpersonal conflicts in the workplace. She’s the author of ”Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them″ and ”Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You.” She is an instructor in CNBC’s online course How to Change Careers and Be Happier at Work.

Want a new career that’s higher-paying, more flexible or fulfilling? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Change Careers and Be Happier at Work. Expert instructors will teach you strategies to network successfully, revamp your resume and confidently transition into your dream career. Start today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off $67 (+taxes and fees) through May 13, 2025.

While going to college tends to mean better pay, not all degrees guarantee high salaries — especially if you study liberal arts.

That’s according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which shows that graduates who major in education, social work or the arts tend to earn the lowest median incomes within five years of finishing school. The analysis includes only full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree and excludes those still enrolled in school.

The salary figures are based on 2023 data, the most recent available, and show early-career pay in these fields falls below the U.S. median wage of $48,060 for that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While engineering majors can make upward of $80,000 early in their careers, many liberal arts and education majors earn closer to $40,000. The median salary of all majors examined was $50,000.

Here’s a look at the 10 majors linked to the lowest median salaries for full-time workers ages 22 to 27.

While learning a foreign language is a valuable skill, a degree in the subject doesn’t always lead to high-paying roles. That’s likely because language can be learned outside a formal education and many graduates tend to go into relatively low-paying fields, like education, translation or public service.

Liberal arts majors also tend to earn less than graduates in technical fields like engineering or math, largely because there’s less demand for their skills in higher-paying industries like technology and finance.

Unfortunately, many liberal arts majors don’t fare much better as they get older, especially those in education. Here’s a look at the 10 lowest-paying majors for full-time workers between ages 35 and 45.

Early childhood education majors earn the least of all mid-career graduates, with a median income of $49,000 — just $8,000 more than what they earned five years after graduation.

By contrast, engineering majors typically break into six figures by mid-career.

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