Hiring Leaders Into Your Organization
The Corner Office: Interviewing Candidates for a Management Position
Interviewing and evaluating a job applicant’s fit for your organization is no simple task. Organizations consume a tremendous amount of resources in the recruitment, on-boarding and training of talented workers. Then, after that, we as managers are left with only the hope that the new hire grows and flourishes in the organization. Bad hires can be extremely costly and disruptive.
Even more difficult, therefore, is the task of interviewing candidates for management positions. A candidate for a management role, if hired, will heavily influence your organization as well as the people in it. Not only must the applicants you interview demonstrate the skills and related knowledge to the job function, but they must also possess the necessary leadership charisma to get people to perform.
But how do you evaluate a candidate’s interpersonal skills? How can you ensure he or she has those leadership abilities to effectively guide a team towards their collective goal? Let’s discuss 10 powerful questions for interviewing candidates for management positions that will do just that.
Interviewing Management Candidates: Key Objectives
Just because a candidate can marshal tasks to completion and push to get results does not make him or her a strong leader. As part of your interviewing sequence for supervisory positions, you must evaluate each candidate’s ability to serve as a positive influence on the organization they will lead and weed out those individuals who simply achieve results through brute force.
Key Answers to Seek When Interviewing a Candidate for a Supervisory Role:
- Does the candidate’s historic behavior support the stated organizational vision?
- Are they, or can they be, effective leaders to others?
- Can he or she make sound decisions under pressure?
- Are they just about results, or are they also about the people who get those results?
- Are they influential? Or just authoritative?
Whether you’re interviewing applicants to fill a first-level management role, or you’re seeking to hire a senior level business leader, here are 10 essential questions to ask candidates during the interview phase, each of which will shed important light on his or her ability to lead a team.
1. Can you tell me about a time when you led a successful team?
Highly effective managers are typically successful because they are also good leaders. For this reason, you always want to seek to hire individuals who are natural leaders. So, start by asking for an example of leadership.
Even if interviewing a candidate with no prior management experience, he or she should still be able to provide an example of leading a project, initiative or assignment and how their effort influenced other people. While everyone has their unique qualities and personalities, look for candidates with clear leadership skills. How they achieved results is just as important as the results themselves.
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- How did they lead? How did they measure success? How did they deal with challenges?
- Tells stories of how he or she empowers others to succeed.
- Recognizes others as unique individuals with unique talents.
- Describes situations when others sought support or guidance from them.
- Able to articulate what he or she specifically did that led to the team’s success.
2. Please tell me about a situation when you had to ask for help accomplishing an important task.
Even great leaders need help from time to time. The managers you seek to hire should be transparent and willing to acknowledge when they need assistance. Asking for help has nothing to do with being weak or incompetent and can have everything to do with the ability to anticipate how any number of outside factors can influence results.
What often makes an employee succeed as an individual – their hard work, dedication and their own perseverance – is not what makes them successful as a leader of people. Managers can’t do everything themselves and need to get results through their employees. Filling a management role with someone who tries to do it all can have negative consequences. Ideally, you want to identify candidates who are unafraid to seek help, willing to delegate tasks, and who have the foresight to know when support is needed.
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- A sense of humility and the candidate’s ability to know their own limits.
- The ability to recognize that as circumstances change, execution plans may also need to change.
- Is willing to let go of things by seeking support from others.
- Unafraid to approach those above them in the organization to identify a problem.
3. Can you give me an example of a time when there were several important tasks and you needed to prioritize? How did you go about it and what was your approach?
A busy manager who oversees a department that’s humming along must have the skills and ability to prioritize on a regular basis. Sometimes, certain activities need to be elevated to the top while others need to be put on the bottom of the list. Therefore, hiring a candidate and filling a role with someone who can make such decisions – and has the leadership strength to stick with them – is incredibly important. Continuous reprioritization is just as ineffective as not prioritizing at all.
Your ideal candidate should be able to demonstrate stability in their decision-making and awareness of the big picture. Equally, the candidate should also be willing to let some things fall to the bottom of the list when necessary, to maximize throughput and resources on the top priorities. Case in point, consider this: if everything is important, then nothing really is.
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- Examples of prioritizing tasks and sticking with those decisions rather than reprioritize on a regular basis.
- Examples of when the candidate had to consult with others to evaluate the necessary tradeoffs.
- Specific details about negotiating due dates or pushing back if there truly was too much work.
- A demonstrated history or ability to make decisions with limited, or partial information.
4. Can you give me an example about a time you had to manage toward a metric or a measured goal, and how you went about it?
Just about every supervisory role requires an aspect of a managing metrics. And, managing metrics successfully starts with effective planning. Even if you’re interviewing a candidate who may lack prior supervisory experience, you should enquire about his or her experience managing and guiding something with a tangible outcome.
RELATED: Are You Leaving Your Metrics Up to Chance?
For example, dig into his or her ability to regularly meet schedule commitments from running a past program, or ask about the way in which the candidate managed a budget. Tracking metrics may be an unpleasant part of the job, but it is necessary, so make sure you select candidates who can plan and forecast well.
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- Not leaving results to chance and adjusting on-the-fly to achieve goals.
- The ability and experience to plan out incremental steps.
- The awareness to plan and anticipate the unexpected.
- Unwillingness to sacrifice standards, morals or quality to achieve results.
Get the Free MRH Download: 105 Excellent Interview Questions to Ask Job Applicants
5. Please tell me about a situation in which you had to manage conflict. What did you do, and how did you go about resolution? What were the results?
Whether an issue exists between employees, or a problem emerges with your customer, the ability to negotiate and resolve conflict is an essential component of being an effective leader of people.
While applicants who have management time under their belt should have first-hand experience dealing with conflict situations, a candidate who does not have prior management experience may not have exact examples to offer. In either case, your ideal candidate should be able to offer details about times they’ve had to negotiate an outcome to an interpersonal dispute. The exact response is not as important as identifying if the candidate has ability to look at multiple perspectives, find common ground, and willingness to find resolution.
RELATED: 8 Ways to Avoid and Reduce Office Conflict
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- Examples of dealing with conflict under pressure.
- The ability to listen and consider different perspectives.
- The level-headedness to engage in professional, non-threatening behavior.
- The ability to be strong and hold ground when dealing with a difficult situation.
- An ability to relate to others and achieve balance in communication.
6. Can you give us an example of how you had to improve the performance of others?
Employee performance issues are a routine, yet difficult problem that all managers face. Unfortunately, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to dealing with such challenges and every situation is different.
Even if the applicant has no prior management experience, a strong candidate should be able to give examples of when they recognized a performance issue from a colleague and the pro-active actions they took to deal with it – even as a peer.
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- Willingness to give feedback to others – peers, superiors and subordinates.
- Ability to motivate and influence others.
- Intuition relating to identifying the root cause of a performance issue.
- Can recognize individual talents and strengths, as well as weaknesses and uniqueness of personalities.
- Willingness and courage to seek management support for larger performance issues.
7. Can you give us an example of how you had to improve a system or a process?
A team’s ability to perform is often a byproduct of the frameworks and processes that are prescribed by the organization. Often, as technology changes and we learn as an organization, optimization of frameworks is necessary. This optimization and performance improvement may come in many forms that result in process updates, efficiency gains, and eliminating waste.
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- Ability to recognize inefficiency.
- Do they just accept status quo, or do they look to improve?
- Willingness to modify the “way things have always been done.”
- Able to effectively communicate the need for change and get others on board with it.
- Recognizes that ideas for improvement often come from working-level staff, not the top.
8. Please tell me about a situation when you had to make a difficult decision at work and how you went about it.
The importance of sound judgment and quality decision-making cannot be understated for supervisory and management positions. Managers and team leaders make decisions throughout the day – some big, some small. In all cases, though, the ability to make a sound decision based on rational thought and data is needed.
Decision-quality, when the stakes are high, is even more important. Thus, when interviewing a candidate for a leadership role, you should evaluate his or her ability to make critical decisions, and explore how they went about it – did they make the decision because it was easy? Or, did they make the decision because it was the right thing to do? What alternatives or scenarios were considered? Did they ask for help or feedback from others?
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- Details about the alternatives that were considered.
- The candidate’s willingness to seek and consider all facts before making a decision.
- The candidate’s ability to avoid making a hasty decision to appease the situation.
- Level-headedness and awareness to balance short-term and long-term impacts.
- Willingness to ask for advice or input from trusted individuals with valuable perspectives.
9. What unique leadership quality do you think you’d bring to this role? Why is it important?
As outlined here, management roles are first and foremost about leadership. They are not just about executing tasks and overseeing that projects are completed on time. Instead, they entail a long list of responsibilities spanning from managing employee workloads to serving as a moral compass to holding employees accountable.
Asking a potential hire what he or she views as their unique leadership quality can give you important insight into what they feel they bring to the table. The key to filling a management position is to identify candidates who are effective leaders and who can navigate the complex business environment in a positive and healthy way. Anyone can chase, track and push for work to get done. Few can build the environment where it happens naturally.
RELATED: What is My Leadership Style?
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- A true and genuine response that demonstrates self-awareness.
- Willingness to share something that is meaningful to them, not just what they think is important to you.
- A response that touches on helping people and employees be successful.
- A quality to which their would-be employees or the organization would respond favorably.
10. What does management mean to you, and what do you see as your role if you get this position?
The role of a manager means different things to different people – some in a good way, some in not-so-good ways. So, as part of your interviewing process, you should delve into what the candidate thinks his or her role will be, and what they believe their duties will entail.
The goal of this question is not really about the specific duties of the job, since the candidate is not yet in the position. Rather, it is intended to gauge the applicant’s view and perspective on the various responsibilities they will own, and the competencies he or she will apply if hired.
What to Look for in the Candidate’s Response:
- Is the response task-oriented or leadership-oriented?
- Are there comments and points made about leading others?
- Does the candidate describe the need to hold others accountable?
- Is the candidate going to focus simply on results, or how those results are achieved?
- Does the candidate mention the importance of helping employees succeed and being a mentor to others?
Interviewing Candidate for Management Roles
When interviewing candidates to take a management or supervisory role in your organization, focus your evaluation on leadership skills. Specific skills, such as process knowledge, technicalities and in-depth understanding of the team’s duties can always be taught. But identifying and hiring natural leaders – while hard to do – is of utmost importance because of the influential nature of the role. Effective leaders can inspire and drive an organization to achieve its peak performance, and your approach to interviewing candidates for management roles should seek to identify these individuals.