1. Give an example of a time you managed a difficult employee, and how you overcame it.
Effective leaders build strong teams by communicating openly and fostering a sense of connection and belonging. This unity can be disrupted by an employee who is troublesome, doesn’t perform well, or causes conflicts among team members. Ask candidates about their experience dealing with difficult employees to assess their ability to handle conflicts within their team.
Their answer should demonstrate their conflict resolution skills, as well as their ability to communicate and compromise. While their solution for dealing with a difficult employee may have ended in termination, that should have been their last resort.
2. How do you motivate your team
This question is meant to get your candidate talking about their philosophy on people management. Remember that good leaders are able to nurture growth and empower their team by creating a safe and trusting environment.
Listen for well-developed strategies for encouraging career growth and strong performance from their employees. Do they use a positive motivation or negative motivation approach? Do they create a feeling of succeeding — or failing — together for their team? Are they able to provide concrete examples of how they have motivated teams in the past, or does the candidate mostly speak in generalizations?
3. How do you set priorities for the different projects you manage?
Prioritization and self-organization are very important skills for senior-level staff. Misplaced priorities, or an inability to rank projects by urgency and importance, can lead to inefficiency and missed deadlines that cause trickle-down effects throughout the company.
The candidate should be able to demonstrate a method for prioritizing their own and their team’s tasks. Do they have a mental model for making decisions, and are they able to communicate their strategy well? Can they regulate their time and delegate important tasks to other people when necessary, or do they try to do everything themselves?
4. Walk me through a time you managed a complex team project. What was your approach to the work, and how did you delegate tasks?
Great leaders foster a collaborative environment by optimizing individual employee’s strengths. They encourage employees to “self-organize” by providing encouragement and direction, and by allowing them to achieve their own goals. Leaders who try to control every part of each process will smother employees and burn out.
Look for people who are able to assign tasks based on the abilities of team members. Are they able to delegate tasks, and are they comfortable giving employees the autonomy to self-direct? Kerrie Juels, Technical Recruiter at Formlabs, uses this question to assess whether a candidate’s leadership style aligns with their organization: “We are a company that emphasizes lack of micromanagement.
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10 leadership interview questions to help assess management potential