Don’t be a candidate.
Congrats, you’re invited for an interview for this role you applied to! This is hopefully the first step of many: you’ll have five, ten conversations, maybe more, with different people across the organization.
Get ready! Interviews are rarely coordinated. Each person is gathering some pieces of the puzzle and running their own assessment, through the filter of their own priorities, interviewing agility with, and relationship with this role you are applying to. They often ask redundant or irrelevant questions. And when the pieces get put together, they’ll try to form a coherent picture of you from fragmented and incomplete data.
Think of it this way: you’re the only person who will be in every interview. You’re the only one who can create consistency and continuity across the many interactions. Your goal is to take control of the narrative from conversation one.
Show them what they need to see about you, equip them with compelling arguments that make it easy for them to envision you in the role, and advocate for you when they compare notes.
Yet, while most interviewers are not experts at asking great probing questions, they are very clear about what they expect in a leader joining their team.
Here’s what collectively the interview team needs to assess:
Relevant Experience
They’re probing for evidence you’ve operated successfully in similar environments. Do your career history, notable achievements, and leadership track record map to their actual complexity, scale, and context?
Impact trajectory
They are assessing your pattern of impact over time. Did you inherit momentum or create it? Do you require the full machinery of a large organization to deliver, or can you generate results from scratch? They’re trying to predict whether your past success is portable to their specific constraints and resources.
Leadership OS flexibility
They’re looking for your natural operating style and at the same time, your ability to operate within a wide range around this style. Can you be disruptive whilst focusing on priorities? Can you take risks whilst protecting the business? Can you lead with authority while remaining open to being wrong?
Values and judgment
They’re listening for your guiding principles on how you make tradeoffs and decisions when faced with competing priorities, limited resources, or political misalignment. Do you have a personal set of morals, principles, and non-negotiables that underlie your decisions and actions?
Team chemistry signals
This is about your social intelligence. Are you interpersonally attuned, insightful and mindful with a range of stakeholders? Do you have the self-awareness to adapt your style to the CEO’s quirks, the board’s expectations, and the needs of your direct reports?
Potential
Potential is not about evolving in the company anymore. This is about evolving the role itself as you predict and prepare for change, navigate novelty and first-time conditions and embed those in a sustainable day-to-day operation. High levels of resilience and tenacity would be implicitly expected, as well as curiosity and a bias for personal development.
The reality gap
Finally, do you see this opportunity clearly and fully understand what you’d be walking into? Do you understand the conditions you need to thrive and is this the right place for you to realize your professional purpose and the impact you want to create beyond this role, on your teams, the organization, the industry? Can you and do you want to win here?
After all, you are assessing them too, at every step.
