Managers have an outsized impact on a company’s success, from productivity to adaptability to talent retention. Yet an astonishing 66% have had no formal training — a recent phenomenon known as “accidental managers.” Asking the right leadership interview questions and paying attention to red flags can help hiring teams determine a management candidate’s deeper suitability for a role.
Failure to do so can mean downstream effects such as attrition and lower morale. Success, on the other hand, can boost productivity and retention; employees working under their best managers are 2.5x more likely to be fully engaged, put in discretionary effort, and stay long-term. Here’s how to craft leadership questions for an interview that can help you hire better bosses.
In this guide, you’ll find:
- Five keys to leadership ability and interview questions for each
- How to interview leaders for values and culture
- Leadership interview red flags
- Bonus tip: Empower leaders to make better hiring decisions
Five keys to leadership ability and interview questions for each
Eight in ten managers have found themselves in their roles without the clear intention of being promoted. That disconnect suggests both knowledge and skills gaps in the majority of management candidates. While many of these capabilities can be taught through workplace training or mentorship, the following five attributes are must-haves in any manager you hire.
1. Visionary thinking
What sets managers and executive leaders apart from individual contributors is their ability to think long-term. Although they’re aware of a team’s day-to-day work, they see clearly how that effort supports a larger goal. They’re also able to get others on board with their vision and inspire collaboration to support initiatives that will help your organization stay one step ahead.
Visionary thinking interview questions
- How do you prioritize what’s important, not just what’s urgent?
- Can you communicate your strategy at all levels: to the executives above you, to your peers, and to your direct reports?
- Do you look beyond your own organization to how your work impacts other departments?
- How do you maintain your long-term vision amidst daily operational demands?
- What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about pursuing a vision?
2. Growth mindset
Research has shown that when individuals have a growth mindset, they’re more likely to challenge themselves, believe they can achieve more, and become stronger, more tenacious problem-solvers. That’s because a growth mindset views intelligence, abilities, and talents all as something that can be developed — versus a fixed mindset, which sees things as immutable.
Growth mindset interview questions
- How do you respond when a project or initiative doesn’t yield the expected results?
- How do you approach learning new skills or technologies that are unfamiliar to you?
- What role does mentorship play in your career growth?
- How do you encourage others to take ownership of their growth and development?
- Can you describe a time when you learned something valuable from someone with less experience than you?
3. Strategic decision-making
Managers must constantly align their choices with the company’s mission and goals. A strategic approach keeps the future in mind and uses a clear framework to evaluate a situation. As conditions, needs, and resources evolve, a manager’s decision-making must adapt accordingly to new circumstances while facilitating shared ownership of the agreed-upon solution.
Strategic decision-making interview questions
- What are the key factors you take into consideration when building a growth strategy?
- Tell me about a time when you conducted a competitive analysis. What steps did you take, and what were your key takeaways?
- How have you involved decision-makers within your organization in developing a strategy?
- How do you balance long-term planning with short-term objectives?
- What’s your approach to strategic resource allocation such as budgets, people, and tools?
4. Team building and empowerment
Managers are responsible for setting and maintaining a team’s direction, creating the right environment for all team members to thrive, and preventing internal and external forces from negatively impacting their people. They’re also highly influential in the professional development of direct reports by advocating for and facilitating their career advancement.
Team building and empowerment interview questions
- What is your approach to providing feedback and coaching team members?
- How do you manage stress among your team members?
- How do you deal with workplace politics?
- How do you measure your team’s success and acknowledge or reward it?
- How do you set performance goals and manage performance issues?
5. Results-driven
Teams work most effectively when they’re pulling together toward a common goal. Managers help facilitate this by centering both long- and short-term objectives in their leadership style and measuring results to make incremental improvements. Great managers know when to push and when to support their people; after all, people and results reinforce each other.
Results-driven leadership interview questions
- Can you tell me about an instance when you redistributed your team’s workload to meet a tight deadline?
- Describe a time you used data to make an important decision.
- Share an example of when you took ownership of a mistake at work and how you rectified it.
- Describe your approach to setting goals and monitoring progress for the different team members.
- Tell me about a time you were faced with processes, systems, or work groups that were delivering poor quality.
How to interview leaders for values and culture
Evaluating candidates for fit with your company’s values is a must, since managers help both maintain and enrich an organization’s culture. The following five tips can help you avoid common pitfalls like letting unconscious bias creep in, while the below leadership interview questions provide language that you can use to adapt to your role’s requirements and responsibilities.
Tips for assessing leadership candidates for culture fit
- Establish clear criteria. Document cultural attributes you wish the hiring team to assess and add them to the interview scorecard, so they can be tracked consistently.
- Ask open-ended questions. These help you draw out a candidate’s real feelings while tracking nonverbal cues, such as body language and sincerity when answering.
- Use a structured interview process. Structuring simply means asking the same questions of every candidate, in the same order, for the same role to ensure fairness.
- Name your biases and manage them. Taking training offered by your employer and reading recommended resources from DEI experts can help you neutralize biases.
- Use an interview scorecard. These standardize the evaluation of candidates, allowing hiring teams to compare rankings and identify the strongest candidates.
Interview questions for assessing leadership culture fit
- What does work-life balance mean to you?
- Describe the environment in which you work best.
- How do you integrate new employees into your team?
- Tell me about your approach to managing diverse teams.
- Can you provide an example of how you’ve upheld company values in prior roles?
Leadership interview red flags
As much as you want to focus on the positive aspects a candidate brings to the table, it’s also your job as an interviewer to catch any red flags. These negative signs are indicators that someone will not align with your team or perform well if hired. Look out for these indicators of poor leadership ability:
Body language and/or tone
A quality management candidate will have sincerity in their body language and tone when answering questions. If a person’s tone sounds forced, their body language mismatches what they’re saying, or both, you know that they might be exaggerating or even outright lying.
- Pro tip: When interviewing neurodivergent candidates, it’s important to remember that they might have irregular body language due to sensory processing issues, difficulties understanding body language, facial expressions, vocal tone, or social norms.
Being too specific or elaborate
Of course you want a candidate to come to the interview prepared, but they don’t need to offer up a dissertation in reply to every prompt. After all, being a manager is all about mastering the art of giving just the right amount of context.
Being too vague or general
A lack of detail in a candidate’s answer can mean many things — lack of preparedness, for example, or misunderstanding of the role. Short, vague statements or hedging language can also indicate that someone is lying.
- Pro tip: Use follow-up questions when asking candidates behavioral interview questions as part of leading them through the STAR Method (situation, task, action, result). Last, but not least, listen for “I” statements in answers and ask for their contribution if missing.
Contradicting themselves
Discrepancies undermine a candidate’s answers, either revealing a poor attention to detail or even dishonesty. Managers must be trustworthy, inspire confidence, and have good presentation skills. Catching contradictions is a clear sign that a candidate isn’t for your team.
Bonus tip: Empower leaders to make better hiring decisions
The leaders you hire will soon become hiring managers themselves. An easy-to-use hiring system that automates key tasks with AI-enabled features like intelligent scheduling and candidate discovery can fast-track their ability to build supercharged teams.
JYSK, a global retailer with more than 3,200 stores, empowers its hiring managers to manage the hiring process end-to-end with SmartRecruiters, which helped reduce their hiring times by 64%.
It was really important that our new system would be easy to use for hiring managers in all our stores across many countries. We rolled out SmartRecruiters with a simple mobile training and optional webinars.
– Karolína Kroužková, HR Digital Manager JYSK
Curious how AI can help automate your hiring process for hiring managers and recruiters alike? Get an overview of SmartRecruiters 3.0 and see how Winston, our AI solution, handles the most repetitive tasks so you can focus on hiring the best people for your team.
