Leadership Interview Questions to Ask Senior Hires

For every business, role, and individual recruiter, hiring can look a little different. It’s important for the hiring process to be tailored to the culture and value of a company, but it should also match the sort of candidate you’re looking for, and this is never more important than when you’re looking for leadership roles. Making sure you have the right interview questions on leadership skills can make or break hiring leaders.

Interview questions for managers will be different to those used for a candidate who won’t be working with direct reports. As well as making sure they are competent in their chosen area, you also need to carefully assess a candidate’s people skills to make sure they can successfully support and manage junior team members. With this in mind, interview questions for managers should aim to find out a candidate’s ability to:

- Delegate and time manage
- Approach conflict
- Develop and support their teams
- Manage stakeholders
- Motivate a team
- Measure the success of their own/team’s performance

You want to be asking interview questions for team leads to effectively showcase their skillset, including:

This is something that will be perfectly evident in how the candidate talks and shares past experiences with you, but you can also ask them to describe a time when communication was key to success in their role.

You can get a good understanding of this by asking the candidate questions about how they handled conflict. Questions for PMs should place importance on this in particular, as they may work in a more collaborative away across the wider business.

Leadership is often where the buck stops, so candidates should be able to demonstrate how they successfully manage time, and also how they approach missed deadlines. This is especially important when crafting PM interview questions.

Ultimately, a manager needs to be someone that can spur on their team to do great work. How does your candidate do this? Do they go the extra mile to make sure their team is supported and nurtured beyond company-wide perks?

Questions for leadership should concentrate on possible negative situations as well as positive ones. For example, PM interview questions that focus on how a candidate handles missed deadlines or tight budgets might give more valuable insight than questions about easy wins. Some common interview questions on leadership skills (and what to look for in their answers) include:

“Have you ever had to manage an underperforming employee? What did you do?”

Ideal answers to these questions should, first and foremost, avoid blaming the employee. There are endless reasons a person might be demotivated at work, and it’s the role of a good manager to help them address and overcome them. So, answers should highlight how the manager focused on solutions, actionable ways they helped the employee improve, and the ultimate result.

“How do you gauge success on your team?”

Answers to these questions should be based around things like effective communication. Do they make it a priority to check in with their team often? Do they step in when their direct reports escalate issues to them? Do they foster a sense of collaboration? Success doesn’t always mean the volume of work turned out so much as the overall satisfaction of the team.

“How do you delegate tasks?”

Team leader interview questions like these should be answered in a way that shows a candidate’s approach to time management and also ways that they ensure work is always fairly delegated. Consider including further questions about if they lead stand-ups, carry out frequent 1:1s, or have created processes to make sure delegation is always effective.

“How do you deal with criticism?”

This question should be answered in a way that demonstrates self-reflection, accountability, and a commitment to improvement and growth. For example, a candidate may explain how they corrected an error and implemented processes to stop it happening again. Alternatively, they may explain how they stood their ground in the face of unfair claims and communicated calmly and professionally to see it resolved. Of course, this question also lets you see how candidates react to the implication of criticism and failure — just another reason why specific team leader interview questions are so important.

Individuals in leadership roles are expected to take on more responsibility and therefore are more likely to encounter some workplace friction from time to time. A project manager, for example, should be expected to defend their work and decisions and hedge any difficult questions from executive staff. With that in mind, don’t be afraid to test their resilience at an interview. Slightly more difficult job interview questions include:

- Why should we hire you?
- When did you last fail and how did you correct it?
- What are your weaknesses
- What part of the job do you dislike?
- What’s the last piece of criticism you received?

These sorts of leadership interview questions help you gauge things like transparency, accountability, self-reflection, and flexibility—all essential traits of a manager.

Find the team leader your business needs with LinkedIn Recruiter. With dozens of filters, AI-powered searches, and tools to streamline the hiring process for the whole team, you can spend more time crafting those perfect interview questions for team leads.