Grading Advice No. 13: Leadership
This is part of a series on how to be a good mock partner and ask the right questions. It is also great for thinking like a hiring manager to better prepare for your pending interviews.
To see the rest of the articles in the series, find the list here. In many ways, this article is a subset of the Behavioral Grading explained in the first of this series.
Helpful Resources to Start
This is an earlier piece leadership interviews where I cover (1) Strategic Influence and Conflict Resolution (2) People Management and (3) Self-Awareness & Reflection. This piece contains lists of signals which some might love, but others might find overwhelming.
Below, I dive into more streamlined practical grading advice. It is applicable to individual contributors as well as managers. And this article addressed 3 core concepts where the previous piece has, for example, 10+ signals for conflict resolution, which might be too much for a mock partner.
Let’s Dive In
Leadership interviews are typically behavioral with a focus on how you lead, this could be with or without authority. Sometimes they will be hypothetical situations.
Meta is known for their Leadership & Drive Interviews. And Google has Googleyness & Leadership. What makes the two different is the cultural focus they used to grade you. Everyone else tends to fall in between, except Amazon which is looking for leadership generally and doesn’t have a category for leadership, most questions are basically about how you lead.
Note: I will assume you read the basics of grading behaviorals here and so I will jump into the nuanced aspects of leadership-specific prompts.
Three Things
Three things you will be listening for when you grade leadership questions are: (1) Alignment with company culture (2) Souning Senior an (3) Humility.
1. Company Culture
If you are being asked to grade someone on a leadership question and you don’t know the company, ask the person you are mocking to share a bit on their leadership principles or anything else they know about the company culture.
Why does culture matter?
I once saw a healthy disagree and commit discussion at Google and everyone else in the room thought it was a horrible meeting. I was from Amazon, I had no idea anything was wrong, it seemed actually quite tame. Culture matters.
Let’s Use Google & Meta as Examples
Google: Getting things done requires consensus. You need to build relationships. You might expect more questions around cross-functional (xfn) alignment.
Meta: Remember they used to move fast and break things. While they seem to be moving away from this, it hasn’t left the culture entirely. They are looking for people who aren’t afraid to try things that don’t work. They want to hear about how you tried something, failed and learned from your mistakes.
2. Sounding Senior
You can dive into this article on sounding senior to baseline on the signals, or this one to understand executive presence. But you don’t need to worry about the hows and whys, just grade as you see it.
What you are likely going to see from strong candidates is:
Get to the point quickly (introclusion)
Share their learnings
Talk about making tradeoffs
3. Humility
Humility is the feeling or attitude that you have no special importance that makes you better than others.
At Amazon, they call it Earns Trust. At Meta, they look for it in all your behavioral. At Google, they look for examples of getting along with others.
To get things done, to lead people, a PM needs to earn trust. One part of earning trust is getting stuff done and being right about your decision. But people who earn trust are typically humble to some degree. Leaders who are not trusted might have the title, but they don’t lead.
Look for real examples of failure, not throw aways. Keep the examples in your business life, not your personal life, unless asked about a personal situation. I have seen way too many people talking about how they meditate or journal to address their weaknesses. In most companies, this is avoiding the question.