Even for the most highly qualified candidates, job interviews can cause feelings of nervousness. There’s nothing like sitting in front of your potential boss or their HR personnel and letting yourself be judged for half an hour or more. However, these job interviews also give you a chance to share your career journey and convince your prospective employer that you have what it takes to be part of the team. If you’re gunning for a senior leadership position, your employer will use your answers to determine your potential to take the company to the next level.
If you’re eyeing that job hiring in Cebu calling for a rare gem who will transform the company, here’s what you should expect and prepare for if you want to ace that important interview phase.
Questions About Your Definition of Good Leadership
People have different definitions of good leadership, and an interview will allow your potential employer to see if yours aligns with the company’s culture, mission, and vision. Your interview may include questions about your leadership style, including the specific skills and values that you find important. Interviewers may also ask about the people you look up to in order to understand your standards for good leadership.
To stand out, you can emphasize how much you value empathy and listening to your team. Showcase your transformational approach to leadership by explaining how you motivate your team to achieve goals that align with the company’s objectives.
Questions About How You Manage and Motivate Others
Good leaders must know how to heighten the morale of a group to deliver results. To assess your ability to lead a team, employers ask about how you set goals for the team and provide constructive feedback to bring out the best in others. You can showcase your mentorship skills by explaining how you actively worked with a teammate to identify their difficulties and help them drive actionable results. You can also talk about how you made sure to recognize your teammates for their efforts to prevent them from feeling undervalued.
When asked about your goals when designated to lead others, you can provide concrete answers founded on a big-picture mindset rather than the typical cold response of “just get the job done.” Provide examples of how you made sure to deliver clear instructions and communicate with each member of the team. Your answers will show your persuasion and people skills, which are both valuable in a leader.
Questions About Self-Assessment
Employers also need to determine your capacity for self-awareness. During the interview, they may ask about how you set goals for yourself and how you measure your own performance. Discuss specific goal-setting approaches such as establishing monthly, weekly, and daily goals for you and your team. Remember, employers are not just analyzing your capacity to improve the performance of others. They also need to know that you can lead yourself and work toward self-improvement.
Questions About Resolving Team Conflicts
Conflict-resolution is a leadership quality closely tied with negotiation and problem-solving. Employers need to assess your ability to settle disputes within the team and approach different perspectives with understanding and respect. Your answer to questions about resolving team disagreements can revolve around how you helped your teammates see eye-to-eye and settle on a compromise.
Questions About Overcoming Challenges
Employers usually look for leaders who are resilient when faced with obstacles. They intend to bring in leaders who have the accountability to own up to mistakes and creativity to come up with innovative solutions. Common questions revolve around difficult decisions you had to make to meet company or performance goals.
You can discuss specific times when your team had to battle deadline or client pressures, limited resources, or miscommunication. These types of questions can be tricky, so you need to answer them honestly and show that you’re the kind of leader who is willing to learn from mistakes and take on a new perspective to efficiently solve challenges.
Questions About Completing Tasks
Employers tend to pass on candidates that are scatter-brained and cannot divide labor properly to finish tasks on time. To determine if you can handle these things well, they need to ask questions about time management and task delegation. A good answer may involve discussing how you made an effort to communicate with your teammates to track overall progress. You need to show that you are organized enough to finish projects on time while still being able to motivate the team to work hard to meet expectations.
Questions About Your Biggest Achievements
Employers respect leaders who can rise to the challenge of identifying opportunities for growth. Your prospective employer must know that you can seek new directions and create a long-term vision for the company. Look back on your whole career and pick your most insightful experiences that show how you took action to go beyond what’s expected of you or your team.
Showcase Your Best Qualities, but Recognize Your Flaws
Employers want leaders they can trust to help steer the ship. While it’s good to follow the age-old tip of “selling yourself” during an interview, there’s nothing wrong with being honest about your flaws as long as you show that you’re actively working to improve. Treat your interview as an opportunity to convince your potential employer that you can make big changes at the company and have the chops to prove it.