Here are some guidelines for technical leadership candidates to prepare for successful interviews with VP, or C-level business executives.
Be prepared to address these topics:
- Leadership Style: articulate your management style in detail. (i.e. servant leadership, inspirational leadership (authoritative), pacesetting, affiliative leadership, consensus leadership, coaching) See Harvard Business Review: Six Common Leadership Styles
- Overcoming Challenges: give examples of challenges you have faced, how you overcame them, and examples of your wins.
- Mentoring and Coaching: talk about mentoring and coaching. Your approach.
- Conflict Resolution: discuss how you resolve people, process and organizational conflicts. Have a few examples for which you overcame the underlying issues. (interviewer is looking for creativity, resourcefulness)
- Stakeholder Management: give examples of how you’ve worked with key stakeholders and contributed to shared objectives.
- Learnings: talk about what you’ve learned at each role. (to proactively share failures from which you’ve learned reveals authenticity, but can be risky).
- Translate business topics into technical solutions: show purpose in explaining why you created a technical solution in order to solve a business problem How do business objectives translate into technical solutions?
- Your Vision and execution: talk about your vision for this role as you know it and how you plan to execute on it.
- Differentiation: Be able to articulate why you are the best person for this role. Tie to specifics: bulls-eye experience, style, culture fit, stage fit, resonance with your potential manager, domain exp, or your excitement/ resonance with the role.
- Be proactive in the interview and have good questions. Ask:
- What are the success factors for this role? What are the 12-month deliverables? How does the interviewer measure success?
- What are they looking for in (C-level/ VP/ Director/ Manager) candidates?
- What’s their own management style? How do they like to work with their people?
- Have them explain how your role fits into the context of the major objectives such as company transformation, innovation, product differentiation, organizational excellence, execution, etc.
- Be sure to check-in periodically with the interviewer. Would you like more detail? Is this what you are looking for?
Finally, listen carefully, be crisp, and most of all, be yourself.
