I know a few people who are looking for a new job at the moment. When talking with one of them, a familiar topic came up: interviewing. Depending on what industry one is in or where one is at in their career, a discussion on interviewing can take a lot of different shapes.

For early career folks, this can revolve around questions like “how do I make a good first impression?”, or “how do I follow up after I’ve met the hiring manager?” For later career folks, and where my discussion went with my friend was more around “how do I spot good leadership?”

“Good” can mean different things to different people, and I’m not going to dive into my definition of good leadership here. What we ended up talking about is one thing I often don’t hear talked about much in this context however, and that is asking for specifics from the hiring manager about themselves.

What does that look like? Without needing to write up a “leadership maturity scale” or something else you could easily find from better sources, the thing that comes to mind for me is simply looking for someone who can easily answer the following question.

Can you give me three examples of routine activities you do that exemplify your leadership style?

Anyone that has a fairly quick answer to this is clearly thinking about growing as a leader. You might wonder how this helps you gauge a leader’s effectiveness or alignment with your definition of “good leadership,” and frankly, it might not. What it does give you insight into though is how much this person is trying to grow in their leadership skills, and perhaps a sneak peak into their level of self-awareness. In other words, how do they grow their skillset and what do they see as their strengths? If you asked a developer to give some examples of how they become a better programmer, most would have quick answers like contributing to open source projects, doing HackerRank tests, writing their own projects on the side, finding mentorship in more senior developers, ensuring they get strong feedback on their pull requests or code reviews, teaching or mentoring, etc.

Just like a developer, I’d expect a leader who is thinking about how they can show up better each day for their people to also have a quick answer for this. You can be the judge of if you like the answer or not, but being able to answer the question in the first place is a great piece of insight to walk away from an interview with. For example, if their answer centers on how they are very hands on and in the weeds with the team, you can decide if that is the leadership you’re looking for. Similarly, if they don’t really have a strong answer, that might be enough evidence for you to decide that an absence of thought on leadership is equivalent to failing a “good leadership” test.

What do you think?