Interviewing candidates for first-level manager positions is something that I’ve done quite a bit over the course of my career. I would guess that I’ve interviewed at least a hundred or more candidates looking to take on a first-level manager role. I can’t say that I’ve been consistently good at it. It’s taken years of practice, and the thing you learn with practice is that you always need more practice.
During my time at Amazon I phone screened anywhere from one or two, to half a dozen or more manager candidates in any given week (yep, even that long ago Amazon was always hiring, at a rate I’ve never seen anywhere else I’ve worked). Those phone screens were almost universally with candidates that passed the recruiter filter for having some people leadership tenure. My task was to weed out those that had no hands-on technical skills, especially coding skills. The screens were relatively short - scheduled for 30min typically - but always quickly and directly to the point. Tell me about the last code that you wrote, what language it was in, what it did, and how long it took you to get it into a functional state. Not the last code your team wrote, the last code you wrote. For manager candidates. As you can imagine, a high proportion of those calls were over in far less than thirty minutes. Now, for a company like Amazon at the time, this was pretty appropriate. Line managers were (are?) expected to be able to do anything their teams could do, and having people leaders that could step into any technical situation alongside their team to help directly solve problems was a valued trait. But it adds almost nothing to the critical function of leading people that a line manager is accountable for. In many cases it can end up detracting, but that’s a topic for another post.
It wasn’t until I was in a leadership role at a less technical company that I began to have a change in mindset about the traits to look for in manager candidates. In a way, I re-learned and re-internalized things that I was first exposed to during my time in the Army. I shifted my thinking away from “managing technical competency and tasks” and toward “leading a team.” On the surface those could be confused as being the same thing, but in practice they take very different skills.
In manager candidate interviews that I do now, I spend the majority of my time talking with the candidate about “A.C.I.D.” - Accountability, Curiosity, Initiative, and Developmental-mindset. These are by no means the only important aspects of people leadership, but within the confines of a short 45-60min conversation with a candidate I feel that talking about these four things can expose enough information about them to give me a good-enough view into how they’ll lead a team.
Accountability - In my opinion the single most important aspect of leadership is accountability. When you step into a formal leadership role, you become ultimately accountable for the actions of the team. Most crucially, for the failures of the team, whatever form those take (mistakes, missed objectives, poor execution, etc.). When I talk to candidates about accountability I ask about failures their team has had. Not to dwell on the failure, but to try and pry loose how they dealt with it. I ask about how they communicated the failure, both laterally and vertically. I also ask about how they worked through the situation with their team, and what changes they made as a result. It’s usually clear pretty quickly whether they approach accountability in the right way.
Curiosity - The best leaders I’ve ever worked with and for ask a lot of questions. Not simple questions like “when will XYZ be done” or “are you hitting your budget”, but rather probing questions that are intended to spur thought, uncover gaps, clarify concepts, and capture diverse viewpoints. This is a consistent trait of a truly curious person. To get at this trait, you guessed it, I ask questions. I try to find out the last thing they learned, and how they learned it. Did they go to a class? Did they self-teach? I also try to dig into how they structure their regular check-ins and status updates. Do they prefer prescribed formal structure, or summaries and a Q&A format? Another great way to get insight here is to have them walk through their team’s last major issue and describe how they approached helping the team through it.
Initiative - Amazon has a “Just do it” award to recognize those who show a bias for action. This is part of what I mean when I talk about initiative, but it’s not all of it. Taking action when the circumstances call for it is great, and should be recognized as such. What I’m looking for though is a spirit of consistent improvement and a desire to always leave things in a better state than you found them, even if that thing isn’t something you’re directly responsible for. One question I’ve found to be effective here is to ask about the last thing that their team worked on or fixed (without being asked to) that was not part of their team’s area of responsibility. I’m looking for those people that innately can’t let something just sit in a broken state. They need to have that spark to either fix it or get it fixed.
Developmental-mindset - A good people leader is constantly improving themselves, and more importantly, their people. This takes effort and has to be made a priority alongside the normal business of the team. Especially in technology roles, the skills your engineers need are ever-changing. Team leaders need to be deliberate about not only making time for their teams to learn new skills and sharpen existing ones, but they also need to be out ahead identifying the key things their teams will need to know to stay relevant. When interviewing, I ask candidates about what new skills they’ve learned in the last year. I also ask about how they structure learning time and objectives for their team. I’m looking for answers that indicate that they’re taking an active role in the development process, and not just checking the box by funding whatever classes their team wants. A leader that isn’t affirmatively guiding their team’s development is paddling down the river with a blindfold on.
Very few line manager candidates will nail all of these categories. In fact, it’s been my experience that the very few who I’ve talked to that have done so had been leading a team for at least several years. As raw material, a candidate coming in who matches up well with Curiosity and Initiative and who at least gets the concept of Accountability can be mentored and built into a good leader. If they can’t win me over on those two however, I’m going to take a pass.
One last thought, tying back to re-learning the lessons I first encountered in my time in the Army. Back then we were constantly reminded that “mission comes first, always.” What was behind that saying though was the fact that you can’t accomplish the mission without people. The leadership training courses that I went through as a young corporal and a sergeant (PLCD and BNCOC) made this crystal clear. A critical role of an NCO is maximizing the effectiveness of the team, through training and through ensuring the team’s health and well-being. A business manager’s role isn’t much different. Get to know your team, take care of them, keep them sharp, and they’ll take you wherever you need to go.
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