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Leadership Interview Questions and Answers:
Examples of Skills for Leaders

Posted on October 13th, 2009 in

Management Skills Job Interview Questions

How does a company develop leaders? Why do many leaders have similar behaviors and experiences? These
types of questions address many academic researches and theories regarding leadership skills.

In fact, there are many theories on every aspect of leadership. The reason for this amount of theories is that
leadership is complex and variant.

Given the importance of effective leaders in any organization, the companies try to ask many questions for
evaluating leadership characteristics of a candidate.

This article discusses

on leadership and the ways to handle and answer these questions.

The artcile provides examples of leadership questions/answers and suggests 4 skills to evaluate:
leadership behavior, project and team leadership, decision-making & leadership, leadership & communication
skills.

After reading this article you may be interested in reading –

examples of competency based questions

and

management interview questions

.

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interview questions

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Full spectrum interview questions for leadership positions with
tips/answers

Here we go:

Behavioral leadership interview questions and tips

• Provide an example of a time when you played a key

role in: an event/activity, a team work unit, or

a project. Describe how you influenced/affected the activities – how people reacted to your actions as a leader?
• Was there ever a time that you disagreed with your management were you able to prove your conclusion and
persuade your superiors?
• Have you ever had a situation when you had difficulties getting people to accept your ideas? What was your
approach to handle these situations?
• What practices do you implement during conflict situations and are they successful?
• If we were to ask your superiors (reporting staff) or your teammates to comment about your leadership how
would they respond?

Tips on answering these questions:
The interviewer wants you to define your leadership style. Why do people listen to you? How do you influence
people? What actions do you take for dominating these

efforts?

Therefore, provide examples of events in your previous workplaces where you’d been able to prove your
positive leadership characteristics to support a company effort. You should also tell about the way people react
to your leadership – how were they affected?

Project leadership & team leadership skills: team lead interview questions and answers

• How often do you consult team members?
• Define your key team members?
• How do you motivate your team?
• Have you ever used your listening abilities to achieve goals?
• When beginning a new project, can you out line the steps you implement? Can you outline a project from
beginning to end that you finished and the specific steps used?
• Are you often satisfied with your actions and outcome?
• Are you flexible and able to achieve your goals in a fast moving environment?
• Are you able to meet deadlines? Have you ever missed a deadline?
• Could some of your team members assist you with meeting a difficult deadline?
• How do you best use your time and what disciplines do you use?

Answer:
The interviewer wants to verify an important issue: the methods you use to manage and lead a team for
achieving the goals within timelines.
These questions are more of “leading questions” to explain your team leadership discipline.
Therefore, explain – what actions do you take? How do you recognize & use others team members skills to
achieve goals? How do you manage your time to achieve your objectives? In summing up: how “positive
manipulator” you are for managing a team?

Leadership and Decision making skills, leadership and analytical thinking skills

• Have you ever had to make a decision without knowledge of all the needed data?
• How do you approach complex problems?
• Can you give an example of a conclusion you had to change after obtaining new knowledge or facts?

leadership

work

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• Have you ever arrived at a wrongful conclusion? Can you explain what part of your analysis went wrong?
• Do you believe all conclusions should be 100% accurate 100% of the time?

Tips on answering these questions:
It goes without saying that a decision-making makes a leader – one of the important qualities of a leader is to
make a decision when all others are shaking or pray for a miracle.. Many people avoid making serious decisions -
here comes a leader who takes an action.
Therefore, personal stories are welcome in these types of questions. You have to describe the ways you take a
decision – the risk management and advantages/disadvantages factors for each decision.

Leadership: Personal Communication Skills for leaders

• Are you most comfortable with verbal or written presentations?
• How do you build a case and present it to an audience?
• What are conversation impressions other than words? How do you use these to communicate effectively with
others?
• What are the techniques that you use to clarify un-cleared messages meanings?
• How do you maintain a positive discussion?

Answer:
Communication is the flow of information and ideas from one individual to another. Many problems occur
because of people failing to communicate effectively – faulty communication causes problems in organizations
and can cause a good plan to fail.
Therefore, the interviewer expects you to describe the methods you take to deliver your (and others) messages.
How you distress people around you for having a good discussion – listening one to each other and deliver
thoughts and ideas.

In summing up these questions, imagine yourself as a key basketball player shoots at the buzzer when all others
are staring at you – this is a kind of a leadership behavior expected from you.
Alternatively, you want to be the one who decides to whom you hand over the ball at the most critical moment..

See More About:

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