Identifying Potential Leaders

Leadership skills can be very nebulous. So, what kinds of questions or what kinds of things do you look for that would make you think, aha, this person has the leadership ability to move this organization forward?

Well, a couple things: one question that I like to ask usually off the bat is to ask people about their inflection points, their professional inflection points. I don’t want to know—I’ve got your resume. I’ve read through it. I know you were at this organization for five years. I’m not interested in the five years you were there and what you did, we’ll get to that later. What I’m interested in is, at the end of year five, you move from here to here? Why? What happened that caused you to make that transition?
So, what you would end up getting at is, you end up getting at people’s underlying motivations, what’s causing them to make the decisions they make, and it helps understand whether they’re aligned with the mission, how excited they are with it, what their values are, and it all comes out. So that’s one of the ways that I like to find out about how people are wired on mission and values. And then when it comes to leadership, you asked about scenarios, such as, tell me about a time when you had a major conflict with a peer and how you resolved it.

That's a good one.

Because you want someone to work through that. Having people give concrete examples of getting results, building teams, continuously learning, and you ask for them to talk about their experiences in that context. And that’s how I go about interviewing. I mean, honestly, the best way to know about this is to actually work with somebody. That’s when you really get to meet them. But if you’re interviewing for it, those are the kinds of things that I try to do.

Well, we just provided a blueprint. Anybody who wants a job at Blue Shields, be prepared to answer those questions.

There you go. Now all my secrets are out, yeah.