How to Identify the Right Talent For Your Leadership Position

When it comes to hiring great leadership, many companies are missing the mark. According to research by Gallup, companies are failing to choose candidates with the innate talents necessary to be an effective manager 82% of the time. This number is staggering, especially since hiring the wrong person for a leadership position can cost a company $40,000 to $50,000 or more depending on the position. And there are other costs associated too, like bringing down company morale, harmed client relationships, and decreased sales.

In order to avoid becoming part of this statistic, companies should focus on hiring candidates who possess innate leadership talents. Gallup identified great managers as having these talents:

And since only one in ten people possess the right combination of innate talent to manage, these hires could come from promoting a candidate from within depending on the size of your company, or you might have to recruit outside talent or use an executive search service to locate top leadership candidates. Below we’ve listed 25 questions to help you identify the right person for your positions based on each leadership trait.

How to Identify the Right Talent for Your Leadership Position

Motivational Ability

1. When do you tend to dig into your toughest business problems – in the morning, afternoon, or evening?
2. What people or events have been most important in your self-development?
3. Under what conditions do you work best? When do you do your worst work?
4. What are your career goals in the next five years? Why did you decide to make them?
5. Normally, most people have periods of letdowns as well as spurts of motivation in a given period. Describe your energy cycle in a week, for instance.

Assertiveness

1. What are some big obstacles you had to overcome to get where you are today? How did you overcome them?
2. Describe an experience in which you were too persistent. What happened? How could you have improved the outcome?
3. Describe some situations in which you gave your all but failed.
4. Have you ever submitted good ideas to your superior and he or she did not take action on them. What did you do? Did this affect your confidence?
5. What unpopular decisions have you recently made? How did your peers respond? How did that make you feel?

Accountability

1. Describe a situation where you took responsibility for a failure.
2. Tell me about the last time you learned from a mistake.
3. Describe some recent work-related problems and the actions you took to solve them.
4. Have you taken responsibility any problems you caused others?
5. Tell me what happened the last time you received negative feedback from a boss.

Cultivate Relationships

1. Give me a specific example of a situation where you had to develop a productive relationship with someone whose point of view was different from your own. How did you go about sustaining the relationship?
2. In what business/work-related situation do you feel honesty would be inappropriate?
3. If I call your references now, what would they say about you?
4. Has a former boss ever asked you to tell a white lie? How did you handle it?
5. If you saw a co-worker doing something dishonest, would you tell your supervisor? What would you do about it?

Decision Making Skills

1. Have you ever recognized a problem before your boss or others in the organization? Explain.
2. How do you stay attuned to potential problems?
3. Give me two examples of good decisions you have made in the last six months? What were the alternatives? Why were they good decisions?
4. How have you gone about making important decisions affecting your career?
5. On which decisions have you deliberated the longest? Tell me about them.