Ask HN: How do you determine leadership qualities in an interview?

Work Rules by Lazlo Bock may give you some good insights. It references a rigorous study by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter. The gist of it is that the 3 best indicators of on-the-job performance is a work sample test, general cognitive ability tests and structured interviews.

If leadership quality is something you wanna test for, you just have to design the questions in that manner - for example ask about how she handled professional failure in the past, ask her to give you some tips to motivate subordinates, to teach you something you dont know, even its a fun fact, like turtles breath through their bottoms.

As for your concern that "most people would have read about these sort of questions and come up with some template answers". You could flush their prepared answers by asking the candidate to give you a 10 second summary of their answer first, then ask them to give another example in a 10 second summary. After they have exhausted their "template answers", ask them to take their time to give you an example other than these 2. Give them ample time. Don't bully them or put them under pressure, work with them to elicit another example and dive deep in a collaborative manner. for example with "why did you think at that time, this was the right approach", "I messed up recently by doing xxx, how do you think I could have handled it better". (Don't do this for all your Behavioral Questions. Pick the last question especially if the candidate is performing well)

End of the day most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313878823_The_impor...). I cant find the reference for my life, but I think it was Google (or Amazon) that found out that given the same structured interview process, some people were better than others in selecting great teammates that performed well on-the-job. The key is to encourage these type of interviewers to do more interviews.

I ask directly - I ask them what their leadership style is, how they handle conflict, and how they build consensus in a team.

I find that anyone with leadership experience can readily talk about how they approach such things. Anyone with skills, but lacking experience can at least talk around the subjects, and give you some insights into where they are. And people without skills or experience flounder completely.

The Leadership Sort Deck identifies 20 characteristics reflecting leadership priorities for the job.

It's an invaluable tool to assess and interview candidates. Really helps cut through the BS.

> https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Architect-Sort-Cards-Lomba...

What we call gut feeling is often a subconscious interpretation of the person’s body language, physical appearance and tone of voice. It’s always good to try to explicit why you had that feeling before basing your decision on it.

I often think that shy people are assholes at first. Now that I’m aware of that I try to test the shyness hypothesis first when I have that feeling.

So exploit it, it’s something humans developed for good reasons. Just be aware of the biais and use it as a good starting point for a behavioral interview.

Great question --

Every organization/industry follow key performance indicators. Relative to an individuals leadership mandate, what actions did they take? What were the outcomes/results?

To be fair, there's always an element of situational subjectivity. Ultimately, you're looking for a leaders impact on the bottom-line.