Senior management interview questions: evidence at the altitude of the job

The honest answer is that I got it wrong for six months before I got it right.

When I was promoted to run client services — three team leads, twenty-two people beneath them — I kept solving problems the way that had made me good: directly. Clients called me, I fixed things, everyone was happy except my three leads, who were becoming expensive messengers. The wake-up was one of them telling me, to her credit bluntly, that her team had started routing around her because I always answered.

What I changed was mechanical, not motivational. Client escalations went to the lead first — I redirected every one for a quarter until the habit died. My one-to-ones stopped being status meetings and became decision reviews: not 'what's happening' but 'what did you decide and how'. And I started measuring myself on their development — within eighteen months, two of the three were running accounts bigger than any I'd personally handled.

What I kept: client relationships at the top level, maybe four hours a week. The distinction I run on now — I own the relationships that set direction; my leads own everything that happens inside them.

The clearest one: choosing to lose our second-biggest customer.

Context — I ran operations for a distribution firm, eleven depots. Our second-largest account, roughly a fifth of our volume, had negotiated service terms years earlier that had become quietly ruinous: dedicated night crews, penalty clauses, and first-priority claims on fleet during peak. The contract made us look busy and made us thin — and it was starving the mid-size accounts where our actual margin lived.

The options were all bad. Renegotiate and probably lose them slowly with resentment; keep them and keep underinvesting in the accounts that paid for the business; or serve notice on the terms and lose them fast but cleanly. Finance modelled all three with me. I recommended the third to the board, with the full cost stated: a fifth of volume, two depot consolidations, and eleven redundancies if we couldn't redeploy.

The board took it. The customer left within the quarter. Two years on, the volume was rebuilt across nine mid-size accounts at better margin — but I want to be accurate rather than triumphant: we couldn't redeploy everyone, and seven people left through a redundancy I still think was the right decision and still didn't enjoy defending in a depot canteen.

That's what strategic costs look like — they have faces.

The hardest one was telling our investors the flagship rebuild would miss its date by four months — at the board meeting where we were supposed to confirm the launch.

I'd found out ten days earlier, when our lead architect showed me the data-migration testing results. I want to be honest about the sequencing: my first instinct was to see if we could compress the plan and avoid the conversation. We spent three days on that, and the honest answer was that compression meant shipping with a migration we didn't trust — the kind of decision that works until it catastrophically doesn't.

So I took the miss to the board myself, first item, three slides: what we knew, when I'd known it, and the choice — ship the date with the risk, or ship four months later with a staged migration and the two biggest customers piloted first. I recommended the delay and put my name on it.

One investor was properly angry — reasonably, they'd made commitments on our commitments. What I didn't do was negotiate the anger; I answered the questions underneath it. The delay held, the staged migration worked, and the same investor later told me that meeting was when he stopped worrying about our reporting.

What I took from it: boards can absorb almost any number. What they can't absorb is discovering you sat on it.

A regional contracts manager, two years into the role, whose sites started slipping in the same pattern — programme dates missed by small amounts, then rework costs climbing. Individually explicable; together, a trend.

I started with diagnosis rather than verdict, because his previous two years had been genuinely good. Two site visits and a long conversation surfaced the real issue: he'd stopped running his own inspection rhythm and was managing from the office — partly, it emerged, because a divorce was eating him alive. Real life was in the room.

We built a twelve-week plan with three properties: it named the standard precisely — inspection cadence restored, rework costs back under the firm's threshold; it included what I'd do, a fortnightly review and moving one problem subcontractor off his patch; and it was honest that the alternative was a formal process. I also pointed him at the employee assistance scheme, and then respected the line — his personal recovery was his; the professional standard stayed mine to hold.

Week twelve: inspections restored, rework trending down but not fully back. I extended four weeks rather than calling it either way — that was a judgement call, and I'd defend it: the direction was honest. By month five his sites were back to mid-pack, and a year later he ran our largest project.

I've also ended one of these processes with an exit, for balance. The mechanics were identical; the difference was direction of travel by week twelve.

I can answer with unusual confidence because we run upward feedback twice a year, so I've seen it written down.

What they'd say works: clarity under pressure. When the cladding remediation programme hit its funding crisis, my heads of service knew the priority order within a day and it didn't wobble for six months. Two of them used the same phrase independently — 'you always know where you stand' — and I'd take that on my gravestone, professionally speaking.

The criticism, verbatim from the last round: 'moves to solution mode before people have finished being heard.' It's accurate. In triage it's a strength; in a February meeting where a head of service needed ten minutes to be frustrated about a contractor before fixing anything, it cost me. She told me afterwards she'd come in with the solution already — she'd needed the ten minutes, and I'd compressed them into two.

What I've done about it is unglamorous: in decision meetings I now ask 'are we venting or deciding?' out loud — it sounds trivial, and it has measurably changed my meetings, because naming the mode lets people choose it. My last feedback round had the criticism again, but softer, and from one person instead of three.

I'd rather give you the real edge than a polished one — you'd find it in references anyway.