The Hiring Blind Spot
Why Your Manager Interviews Are a Malpractice
Every leader knows what a bad management hire does to an organization. It’s not immediate, and that’s what makes it dangerous. The damage spreads slowly: morale craters, trust evaporates, your best people start taking calls from recruiters. A great manager creates conditions for their team to thrive. A bad one injects toxicity and triggers attrition among exactly the people you can’t afford to lose.
The old adage is true: people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Given the stakes, the standard hiring process for this role isn’t just inadequate, it’s organizational malpractice.
Most companies default to a process that’s basically what they use for individual contributors, with a few tweaks. Screen for technical depth, architectural judgment, “culture fit.” When it comes to assessing leadership itself, they rely on behavioral interviews. This systematically fails to detect the most dangerous failure modes in leadership. You end up with a critical blind spot at the most leveraged point in your organization.
The Problem: Behavioral Interviews Are Theater
The traditional behavioral interview assumes that past behavior predicts future performance. Ask a candidate to “describe a time when you managed a poor performer,” and you should get signal on their competence. For any seasoned manager, this isn’t a diagnostic at all, it’s a performance. The questions are predictable. The “correct” answers are documented online. The whole exercise tests a candidate’s ability to perform authenticity, not their capacity to actually lead.
Consider the “poor performer” question. A savvy candidate knows the script:
The Diagnosis: Frame it with empathy. Seek to understand the root cause: personal issues, unclear expectations, skill gap.
The Action: Describe a structured process. Clear feedback, a PIP framed as supportive, regular check-ins.
The Outcome: Whether the employee improved or was let go, take accountability, emphasize fairness and learning.
This sounds great. It’s also completely unverifiable. The interview provides zero signal on how they actually behaved. Did they belittle the employee? Set impossible goals? Ignore the problem for months until HR forced their hand? The behavioral interview can’t uncover this. It rewards polished storytellers and penalizes honest leaders whose real experiences are messy.
What you actually need is insight into the candidate’s core leadership philosophy and their judgment under pressure. Standard behavioral questions don’t get you there.
A Better Approach: Simulation Over Storytelling
To get real signal, replace theatricality with simulation. Observe the candidate’s thinking in scenarios that mirror the complex reality of the job. This requires a multi-part process that goes beyond canned questions.
The Leadership Philosophy Deep Dive
Instead of asking for stories, probe for models and first principles. Best conducted by a senior engineering leader, this moves from “what did you do” to “how do you think.”
Weak Question: “Tell me about a time you resolved a conflict.”
Strong Question: “Walk me through your mental model for resolving conflict between two high-performing engineers who disagree on a technical approach. What principles do you rely on? When do you intervene versus let the team work it out? How do you ensure the outcome strengthens rather than weakens trust?”
Other examples:
“What’s your framework for delegation? How do you balance autonomy with accountability?”
“Describe your system for managing performance across a team. How do you define it? Measure it? Handle calibrations?”
“What is psychological safety to you, and what specific, observable actions do you take in the first 30 days to create it?”
This forces candidates to articulate their underlying philosophy. You’re not looking for a single right answer; you want evidence of a thoughtful, coherent approach.
The Socio-Technical System Design
This is the leadership equivalent of an architectural design interview. Present a realistic, messy team scenario and ask them to solve it.
The Prompt: “You’re inheriting a 6-person team responsible for a critical service. The previous manager just left. You’ve heard that morale is low, deadlines are slipping, and there’s tension between two senior engineers. Your new director wants a 30-60-90 day plan within your first week. Walk me through your process.”
This reveals:
Diagnostic Skills: Do they jump to solutions, or start by gathering data? Who do they talk to first—the team, stakeholders, their boss? What questions do they ask?
Prioritization: What do they tackle first? Rebuilding trust? Clarifying technical direction? A quick win?
Communication Style: How do they plan to communicate with the team, their peers, leadership?
Systems Thinking: Do they see this as just a personnel issue, or investigate systemic causes—unrealistic roadmap, tech debt, broken processes?
This simulates the core of the job: diagnosing and solving complex, human-centric problems.
The Upward Feedback Loop (The “Meet the Team”)
This is the most critical part of the process and the most often mismanaged. Too often it’s an unstructured “vibe check.” To make it effective, it must be a structured interview where the team is the interviewer.
Don’t ask the team “did you like them?” Task them with assessing specific competencies:
“Does this person listen more than they talk?”
“When you described a team challenge, did they respond with curiosity or judgment?”
“Did they create an environment in this 45-minute meeting where you felt safe to be candid?”
Provide a structured feedback form. The team’s collective signal on a candidate’s ability to foster safety, listen, and demonstrate empathy is far more reliable than any answer the candidate gives to senior leadership. This is also where you catch the people who perform well upward but poorly downward, a failure mode behavioral interviews consistently miss.
The Outcome: Hiring for Judgment, Not Performance
This process requires more effort. It’s harder to design and execute than running through a behavioral script. But the return is significant.
You stop optimizing for people who are good at interviewing. You start identifying people who are good at leading. You hire for judgment and character, the things that actually matter when someone is managing humans through ambiguity.
The leaders you bring in will have more than compelling stories. They’ll have principles and demonstrated ability to navigate complexity. These are the managers who build resilient, high-trust teams that can weather challenges. They become healthy nodes in your organizational graph, strengthening the entire system.
This isn’t just better hiring. It’s a statement about what you actually value as an organization; not polish, but substance. Not theater, but reality.