In Gridiron Genius, Michael Lombardi repeatedly references a Marcus Aurelius quote anytime the topic turns to a leader’s role in organizing a team - the secret to all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious. My favorite example of this quote in action came when Lombardi lists the questions he recommends asking any head coach candidate. His list is around two hundred questions long and covers everything from the philosophy of the offense to how the jersey numbers are assigned. Or, to put it another way, Lombardi’s questions ask candidates to describe how they would organize the non-obvious for a football team.
Here is what I consider the best of the questions:
-What are the mandatory lifts in the off-season conditioning program?
-How will you develop the players on the practice squad?
-How does the travel plan change for a Monday Night Football game on the road?
-Once the coordinators are hired, who is in charge of hiring the position coaches?
-How do you handle rehab for injured players during the off-season?
-When setting the depth chart, do you reward practice or games?
I then took those football questions and tried to generalize them to fit the kinds of interviews I might conduct one day:
-What do you demand your team do outside of work to improve its skills?
-How do you see the role of entry-level employees? How do you improve them?
-How does your process change during periods of high or intense workload?
-How do you make decisions about the work you delegate?
-How do you reintegrate team members who are returning from leave?
-How do you decide to change someone’s responsibilities? Do you consider performance or potential?
On first glance, these questions look pretty good. However, I must remember that the best questions avoid hypothetical phrasing – what would you do gives the candidate license to say anything yet imparts no useful information to me beyond whether I liked the sound of the answer. I should add that the best way to avoid a hypothetical question is to ask a specific question about past behavior. So, I gave those questions another look with the goal of phrasing the question so that a candidate could explain why or describe how he or she approached a similar problem in the past.
Here are the results:
-Describe how your past teams have improved their skills on their own. What was your role in this process? Explain why you chose not to emphasize developing these skills during the workday.
-Describe how an entry-level employee from a past team improved under your leadership. What was your role in this process? As this person improved, how did his or her role in the team evolve?
-Describe how your routine changed during a period of high or intense workload and explain why you chose to sacrifice those aspects of the routine.
-Describe how you’ve delegated work in the past and explain why you chose those functions ahead of the responsibilities you retained for yourself.
-Describe how you've integrated returning members back into the team.
-Describe how you’ve changed someone’s responsibilities in the past. Was the decision based on performance or potential? Explain why.
I feel a little more comfortable with the revised questions and I’m sure an interview built around those questions would lead to some useful insights about a candidate. My guess is that in the future I will have a bank of well-phrased questions similar to the above for certain types of interviews. I could then use those questions to dig into a candidate’s resume – for example, a note about mentoring junior associates might lead me to ask the question from above about how entry-level team members improved under the candidate’s leadership.
I’m unsure, though, if such questions are better than my default method of simply opening up a resume and going from top to bottom, applying the describe how or explain why framework to each and every line item. The resume forms a significant portion of the candidate’s best attempt to get the job, after all, so I worry that asking questions outside the resume takes me away from a strengths-focused approach to the hiring process.
