leadership interviews: A Practical Course with Marcus Reed

Start with the purpose

Place leadership interviews inside a realistic task that requires knowledge, judgment, and reflection. Name the result a learner is trying to produce and the constraints that make the skill useful.

How leadership interviews actually works

These are the load-bearing ideas. Everything later in the course is an application of one of them, so it is worth reading slowly and returning to when something stops making sense.

• STAR gives behavioural answers a spine. Situation, Task, Action, Result forces context, your specific remit, what you personally did, and a measurable outcome. Most weak answers fail at Action, describing what the team did rather than what the candidate did.
• Quantified results outperform adjectives. A result stated as reduced onboarding from 14 days to 5 is checkable, whereas streamlined onboarding is not. Even approximate magnitudes such as about a third of support tickets beat unquantified claims.
• Your questions are assessed too. Asking how success is measured in the first six months, or what happened with the previous holder of the role, signals that you evaluate roles rather than simply want one. Questions answerable from the careers page suggest no preparation.

Misconceptions worth clearing early

Each of these is common, understandable, and expensive to leave in place. Recognising them now saves rework later.

• Answering with we instead of I. Candidates want to appear collaborative and avoid sounding arrogant. Fix: Use we for context and I for actions, and state the team size so your share is explicit rather than implied.
• Preparing answers instead of stories. Candidates try to anticipate the exact list of questions. Fix: Prepare six to eight detailed stories and map each to several question types; stories recombine under pressure, memorised scripts do not.
• Rereading and mistaking familiarity for knowledge. Fluent text feels like understood text. Fix: Close the material and write what you remember, then check what was missing.

Build the mental model

Connect the key terms as a process rather than a word list. Use this sequence: build a clear model, practice one step at a time, apply it, review the result, and revise.

Catch the common miss

Compare a surface-level attempt with one that shows accurate ideas, purposeful choices, a usable result, and specific reflection. Explain the single difference that matters most.

Watch the whole process

Trace a model from the initial prompt to an applied portfolio and reflection. Mark each point where the learner must observe, choose, or verify rather than act automatically.

Worked example: Building one STAR answer about reducing a support backlog

Follow each step and predict the next before you read it. Predicting first is what turns a demonstration into practice.

1. Situation: the queue held 480 open tickets and first response averaged 3 days.
2. Task: you owned triage for a two-person team, not the whole department.
3. Action: you wrote a severity rubric, split the queue into three tiers, and ran a daily 30-minute sweep.
4. Result: backlog fell to 90 within six weeks and first response dropped below 8 hours.

The Action step is where credibility is won, because it is the only part an interviewer cannot attribute to luck or to colleagues.

Where this usually goes wrong

Watch for these while you work through the demonstration rather than afterwards.

• Answering with we instead of I. Candidates want to appear collaborative and avoid sounding arrogant. Fix: Use we for context and I for actions, and state the team size so your share is explicit rather than implied.
• Preparing answers instead of stories. Candidates try to anticipate the exact list of questions. Fix: Prepare six to eight detailed stories and map each to several question types; stories recombine under pressure, memorised scripts do not.
• Rereading and mistaking familiarity for knowledge. Fluent text feels like understood text. Fix: Close the material and write what you remember, then check what was missing.

Practice with scaffolding

Repeat the model with one detail changed. Keep the prompts visible and say or write the reason for each choice before continuing.

Check before feedback

Use accurate ideas, purposeful choices, a usable result, and specific reflection as the quality test. Make one self-correction before asking the tutor to review the result.

Read the situation

Translate the scenario into a clear task. Separate facts, assumptions, constraints, and information that is interesting but not relevant to conflict stories.

Choosing well under real constraints

Applied work is mostly judgement under limits: less time, less information, and more competing goals than a textbook example allows. These are the decision rules that hold up in practice.

• You have limited study time: Test yourself rather than review; retrieval gives more return per minute.
• Something is not making sense: Find a concrete example or a simpler version before rereading the explanation again.
• You need this knowledge long term: Schedule two or three spaced reviews now, while the material is still fresh.

Reading the situation before acting

Before choosing an approach, state three things explicitly: what result the situation actually requires, which constraints are fixed rather than preferences, and what evidence would tell you the approach is working. Skipping this step is the most common reason competent work solves the wrong problem.

• STAR gives behavioural answers a spine. Situation, Task, Action, Result forces context, your specific remit, what you personally did, and a measurable outcome. Most weak answers fail at Action, describing what the team did rather than what the candidate did.

Practitioner notes

Small pieces of working knowledge that rarely appear in introductory material.

• Rehearse out loud with a timer: strong behavioural answers land in roughly 90 to 120 seconds, while untimed answers routinely run past three minutes.
• Write down every question you answered poorly within an hour of finishing, because that list is the most accurate study guide you will ever be handed.

Compare real options

Generate two workable approaches and test both against the purpose. Do not hide the tradeoff; name what each option improves and what it gives up.

Make the reasoning visible

Produce an applied portfolio and reflection and attach a short decision note. The note should make the result auditable, not merely confident.

Use the rubric, not a feeling

Review the work for accurate ideas, purposeful choices, a usable result, and specific reflection. Record evidence for each judgment so feedback points to something observable.

Diagnostic checklist

Run this before you revise anything. Diagnosing first prevents the common failure of polishing the parts that were already fine.

• Check: Answering with we instead of I — is this present in your work?
• Check: Preparing answers instead of stories — is this present in your work?
• Check: Rereading and mistaking familiarity for knowledge — is this present in your work?
• Check: Studying only what already feels comfortable — is this present in your work?

The quality bar

This is what finished work looks like in this field. Use it as the standard for your revision rather than a general sense of improvement.

• You can explain the idea without notes, in your own words
• You can apply it to a situation different from the one it was taught in
• You can name what you still find unclear

Diagnose before editing

Name the symptom, then ask what decision or missing step produced it. Choose the cause you can address rather than changing everything at once.

Revise and compare

Make one purposeful revision and compare the two versions. Keep the change only if it improves the intended result without creating a larger problem.

Define a finishable brief

Choose a specific audience, result, and boundary for the executive communication capstone. Reduce scope until the project can be finished and reviewed in one focused cycle.

Bringing the parts together

A capstone is judged on coherence, not on the number of techniques it includes. Return to the core ideas and make sure the work demonstrates them rather than decorating them.

• STAR gives behavioural answers a spine. Situation, Task, Action, Result forces context, your specific remit, what you personally did, and a measurable outcome. Most weak answers fail at Action, describing what the team did rather than what the candidate did.
• Quantified results outperform adjectives. A result stated as reduced onboarding from 14 days to 5 is checkable, whereas streamlined onboarding is not. Even approximate magnitudes such as about a third of support tickets beat unquantified claims.
• Your questions are assessed too. Asking how success is measured in the first six months, or what happened with the previous holder of the role, signals that you evaluate roles rather than simply want one. Questions answerable from the careers page suggest no preparation.

Standards that make the work credible

These are the marks of work that would be taken seriously by someone who does this professionally.

• You can explain the idea without notes, in your own words
• You can apply it to a situation different from the one it was taught in
• You can name what you still find unclear

Practitioner notes

Small pieces of working knowledge that rarely appear in introductory material.

• Rehearse out loud with a timer: strong behavioural answers land in roughly 90 to 120 seconds, while untimed answers routinely run past three minutes.
• Write down every question you answered poorly within an hour of finishing, because that list is the most accurate study guide you will ever be handed.

Build with checkpoints

Plan foundation, first draft, verification, and revision milestones. At each checkpoint, save evidence instead of relying on memory.

Present and continue

Present an applied portfolio and reflection with a concise rationale. Use the final rubric to choose one strength to retain and one next practice target.