Welcoming questions
- Can you walk us through your leadership journey and the companies or businesses you have led?
- What do you understand our mandate for this role to be, and why does it attract you?
Role-specific / technical competencies
- Tell us about a strategy you set that changed a company's trajectory. How did you arrive at it, and how did you know it was working?
- Walk us through the most consequential capital allocation decision you have made and how you weighed the alternatives.
- How have you built or rebuilt an executive team? Include a senior hire that failed and what you learned.
- Describe your experience working with a board. How do you handle disagreement with directors?
- How do you set and monitor company-wide financial performance without pulling decision-making up to yourself?
Behavioural & culture fit
- Tell us about the hardest decision of your career, where every option carried serious cost. How did you decide, and what happened?
- Describe a time you were publicly wrong as a leader. How did you handle it with your team and stakeholders?
- How do you deliberately shape culture, and what evidence would we see of it a year into your tenure?
Problem-solving / case
- You join us and discover within 90 days that cash runway is half of what the board believes. Walk us through your actions and communications.
- A competitor's move makes a core revenue line likely to decline 30 percent within two years. How do you lead the company's response?
- Two of your executives are exceptional performers but toxic to each other, and the organization is splitting into camps. What do you do?
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