How Would You Interview Potential Managers?

martincmartin asks: "The company I work for is starting to interview development managers, and I've been asked to interview a bunch of them. While there's been a lot written on interviewing programmers and what makes a good manager, how do you interview a management candidate? What questions do you ask? What are good and bad answers? What else do you do?"

Comments

Get him talking

[tverbeek]

I'd be especially interested in hear each candidate articulate their "management philosophy". While this is likely to lead to a fair amount of buzzword regurgitation, you can discern a bit about what they'd be like to work for from their choice of buzzwords and the connecting tissue that they have to supply themselves to craft a paragraph around them. You also need to know what kind of management style the department/team needs; don't automatically go for the guy who promises the least supervision and the most perks to his staff. Some standard "how would you handle the following scenario..." story problems can also be revealing.

interviewing techniques

[romit_icarus]

To be able to get an interview i'd check on general competence. there's no substitute for prior experience, reference checks.

To get the job, you need to look for alignments on the softer stuff - vision, attitude, personality and motivation levels. There's no quick and dirty way to assess all that. That's why it's an interview, not a questionaire..

Role Play...

[GrpA]

A lot of managers and staff underestimate the effectiveness of Role Play as a teaching / learning tool.

Take the manager into a quiet office and tell them that you're going to do some role play to observe their reactions. Give them a scenario... Eg, Employee theft, Trademark Crisis on project, Loss of proprietary information (that they are responsible for) etc.

See how well they respond. Usually, once they get into role play, they'll even assume the correct emotion state. See what they think of. Put them into an emotional problem.

eg, Someone comes in and lets the manager know they accidently gave their friend proprietary information and now it's on the Internet. Give the manager background. Is it a bad employee? Do they have family and how does that affect his decisions? Can he think on his feet to address the issue? How does he balance his commitment to his team with his commitment to his employer? A company hardliner always makes a bad manager, so even though it's the easy answer, it's often not what the company truly wants in a manager.

Make the scenario real enough, eg, he's just taken on the job when this happens, and now it's his mess.

Observing him as he reacts, thinks and determines what to do won't give a complete picture, but it will give an insight into their way of thinking and how they might react in similar circumstances if it did happen. Especially how he copes with this without knowing enough about the company he works for and what questions he asks the interviewer (playing the role of the managers Senior manager or as his 2IC...)

Adjust as required to meet company needs and position role description.

GrpA.

Re:What level?

[fyngyrz]

• Set realistic expectations.
• Provide adequate resources.
• Get out of the way.

If this is all you see a manager doing, then there is no need for them at all. All three of these can be provided at the executive level with the stroke of a pen.

If one requires the manager to have both management skills and (in this case) development skills, then the need to "get out of the way" will go away with a good manager. They can step in when the group being managed needs help, resources, mediation, or course change and they'll understand these requests so they can actually make a qualified decision on the matter at hand.

A good manager can spend five minutes with an already-launched, directed and running team and get a good sense of where they are as compared to where they were, and still not "be in the way." They can also sit down with a tech person for an hour and work through something complex. They'll have the patience, skill and knowledge required to explain this to the top level and keep them off the team's back, from cutting the team's resources, from "featuritis" (and keep the team from it too) and from making unrealistic promises or marketing excursions.

So, just to add my two cents here, a good manager is someone who would make a great tech person, and has management skills. If "getting out of the way" is their idea of management, I have no use for them. For the record, there are only two managers, per se, in the four companies I own, and about 300 employees.

One Question

[triso]

Here's my question:
It is nearing the end of a project and there is a deadline upcoming. The bugs are still coming in faster than the programmers are fixing them. What do you do?