What Questions Can You Ask to Understand Management Styles/Preferences?

Ask them questions that identify their pain points

One of my favorite questions that I’ll ask in an interview is what is it that keeps you up at night.

And this is somewhat an old sales tactic. To be able to identify what the pain points are, which is awesome, because then later, you can show how you can solve that pain and show the value that you can provide.

But it also can give you a clue into how they handle stress.

When they’re making statements, are they very short, to the point, or do they have long drawn out explanations and questions with lots of details and stories? That can give you a clue as to their level of attention detail and how they get organized.

If I have concerns about what type of style they have for management, I can ask a question that can help me get close to that without directly focusing it on them.

I can ask, how is the dynamic with you and your team? Do you find that you can trust them to get things done? Or do you find that you have to manage more in the day-to-day than you’d like? And then let them talk and let them explain what their relationship is like with the team members and that gives you additional information about how they approach their role as manager.

Use help from vendors, etc.

Consult with your main point of contact from the vendor companies. Some of them probably have been typically supporting these client managers for 13, 15 years. So lean on them to ask what can you tell me about their management style, their preferences, on the flip side, their pet peeves.

Observe what their values are

You can get a lot from observation. If you’re reading the company website, and you’re reading their morals, their values, their mission statement, when you go in for an interview, and you don’t really see those morals and values being displayed, that would be a red flag.

You can talk to people in your network. For career success, you really want to be working on building a trusted network - people that can ask open questions and people that will give you honest feedback.

By just really being observant, and reading what their morals and values are, and then seeing if that is really displayed in what the company puts forward would be a good way to understand their management style.

Research on Linkedin

The first place I go is to linkedin. I want to see what is the background of the manager - where have they worked before, what have they been endorsed for, what awards do they have, what is behind them? Because as we all know, that will that will shape the kind of person that you are.

They’ve worked in large government organizations all their lives. They’ll be different than if they came from start, at the start of the startup and so that’ll help you understand both their attitude towards work as well as what they value.

And then second thing that I do is, do all I can online, to both google the company - to see if it’s got a social media presence, as well as to see the people that work there - what are their backgrounds, how do they spend their time, do they blog, are they on twitter, do they share posts on linkedin. And that helps to understand where are you, and where’s the company, and where the people that are working at that company are at, in relationship to gestures, broadly things that are going through right now.