How would you describe your leadership style?
For a Senior Software Engineer, “leadership style” isn’t about formal authority over direct reports (usually), but about influence, technical guidance, mentorship, and fostering a positive team environment. Your answer should reflect this.
Here’s how to approach it:
1. Start by Framing Your Leadership Context: “As a Senior Software Engineer, my leadership style is primarily about influencing and enabling my team through technical expertise, collaboration, and mentorship, rather than formal authority.”
2. Highlight Key Aspects of Your Leadership Style (Choose 2-3 that resonate most):
-
Servant Leadership / Enabler:
“I adopt a servant leadership approach. My goal is to enable my teammates to be successful. This involves actively listening to their challenges, offering technical guidance, unblocking them when they’re stuck, and ensuring they have the resources and knowledge they need. I see my role as clearing the path for them to do their best work.”
-
Empowering:
“I aim to empower team members by encouraging them to take ownership of features or components. I’ll provide support and guidance, but I trust them to make technical decisions (within reasonable bounds) and learn from the experience. This builds their confidence and skills.”
-
Pragmatic & Results-Oriented:
“While I value collaboration and growth, my leadership is also pragmatic and results-oriented. I help the team focus on delivering value, making sound technical trade-offs, and meeting our commitments, always keeping the end-goal in sight.”
3. Provide a Brief Example (if possible and concise):
TODO - notes from Tech Lead document
- “For instance, when we were tackling a particularly complex new feature, I facilitated several brainstorming sessions, ensuring everyone, including junior members, had a chance to contribute ideas. I then helped synthesize those ideas into a coherent design, and paired with team members who were newer to that part of the codebase to get them up to speed.”
- “Recently, a teammate was stuck on a persistent bug. Instead of just fixing it for them, I sat down with them, we walked through their debugging process, and I asked questions that helped them identify the root cause themselves. They not only fixed the bug but also learned a new debugging technique.”
- “For instance, on a recent project, a junior developer was struggling with a complex API integration. Instead of just doing it for them, I paired with them, walked through the debugging process, and helped them understand the underlying concepts. They were then able to tackle similar issues independently.”
- “When we were deciding on a new caching strategy, I facilitated a team discussion, presented the pros and cons of different approaches, and we collectively came to a decision that everyone felt good about.”
4. Conclude with the Impact: “Ultimately, my leadership style aims to foster a team environment that is technically strong, highly collaborative, supportive, and where everyone feels empowered to contribute their best work and grow professionally.”
Example Answer Structure:
“As a Senior Software Engineer, my leadership style is primarily about influencing and enabling my team through technical expertise, collaboration, and mentorship.
I would describe my leadership style as a blend of leading by example and servant leadership. I strive to set a high bar with my own work in terms of code quality, problem-solving, and adopting best practices, which I find encourages others. At the same time, I focus on being a servant leader by actively looking for ways to unblock my teammates, provide technical guidance, and ensure they have what they need to succeed. For example, I make it a point to be available for pair programming or to help debug tricky issues.
I also believe strongly in a mentorship-focused approach. I enjoy sharing knowledge and helping others grow, often by asking guiding questions rather than just providing answers, to help them build their own problem-solving skills.
Ultimately, my aim is to contribute to a team that is not only productive and delivers high-quality software but is also a place where everyone feels supported, valued, and can continuously learn and develop.”
Things to Avoid:
- Sounding like you’re trying to be a formal manager (unless the role has those explicit duties).
- Describing a style that’s overly autocratic or hands-off (laissez-faire without support).
- Using buzzwords without explaining what they mean in practice for you.
Focus on authenticity and concrete behaviors.
Hindusthan Unilever’s Standards of Leadership (SOLs)
https://www.kraftshala.com/blog/how-to-crack-the-ceo-factory/
First things first: Understand HUL’s Standards of Leadership (SOLs). SOLs are competencies that Unilever expects its employees to embody and showcase in every single job at hand. As a candidate, if you can demonstrate these behaviors through your past experiences and/ or key decisions, you will stand out as a clear culture fit. Below we have tried to explain each SOL and ways to demonstrate them in an interview:
- Growth Mindset:
Definition: You have a positive attitude about the company’s future and a passion for growth and winning. You take the lead and seek fresh opportunities; insist on innovation and never settle for ‘good enough.’
To manifest a growth mindset in an interview, try finding past experiences in your life wherein you undertook the task with a clear intent to really ‘up’ the game. It can be your role in the marketing team of your undergraduate college fest. Now how did you go about it? Was your benchmark the footfalls achieved by the previous team, or did you aim to beat the best fest in the city or the country? People with a growth mindset are the ones who always hope for, believe in, and work towards the best possible outcome. They challenge the status quo and push themselves and their team much beyond their ‘satisfactory’ performance.
- Bias for action:
Definition: You bring a sense of urgency in getting things done and making tough decisions, avoiding over-debating or over-analyzing issues. You’re results-focused and driven for simplification by keeping the end goal in sight at all times.
Bias for action can be manifested in an interview by talking about your past experiences wherein you got things done. Find instances where you were absolutely execution focused. You realize that it is imperative to make a decision irrespective of the lack of information or challenges or the doubts that people surrounding you have. You escalated issues, inspired people, or just rolled up your sleeves and did it yourself.
This SOL can be very critical in an HUL group discussion. An HUL GD simulates solving a problem under time and data constraints. Difficult decisions need to be made and key outputs to be delivered. Candidates who keep their cool, overcome conflicts, complexities & doubts, and stay results-focused stand out clearly.
Let’s also correct a common misconception for HUL GDs.
No one likes overly aggressive candidates in GDs!
There, we said it! Let your marketing logic and interpersonal skills help you lead the group toward solutions. Group discussions: Don’t be that guy. Aggression doesn’t work.
- Accountability & Responsibility:
Definition: You make commitments and hold yourself accountable for delivery. You take pride in delivering work to the highest standards and acknowledge when things are not up to scratch. You let people know clearly, in the beginning, what is expected in terms of performance and hold them accountable for delivery.
This SOL has integrity, consistency, and perseverance as their core personality facets. HUL invests significantly in its employees and obviously wants to make sure that the investment does not go down the drain on fickle-tempered individuals. You should be ready to keep fighting when the going gets tough. Hence, it constantly looks for perseverance as a quality that you have demonstrated in the past. It shows how you have persevered with good grades all through high school & college or how you have persevered with a hobby and now have an in-depth understanding of that field.
- Customer and Consumer Focus:
Definition: You have a passion for improving the lives of our consumers and customers and bring their voices into everything we do and the decisions we make. You are externally focused and go the extra mile in order to exceed consumer and customer expectations.
Applicants with work experience can demonstrate this competency through examples wherein they made an impact in the lives of a client or the end consumer. This SOL is not always possible to evaluate in an interview, especially for freshers. However, it can be manifested in your passion for solving consumer problems or in your intention to find consumer insights, which you believe are the real game changers.
- Building Talents/Teams:
Definition: You inspire through action and lead by example. You challenge people to do their best work and spend time coaching individuals and teams to ensure that they realize their full potential. You constantly challenge yourself to grow and improve.
Again, this SOL is not something that is actively judged while recruiting a candidate. However, it can be manifested using experiences wherein you held positions of responsibility and helped an individual or a group of people to escalate their potential.