Leadership Interview Questions & Answers

How to introduce yourself for Tech Leadership position

First of All, thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity and it is my great pleasure to speak to you. Thank you for your valuable time.

In 20 years of IT career, I have been enjoying working with diverse stakeholder group across US/EMEA region and delivered on Enterprise solution and delivery mostly into BFSI and Investment Banking space. I always embark on experiential learning journey on tech leadership and driving dynamic digital tech landscape, that is where I consider myself as strategic and transofmational leader,driving strategic tech alignment and navigating through digital disruption innovation.

I am result oriented and senior technology leader,with hands on approach in temrs of EA Strategy & Implementation, EA Roadmap,EA Blueprints,Technology soultioning,Digitization Architecture and delivery. I take care of people,vendor,patner and client management, security champion for cybersecurity vulneribility mitigation, cloud champion for multi cloud stategy with AWS,GCP and AZURE for a digital ecosystem.

I have been enjoying accountability,ownership for the work i do in position and bring the result to table ,creating positive organizational impact. I enjoyed collaborating with people,diverse stakeholder group like senior leadership,product management,business stakeholder,client,PMO,Enterprise CTO Group,Presales/Development/Insfrastructure/procurement Team and making sure that we are on the same page and delivered on organization objective as a team.

I am people person ,who encourage his team for the organization objective, take care of their continous leaning and professioanl development, build their career that is where I take care of coaching,mentoring them.

I bring diverse set of experience,skills and qualities. I am a quick learner,adpatable and can quickly come into roles and delivred on the result which bring value for the organization. I played the various role in my career and for last 8 years I have been with BNY Mellon Bank as VP of Technology and enjoyed the India delivery accountability and ownership for the digitization. As VP, sucessfully delivered on below key achievemens

1. Digitization with strategic tech alignment with business strategy

2. Leading fullstack Engineering , levaraing Open source Enterprise Tech stack including Java J2EE spring,hibernate,microservices,Kafka,RDBMS like oracle,NoSQL DB like MongoDB,Casandra, Emerging tech trends like Big data & Analytics, Cloud Computing,AI caabilities,RPA,BlockChain,OCR,UI with Angular/React

3. Cloud Migration in terms of App Modernization,Infrastructure Modernization

4. Engineering Best practices in terms of API First Culture, Build & Infrasturcture automation with cloud agnostic DevOps pipeline, Terraform scripting,DevSecOps pipeline,FINOPS management, Chaos Engineering Experiments as a part of resilency testing,Data Driven staregy with AI capabilities like machine learning

As a result, improved on overall operational efficiency, reduced operational risk, enhanced cusotmer satisfaction,better service support, maintained 20-25% revenue growth YOY basis.

I am looking forward to be patner with you in your organization journey and be valuable team member and achived overall organization objective as a team.

Thank You.

How to improve revenue

What leadership skills do you find most useful?

To me, the most important leadership skills include communication, accountability, decision-making, critical thinking and conflict management skills. I

How do you describe your leadership style?

I consider myself a transformational leader because I encourage teams to make decisions, brainstorm recommendations, and find new solutions to old problems. In my previous position, I met with my team every quarter to review company objectives and track the progress of overall team goals. During one of our meetings, we discovered that our most recent goal was too department-focused, and we'd become unsure of how it helped the company. We brainstormed with the team, allowed everyone to make suggestions and together we devised an approach that allows the team to track individual goals in accordance with organizational goals.

I also met with each team member individually to help them outline personal workplace goals. For instance, one of my team members wanted to produce twice as many deliverables, but we worked together to revise their goal to produce a lower number of deliverables with better quality assurance scores. This transformational leadership style enabled my team to address an overall company goal and improve the overall quality of our work.”

How do you make sure projects and tasks stay on schedule?

I ensure tasks stay on schedule by dividing the project into parts and phases. I always begin by discussing the project's objective and purpose. Then, I assign each team member individual tasks and deadlines. I find that when the team knows the goals of the overall project, they can better see how their role impacts the project's success.

When we work on a project, I hold full team meetings to allow individual team members to share their progress. I try to celebrate the team's hard work to keep them motivated. I also check with each team member to see their progress, address any risks or deadline issues and provide additional clarity. I also use scheduling and project management tools to monitor progress even when I'm out of the office.”

How do goals help you become a better leader?

I use the SMART goal method to establish daily, weekly and monthly objectives and guide my team's productivity.

I also met regularly with my team to ensure our timeline was still realistic and made adjustments to weekly objectives if other tasks had to take priority. With this SMART goal system, my team was able to complete inventory on time. This method helps me meet my team's needs for clear instruction and motivation. I find that SMART goals can apply to a variety of team needs, and I plan to use this method to guide my future teams.”

How do you handle disagreements on your team?

I resolve disagreements in my team by employing the negotiation strategy. Here, my goal is to facilitate discussion and explore the interests of the disagreeing parties. In my last role, two of my team members vehemently disagreed on the best approach to completing their part of the project. I let each side explain what their thought process was and what benefits they saw in their method. I encouraged respectful discussion and constructive commentary. After each side outlined their arguments, I helped them brainstorm the ways in which both arguments could become a combined solution.

This process enabled these team members to work together and see each other's perspectives. It also helped them remember that they both were working toward the same goal and should collaborate on the best way to complete their tasks.”

What was a difficult decision you made as a leader?

I once had the option to give my team a long holiday weekend. I knew how hard my team was working, but we had an important project that was due by Monday. My first thought was to give them a long weekend to rest, but we would've rushed to complete the work. This decision risked impacting productivity and the quality of our work. I then thought of denying them the long weekend and encouraging them to keep working on schedule. This option might've avoided pressuring them to rush but also risked them feeling overworked or underappreciated.

I ultimately decided against granting them the long weekend and emphasized the importance of completing the project. On that Friday, I ordered a catered lunch and offered to let them take a long weekend next week to thank them. I think this compromise showed that I cared about my team's well-being but also valued their reputation for providing quality work on time.”

Can you describe a leadership challenge you overcame?

During one of my team's recent projects, we were approaching the deadline but were behind on our progress. Many team members were feeling overwhelmed, and the pressure was affecting their work quality. I took on a number of tasks and worked alongside them to meet the deadline. My team felt supported knowing I was taking on additional responsibilities so they could focus without compromising the quality of their work. We completed the project on time, and the client was happy with our results.

After reviewing the project's initial planning process, I realized that our timeline and workload were unrealistic. In the future, I plan to spend more time analyzing the initial planning process and discussing realistic expectations. I want to make sure my team stays motivated, so spending more time before beginning the project can help me better delegate tasks.”