Mark Murphy explains how to spot a bad manager before you take the job. Ask two behavioral questions about team attitudes and listen for concrete specifics in their answers. Vague responses are a red flag.
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Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, New York Times bestselling author, and I want to show you how to spot a bad boss in a job interview. And this is one of just dozens of techniques you can find in my new book, Never Say These Words in a Job Interview. You can find the link in the description. Finding a bad boss is more than just finding a boss that is utterly toxic, right? I mean, clearly we don't want to work for somebody that is an absolute nightmare. But being a bad boss for you is more than just being a bad boss in general, right? Having a bad boss can be somebody where their values are just out of sync with yours. The things that they prize, the things that they want to see from their employees just doesn't work for you, where their leadership style is utterly at odds with the kind of working environment where you perform the best. You don't want somebody that doesn't really know their people. That doesn't know what their people are doing, that can't recognize when their people are doing an awesome job, can't recognize when somebody's doing a terrible job. You don't want somebody like that. You also don't want somebody that doesn't hold people accountable. You don't want somebody that tolerates, for example, talented terrors, somebody who has great skills but a terrible attitude. You don't want somebody where they're gonna allow, you know, somebody with good skills, who's a nightmare to work with, to violate the company values on the regular, simply because they don't care about the values or the culture, things like that. So when we're looking at finding a bad boss, it's not just kind of the classic toxic boss. We're also really looking for somebody that is a bad boss for us. Now, how do you do that? Okay, you're gonna really do 3 things in the job interview. You're gonna ask 2 questions and really pay attention to 1 big thing. So step 1, at some point in the interview, and usually this will occur sometime towards the end of the interview when they say, "Hey, do you have any questions for me?" The first question you're gonna ask is basically trying to figure out what are the attitudes that really resonate for you. So the way you would ask that is some version of, "Hey, if you think about a current employee who really represents the right attitude for your team, for this culture, Could you tell me about a specific time they did something that really exemplifies having the right attitude? Right? So basically what I wanna know is, I wanna know what you value. I wanna know what you think awesome looks like, because that is gonna tell me so much about what you as a boss actually value, what this potential boss actually values. Let me give you an example. Here's a real-life answer that somebody gave. Well, you know, my best employee is great at taking everything I throw at him, no matter how tight the deadline, and he doesn't need any hand-holding. Just last week, for example, I realized we needed to rewrite our entire sales presentation for a big sales call on Wednesday. I told him Monday afternoon to redo the whole thing, and he goes and pulls an all-nighter to get me a draft by Tuesday. Now, it still wasn't perfect, so Tuesday night he redoes it again so I have a better draft on Wednesday morning in time for the presentation. Not a complaint or a peep. He just plows through the work. Okay, now this answer is incredibly detailed. It's exactly the kind of thing we're looking for. And if you look at this answer and you say, all right, you know what, I'm the kind of person, I love pulling all-nighters, I love crazy intense working environments, I love getting stuff at the last minute, I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie, well then yeah, you probably just found a perfect working environment. But if you look at this and say, My gosh, that sounds like a nightmare. You were going to rewrite the entire thing 2 days before it's actually due. I'm going to have to pull an all-nighter to do it. And then even after I pull the all-nighter, the boss still isn't satisfied. So I got to do it again. Okay. And oh, by the way, I can't make any complaints at all. All right. Well, this boss just told you everything about what it is they actually value. They told you what they prize, what it is that it's going to take to be successful. Working for this person. Now, you can look at it and think that's awesome. You can look at it and think that's a nightmare. The point, though, is that you just were able to spot exactly what makes this person tick, what they're like as a leader. Now, when you get an answer like this, poof, problem solved. You just learned what you needed to learn about this person. But step 2 You really want to also be careful and watch out for a boss that cannot give you specifics. Oh, you know, I don't know, we got a lot of good people on the team. If they give you some kind of generic nonsense like that, basically what that tells you is that this is a boss that doesn't really pay that much attention to their people and isn't noticing when their people do something awesome. I mean, if I ask a good boss, hey, could you tell me about a specific time, maybe in the past month, when one of your employees did something that exemplifies having the right attitude for this team? Oh my gosh, I should be able to give a dozen examples. If I'm paying any attention to my people, I should be able to give dozens of examples of something. Oh yeah, they stayed late. Oh, they took the feedback and they worked on this report, or they made 12 calls to finally get a hold of this one customer that's that's been having trouble, whatever. Or they saw that one of their colleagues was struggling, and so they jumped in without any prompting to really help this person out. Whatever it is, I should be able to give specifics. If the boss isn't giving you specifics and gives you one of those generic, well, you know, you just, everybody's good on the team. It's a really nice group of people. I just learned that this person really doesn't pay attention. In fact, one of our studies at Leadership IQ We found only 28% of employees say that their leader always recognizes their accomplishments, whereas a whopping 54% said that it was, yeah, like never, rarely, maybe occasionally. I— so, you know, ask yourself, do you really want to work in an environment where the boss doesn't seem to recognize when people do an awesome job? That doesn't sound like a great environment. The third thing then is to ask the reverse of the first question. And it goes something like, so, you know, without naming names, has there been anyone who just had the wrong attitude for this company? And if so, could you tell me about a specific time when they really did something that exemplified having the wrong attitude? So your first question was, you know, could you give me a specific example of somebody who really exemplified having the right attitude? The other question then, the second question is, you know, without naming names, has there been anybody who had the wrong attitude? And could you give me a specific example of that? And again, you're going to learn a ton about what this person values and what they really dislike. So here's an actual answer. Well, you know, we had a few people, no longer here thankfully, that just wanted promotions without actually putting in their time. We had one guy who literally asked me for a promotion after less than a year on the job. I was here for 5 years before I got my first promotion, and he wants one after 11 months. What could a person realistically accomplish in 11 months that would warrant that? When you ask this person to give you a specific example of somebody who really had the wrong attitude, most of the time they will be so anxious to just vent and get this off their chest that they will reveal a ton. Now again, you can look at this and if you're like, yeah, I'm somebody who believes that you should have to put in your time and I'm more than willing to spend 5 years, 10 years, whatever it is that I need to work my way up, great. But if you look at this and say, um, yeah, that— no, I want, I want to move quickly. I plan on moving up the ladder at a pretty rapid pace. And this boss seems to really hate that. Well, now I just learned that for me, this person is going to be awful to work for. So again, and it's not so much that I'm looking for the one terrible answer to spot the bad boss. It's really about, yeah, I may discover that they're truly toxic, but more importantly, frankly, is that I'm learning something deeper. I'm learning about, is this person going to work for me? There may be people who love this, and there will absolutely be people that will hate this. The lesson for me is that I gotta reveal whether this is a good fit for me, if I'm gonna be happy or I'm gonna be miserable working for this particular boss. If you want to take some of this stuff next level, check out some of our courses. You can check out the link in the description to see some of the courses we offer at Leadership IQ. And of course, you can also also check out my most recent book, Never Say These Words in a Job Interview: The Words and Phrases That Win or Lose You the Job. And be sure to click on the like and subscribe button.
