When companies downlevel your offer, they're questioning your leadership style. The speaker explains how to signal senior-level thinking in interviews: focus on how you solve problems with peers and leaders, not just what you accomplish.
How do you communicate your leadership style from your past experiences? In an interview demonstrates what level you are. In a leadership interview you want to demonstrate that you proactively identified problems or opportunities and you got people behind it and then actually like got something accomplished. So when I was an IC5, I was clearly saying, hey, somebody chose a problem, gave the problem to me and I actually like went and crushed it. I crushed it. It was really good. But I didn't identify the problem. But then actually as I was more senior, I'm like, hey, I saw this opportunity and I got people to actually see it and get behind it. The other thing that people communicate is how their relationship with their peers and their leadership. So more junior people complain about their leaders, how leaders are getting in the way, how their teammates are getting in the way. And they do that even in interviews. Whereas the more senior people are like, hey, leaders have their perspective. And it is my job to figure out how to align the problems that I'm seeing with my leaders priorities and communicate it in a way in which they.