Leadership Interviews

Group settings produce consensus performance; interviews produce candour. Leaders will say things one-to-one — about culture, about each other's functions, about the real appetite for change — that never survive a steering meeting. These interviews convert the Visioning Session's collective ambition into a map of individual positions: who genuinely supports which future, where risk tolerance actually sits, and which workplace success criteria each decision-maker will privately apply when the trade-offs arrive.

• Early in Diagnose, before quantitative methods launch — interviews generate the hypotheses data will test
• After the Visioning Session, to probe documented divergences one-to-one
• When steering behaviour suggests unspoken resistance
• Before scenario selection, to calibrate individual risk tolerance

• Executive committee members and business unit leaders (typically 8–15 interviews)
• Function heads whose domains carry workplace consequences: HR, Finance, IT, CRE
• Conducted by the senior strategist personally — not delegated to junior researchers
• One interviewer, one note-taker maximum; larger audiences kill candour

• Vision framework and strategic tension register from Discover
• Project definition and constraint register
• Interview protocol covering: strategic direction, business model, leadership expectations, culture, organisational tensions, talent, portfolio, financial constraints, technology direction, future ways of working, change appetite, risk tolerance, workplace success criteria
• Confidentiality protocol: attribution rules agreed before the first interview

1. Agree attribution rules up front: findings reported thematically, quotes anonymised, nothing traceable without consent. State this at the start of every interview.
2. Use a consistent semi-structured protocol so responses are comparable across interviewees, while leaving room to pursue what each leader actually raises.
3. Open with strategy, not workplace: where is the business going, what is changing in the operating model, what keeps them awake. Workplace questions land differently once strategic context is established.
4. Probe the tension register from Discover: present each documented divergence neutrally and record where this leader stands.
5. Ask for workplace success criteria in decision language: 'Two years after the move, what evidence would tell you this worked?' Record verbatim.
6. Test change appetite and risk tolerance concretely: reactions to sharing ratios, portfolio reduction, presence expectations — not abstract openness to change.
7. Close each interview by asking what question the strategy must answer that nobody has asked yet.
8. Code all interviews thematically; map convergence, divergence and contradiction across the leadership population.

• Gaps between a leader's public position and private view — these predict where governance will strain
• Success criteria that are mutually incompatible across leaders (cost per head vs experience scores) — raw material for trade-off governance
• Leaders describing their own function's needs as organisational needs
• Uniform answers across interviews — usually signals a pre-briefed script, not alignment
• The topics leaders route around: what is not said, and who is not mentioned

• Thematic synthesis of leadership perspectives, anonymised
• Individual position map against the strategic tension register
• Consolidated workplace success criteria with owners
• Hypothesis set for quantitative testing in Dynamics, Occupancy and Culture assessments

The hypothesis set directly configures the Dynamics Assessment and Organisational Culture Assessment. Success criteria feed Workshop II — Key Criteria. The position map informs how Scenario Development frames options for this specific leadership group, and warns the project team where scenario selection will meet resistance.

Everything in this method is judgement: building trust in minutes, hearing the hesitation behind an answer, deciding when to press a contradiction and when to let it stand, and later separating an individual's idiosyncrasy from an organisational signal. No structured instrument replaces a skilled interviewer here.

• Delegating interviews to junior staff, converting candour into corporate messaging
• Asking workplace questions first, producing office opinions instead of strategic context
• Reporting attributable findings and destroying trust for the rest of the project
• Treating one forceful leader's view as the organisational position
• Skipping thematic coding and cherry-picking quotes that fit the emerging story

In a 14-interview programme at a manufacturing group, the CEO's public commitment to 'radical flexibility' was contradicted privately by five of seven business unit leaders, who expected near-full presence from their teams. The synthesis reported the pattern thematically. Rather than surfacing mid-project as policy sabotage, the contradiction became an explicit agenda item for the leadership team — and the central input to Hybrid Balance in Define.