How do you check whether a leadership story really evidences the level you are targeting?
answer
- Four facts, not a feeling of size
- Name the people who changed behaviour
- Find the decision nobody asked for
- Ask what survived after you left
- Claim the mechanism, not others' outcomes
basics
~20 sAudit each story against four facts: who outside you changed behaviour, which decision you made unasked, how far ahead it was planned, and what survived after you left. A story missing the first and last belongs a column lower than you think.
solid answer
~40 sI run the same four-question audit over every story before a loop. Who, outside me, did something differently — and can I name them? Which decision did I take that nobody asked me to take? What horizon was it planned over, 6 months inside 1 team or 18 months across 2-3? And what was still running six months after I stopped paying attention? Stories that answer all four sit in the multi-team column; stories that only answer the second are single-team project work; stories that answer none are task work told well. The point is to find the gap myself, because a hiring manager finds it with one follow-up — usually 'who else used it?' — and a claim that collapses under the first probe costs more than the smaller claim would have.
go deeper
Get used to asking one of these questions about your own work: who, other than me, did something differently because of this? Answering honestly early stops you from learning to inflate.
Be able to run all four checks and name the column your story lands in. Know why informing other teams is not influencing them, and practise stating what you supplied instead of what others achieved.
Show that you catch the gap before the interviewer does, and that you can hold a smaller, fully defensible claim under pressure to sound more impressive. Being able to describe a change that reverted, and why, is a strength here.
Own the asymmetry between undershooting and overshooting, and be able to explain to someone you coach how one collapsed claim discounts the rest of a round. Decide deliberately where a story's honest ceiling is.
## Why an audit beats intuition The single most common calibration failure is claiming staff-level scope on evidence that describes one well-run task. It rarely comes from dishonesty. It comes from proximity: the work felt large because it was hard, it took months, and other teams were mentioned in the planning document. None of that is reach. An audit replaces the feeling of size with four facts that either exist or do not. ### The four questions **1. Who, outside you, did something differently?** Name them. Not 'the platform teams' but 'the two groups who ran their own cutovers'. If the honest answer is 'nobody, but they were kept informed', the story is not multi-team; it is single-team work with a broad distribution list. **2. Which decision did you take that nobody asked you to take?** Autonomy shows up as a specific call with a cost — a sequence you defended, a scope you cut, a problem you picked up that was not assigned. 'I was trusted to get on with it' is not a decision. **3. What horizon was it planned over?** A 6-month plan for one team's outcome is project scope. An 18-month plan whose consumers are other teams is a different claim entirely, and it is only credible if you can say what is in it. **4. What survived after you stopped pushing?** This is the question that separates influence from effort. If the practice reverted the moment you moved on, you ran a campaign, not a multiplication. Saying so is not a weakness — the reversion itself is often the most interesting thing you can talk about. ### Grading the result | Answers you have | Honest column | |---|---| | Only question 2, weakly | Task — told well, but task | | Questions 2 and 3, one-team horizon | Project, inside 1 team | | All four, with named adopters and survival | Multiple teams, 2-3 or an org | ### The audit applied A candidate in an infrastructure group wants to claim multi-team scope for consolidating deployment tooling. The audit runs like this. - *Who changed behaviour?* Two groups migrated their services themselves, using the playbook. **Named, real.** - *Which unasked decision?* Sequencing the riskiest service last against schedule pressure, and refusing a parallel-run shortcut that would have doubled the freeze windows. **Specific, with a cost.** - *Horizon?* An 18-month capacity plan the candidate still defends in planning. **Concrete.** - *What survived?* The compatibility layer is still the default path; the playbook has been edited by people the candidate has never worked with. **Survived without them.** That is a defensible third-column story. Change one fact — the other groups were consulted but migrated with their own approach — and the honest column drops to project scope, no matter how much the tooling work cost. ### State the mechanism, not the credit The safest way to claim multiplication without over-claiming is to say what you supplied rather than what others achieved. 'I wrote the playbook two other groups migrated with' is checkable and modest in form. 'I made three teams faster' claims other people's outcomes as your own, and it is exactly the sentence a hiring manager pulls on, because the follow-up — *what did you personally do that produced that?* — has no good answer if the mechanism is missing. ### Deliberately undershooting When your best evidence sits between two columns, lead with the lower claim and let the evidence pull it up. Describing project scope with facts that quietly exceed it reads as substance. Describing multi-team scope with facts that fall short reads as inflation, and inflation contaminates the stories that came before it — once the hiring manager has caught one over-claim, they discount the rest of the round. The asymmetry is the whole argument for auditing before you walk in: an undersold story costs you a little, an oversold one that collapses costs you the round. ### Keep the audit written One line per story, four marks, and the column. It takes twenty minutes for a whole set of material and it converts a vague anxiety about whether you are 'senior enough' into a concrete inventory: here is what I can defend, here is where I am thin, here is the one story I should stop leading with.
- What if the practice you introduced reverted after you moved to another team?Then I say so, and that becomes the interesting part. I describe what I would build differently — ownership handed over explicitly, a default that costs nothing to keep — rather than presenting the original push as durable influence. A reversion I can explain is stronger evidence of judgment than a survival I cannot.
- Can you name the specific decision you took that nobody asked you to take?Sequencing the riskiest service last on the pipeline migration, against pressure to front-load it because it looked faster on the plan. The cost was that our headline number looked flat for two months. I took it because a failed first cutover would have stopped the other groups from adopting the playbook at all.
- Why lead with the lower claim when your evidence sits between two columns?Because the errors are not symmetric. An understated story that turns out larger under questioning reads as substance, while an overstated one that collapses under the first probe makes a hiring manager re-examine everything I said earlier in the round.
saying these in an interview costs you the question
- Claiming staff-level scope on evidence that describes one well-run task
- Counting teams that were informed as teams that were influenced
- Claiming other people's outcomes without naming the mechanism supplied
- Treating months spent and difficulty as evidence of reach
- Never checking whether the change survived the candidate leaving