As I think back on the thousands of people I’ve interviewed and the hundreds I’ve tracked for years after they were hired, leadership stands out as the universal trait of success. At its simplest, I define leadership as the ability to figure out the best way to solve a problem and then executing on that solution.

For an accountant, this could mean describing how to set up a new budgeting system and then setting it up. For an engineer, it might be figuring out how to redesign a system and then successfully implementing the redesign. For a CEO, this could mean describing how the company will be reorganized to increase profitability and then making sure it gets done.

Use the two-question, performance-based interview to assess leadership

While leadership is a universal trait for the most successful people, assessing it needs to be related directly to the needs…