Prepared for what a committee is actually listening for.

At the Director level and above, interviewers are rarely testing whether you can do the job — your resume already made that case. They're testing judgment: how you think under ambiguity, how you've handled conflict with peers or boards, how you make decisions with incomplete information, and whether your account of your own leadership holds up under follow-up questions.

Most interview preparation still focuses on rehearsing answers to expected questions. That helps less than it seems to, because senior interviewers are trained to probe past a rehearsed answer within one or two follow-ups — and a candidate who hasn't prepared for that follow-up often undermines a strong first answer.

The higher the role, the more the interview becomes a conversation rather than a script. A rehearsed answer to 'tell me about a time you led change' can sound strong on the surface, but a senior interviewer will often ask a specific follow-up designed to test whether the story holds up in detail — what you'd do differently, how a specific stakeholder actually reacted, what the outcome looked like six months later.

Candidates who haven't prepared for that layer of follow-up tend to either over-explain in the moment or retreat to vague language — both of which read as a lack of ownership over the story, even when the underlying experience is genuinely strong.