Positioning Executive Storytelling at a Different Altitude

One of the biggest interview mistakes I see senior-level candidates make is preparing stories that prove they can execute rather than stories that prove they can lead.

The traditional STAR narrative framework  – and the many STAR-adjacent variants so many of us coaches use – lead to success stories with an intentionally narrow scope.  It’s the point of the framework: to narrow in and focus on the competency that the story is designed to demonstrate. The STAR-based story is a structure that proves someone can do the work: a situation or challenge, an action taken, and a clean result at the end. For years that has been enough, and for most roles it still is. But once a candidate is interviewing for a director, VP, or C-suite seat, that same well-built story misses the mark of what interviewers are listening for. Candidates are telling stories that prove their competence. What they need are stories that prove they can be trusted with authority. It’s a different scope, at a different altitude. 

That distinction is critical at the executive level. When a hiring committee interviews a mid-level candidate, they are mostly asking one question: can this person execute? When that same committee interviews an executive candidate, the question changes. They are asking whether this person’s judgment can be trusted, even when nobody is checking their work. A great STAR-style story answers the first question beautifully. It rarely answers the second one at all.

Executive interviews are as much about positioning as performance. Two candidates may have accomplished equally impressive things, but one is perceived as someone who executes strategy while the other is perceived as someone who shapes it. That perception often determines who advances. Intentionally shaping that perception and categorization can be just as important as describing performance when telling a success story. 

To elevate the level of a client’s success narrative, I explore six key shifts through coaching questions: scope, ownership, judgment, stakeholders, stakes, and impact.

Widen the scope of the story.

A STAR-style story proves a candidate completed a task or solved a bounded problem inside their own role. An executive success narrative must show a decision that changed an outcome other people depended on, whether that is P&L impact, board confidence, or a risk the organization avoided at scale. The language used in the story often gives away the altitude they are interviewing at before the content of the story even lands. Words like “supported”, “executed” and “managed” describe someone doing good work inside a system built by others. Words like “decided”, “positioned”, “reframed”, and “shaped” describe someone influencing the direction of that system.

I ask clients to stop describing what they did and start describing what happened to the organization because they decided something. This is positioning in practice: the story itself is the evidence the interviewer will use to categorize this person as an operator or as a leader. The question I ask to get there is: what happened to the organization because you decided something?

Claim ownership.

Claiming ownership means clearly and confidently articulating your own value rather than assuming that greatness will be inferred by a successful outcome.  Good leaders are generous in giving credit to others on the team. In a job interview, though, that may obscure ownership for leading a success.  

Senior candidates, especially those who came up through collaborative cultures, often default to “we”. “We solved it. We aligned the team. We got through it.” That instinct comes from genuine humility and real team leadership, and I never want to coach it out of someone entirely. But an interviewer is not hiring “we”. At the executive altitude, interviewers need to hear specifically what this candidate was accountable for, who convened the room, who made the final call, who owned the risk if it went wrong. 

The skill is saying “I” without erasing the team, and it takes practice to find that line. I ask clients directly: what specifically were you the one accountable for?

Describe judgment, not actions.

Mid-level stories can lean on process. I followed the steps, I hit the deadline, I solved the problem. Executive interviews don’t simply assess what a leader did. They assess how a leader thinks. Executive stories need to show reasoning under ambiguity, the tradeoffs a candidate weighed when there was no clean answer available. This is where I push clients hardest, because most of them have made genuinely hard calls and then flattened the story down to what they did instead of how they decided. I want to hear what they saw that other people in the room did not, so I ask it outright: what did you see in that moment that other people in the room were missing?

Detail who is in the story.

A conventionally framed STAR story often centers on a single manager, team, or audience. An executive narrative almost always involves competing stakeholders with different priorities. The candidate is usually influencing people who do not report to them. That thread, how someone moved a room they did not control, often matters more to an interviewer than the technical solution the candidate eventually landed on. I ask clients: whose competing interests did you have to reconcile, and who did you have to move without any authority over them?

Explain clearly what was at stake.

A STAR-style challenge is often a deadline or a difficult customer. An executive story needs real exposure behind it, something reputational, financial, legal, or strategic. Executive stories should also show composure when things didn’t go according to plan, because composure under real stakes tells an interviewer more than a flawless outcome ever could. I ask it as one question with two parts: What was at risk, and when things went off course, how did you recover?

Distinguish the impact.

A STAR-style story usually closes on a metric, a percentage, a number that went up. But executives permanently change how an organization operates. An executive narrative should close on a shift in position, how the market, the board, or the leadership team now sees the organization, or how differently this person’s judgment is trusted going forward. This is positioning showing up in the ending. The candidate is proving not merely that they delivered a result, but that their leadership changed how the organization thinks, operates, or makes decisions. The closing question I want a client to be able to answer is this: how is the organization, or how are you, positioned differently because of what you decided?

None of this means your existing story structure, whatever version you teach, is wrong. It just may not be built for this height. When I work with clients on these shifts, I have them keep their existing story notes in front of them and examine the story through each of these lenses: scope, ownership, judgment, stakeholders, stakes, and impact.  Almost every client already has the raw material for a strong executive narrative hidden inside an execution story they have been telling for years.  Most of the time, the executive story is already there. It just needs to be coached at a different altitude.