The Question Every Hiring Manager Should Be Asking — but Usually Isn’t
When a candidate lists “10 years in higher education construction” on their resume, it sounds compelling. But Matt Lesher, search consultant at Real8 Group, has spent years digging beneath that surface — and what he finds often surprises his clients.
Institutional experience is not a binary. It exists on a spectrum, from genuinely deep and transferable to cosmetic at best. Knowing the difference before you extend an offer can determine whether your next VP of Facilities or Director of Construction drives results or struggles for two years before quietly exiting.
What “Institutional Experience” Actually Means
At the surface level, institutional experience simply means someone has worked at a university, health system, museum, or similar organization. But that framing misses the point entirely.
The questions that matter: Did they sit in capital planning meetings, or did they execute scopes handed to them by others? Did they manage vendor relationships and owner-side contracts, or did they work inside a GC and interface with the owner as a subcontractor? Did they navigate shared governance, board approvals, and faculty or clinical stakeholder politics — or did they work in a relatively autonomous construction department where decisions were made by one or two people?
Cosmetic institutional experience looks good on paper. Genuine institutional experience changes how someone thinks about problems.
Four Screening Questions Matt Uses to Test Depth
Over years of placing facilities and construction leaders at universities, health systems, and cultural institutions, Matt Lesher has developed a set of probing questions that reveal whether a candidate’s institutional background runs deep or stays shallow.
1. Walk me through how a major capital project gets approved at your institution.
Candidates with genuine experience can narrate the full governance arc: how a project enters the capital plan, who has sign-off at each stage, what committee structures exist, and where political friction typically appears. Candidates with surface exposure often describe the construction execution phase — scheduling, subcontractors, punch lists — and stop there. They were present for part of the story, not the whole thing.
2. Tell me about a time a project stalled for a non-construction reason.
Real institutional leaders have dozens of these stories. Budget re-forecasts in the middle of design development. Donor-tied capital that came with unexpected scope restrictions. Department chairs who reversed course on programming after schematic design was complete. Faculty governance that added six months to a timeline. If a candidate struggles to name a single example, they likely worked in environments where the construction team was insulated from institutional complexity.
3. How did you manage a relationship with a clinical or academic stakeholder who was resistant to your project?
This question separates people who understand stakeholder management from people who have only heard the term. The best answers include specific details: the nature of the conflict, what the stakeholder’s underlying concern actually was, and how the candidate found a path forward without either capitulating or bulldozing. Vague answers about “communication and transparency” suggest the candidate has not been in those rooms at the right level.
4. What was your relationship with the CFO or Board on capital matters?
At real8 Group’s target institutions, the VP of Facilities or Director of Construction often has a dotted line to the CFO, sits in front of a Board Facilities Committee, or presents capital forecasts at the trustee level. Candidates who have operated at that interface understand the language of capital allocation, deferred maintenance liability, and long-range financial planning. Candidates who have not often have no answer at all — or they describe “sending reports up the chain” rather than actively participating in those conversations.
Why This Matters More Than It Used to
Institutional roles have grown more complex. Capital programs are larger, stakeholder groups are more vocal, and board oversight of facilities and construction has intensified at universities and health systems. The gap between someone who can manage a project and someone who can lead a function through that environment is wider than it has ever been.
Matt sees this play out repeatedly in searches where a client gets excited about a candidate from a well-known institution, only to discover mid-process — or worse, post-hire — that the person’s institutional exposure was narrow. They were excellent within a defined lane. The job requires someone who can also define the lane.
What Genuinely Institutional Candidates Look Like
Candidates with deep institutional experience tend to share a few traits. They speak fluently about governance, not just construction. They have strong opinions about capital planning processes — and can describe how those processes vary across institution types. They know the difference between the owner’s rep model, the in-house construction team model, and the hybrid model, and they can articulate the tradeoffs of each from an owner’s perspective.
They also tend to have navigated at least one major organizational change: a change in leadership above them, a significant budget cut, a shift in institutional strategy that required reprogramming or deferring capital. These experiences build a kind of resilience and adaptability that shows up in how they approach new challenges.
How Real8 Group Applies This in Practice
Real8 Group runs targeted searches for VP of Facilities, Director of Construction, Director of Facilities Operations, Senior Project Manager, and Project Executive roles at universities, health systems, cultural institutions, and owners’ rep firms. Every search includes a structured screening process designed to test exactly this kind of depth.
Matt Lesher works directly with hiring managers to define what “genuine institutional experience” means for their specific organization, their capital program complexity, and their stakeholder environment. That definition becomes the filter for every candidate evaluated against the position.
The result is a shortlist where every candidate has been tested for depth — not just presence. That difference matters enormously when the role requires someone who can function at the highest levels of a complex institution from day one.
If you are filling a facilities or construction leadership role and want to understand how to screen for genuine institutional depth, reach out to Real8 Group. You can also learn more about how we work or meet the team.
Real8 Group is a specialized executive search firm serving the real estate, construction, engineering, and facilities operations sectors across the U.S.
