A Question Most Hiring Leaders Don’t Ask Until It’s Too Late
When a university, health system, or cultural institution begins a search for a VP of Facilities or Director of Facilities Operations, the conversations tend to focus on the obvious dimensions: years of experience, portfolio size, technical background, sector familiarity. What rarely gets examined carefully enough is whether the candidate has actually led a facilities function or simply managed one. That distinction, in my experience, is what separates a hire that transforms an organization from one that maintains the status quo.
I’ve placed facilities leaders at institutions ranging from mid-size universities to major academic medical centers, and the pattern I see most often is this: an organization hires someone with an impressive track record of operational execution and then wonders two years in why the capital program isn’t moving, why deferred maintenance keeps compounding, and why the board keeps asking the same questions about facilities strategy that no one seems able to answer.
What Managing Looks Like
A facilities manager, even a very good one, keeps systems running. They respond to work orders, oversee maintenance staff, manage vendor relationships, and make sure the lights stay on and the HVAC functions. At the Director level, this translates to managing a team of managers, handling escalations, and ensuring operational continuity across a complex portfolio.
There is nothing wrong with this. Institutions need people who can execute at this level. The problem arises when an organization places a strong operational manager into a VP role that actually requires strategic leadership, and then expects different output. The person hasn’t changed. The role has. And the organization often doesn’t realize the mismatch for 18 months or more.
What Leading Looks Like
A facilities leader, at the VP level, is doing fundamentally different work. They are setting the strategic direction for the facilities function, translating deferred maintenance data into a capital investment case for the board or the CFO, building and retaining a team with the right skills for where the portfolio is going, and managing the political complexity of an institution where facilities touches every department and every stakeholder has an opinion.
The best VP of Facilities I have worked with don’t just understand buildings. They understand how facilities decisions connect to an institution’s mission, financial model, and competitive position. A health system VP who can articulate the link between facilities performance and patient experience scores is operating at a fundamentally different level than one who can tell you the deferred maintenance backlog by building.
How to Screen for the Difference
The distinction is not always visible in a resume. Both profiles tend to list the same titles and similar scope metrics. The difference shows up in how candidates talk about their work, what they emphasize, and what they have actually changed versus what they have maintained.
In interviews, the questions that reveal this distinction are not the obvious ones. Asking someone to describe their biggest capital project tells you about their execution capability. Asking them how they convinced the CFO to fund a capital renewal program they had been told was off the table for five years tells you whether they can lead. Asking how they handled a board or executive committee that didn’t understand why a $30 million infrastructure investment was strategically urgent tells you whether they have the institutional presence and communication skills the role actually requires.
The Questions I Recommend Hiring Committees Ask
When I work with a client preparing to interview VP of Facilities candidates, I suggest a handful of questions that consistently reveal this dimension. First: describe a time when the facilities function you led changed how the institution made decisions. Not a project you delivered, but a change in how the organization thought about facilities as a strategic asset. Second: what is the most politically difficult decision you have made in a facilities leadership role, and how did you build the support to make it stick? Third: how have you approached building a team where you needed to upgrade capability rather than just fill vacancies?
The answers to these questions sort candidates quickly. The ones who have only managed tend to pivot back to operational specifics, project metrics, and technical solutions. The ones who have led talk about relationships, institutional dynamics, how they framed problems for non-facilities audiences, and what they had to change about how their function was perceived before they could change what it delivered.
Why This Matters More at Institutions Than at Firms
This distinction is important in any facilities context, but it is especially critical at universities, health systems, cultural institutions, and nonprofits with real estate portfolios. At a commercial real estate firm or a construction management company, the metrics are relatively clear and the authority structure is fairly direct. At an institution, the facilities leader is operating in an environment where authority is diffuse, stakeholder politics are intense, and the case for investment has to be remade constantly to audiences who did not go to school to understand deferred maintenance curves.
Institutional facilities leadership is a distinct discipline. It requires not just technical credibility but the ability to translate that credibility into influence across an organization that often does not prioritize the built environment until something breaks. That is what Real8 Group screens for when we run VP of Facilities and Director-level searches for our institutional clients, and it is what separates a search that ends with a strong hire from one that ends with the right resume.
Connect with Real8 Group
If your institution is preparing for a VP of Facilities or Director of Facilities Operations search, or if you want to talk through how to structure the evaluation process before you launch, I am happy to have that conversation. You can learn more about how Real8 Group approaches institutional facilities search at real8group.com/how-we-work, explore the roles and sectors we cover at real8group.com/finding-talent, or reach out directly at real8group.com/contact. You can also learn more about our team at real8group.com/team.
Real8 Group is a specialized executive search firm serving the real estate, construction, engineering, and facilities operations sectors across the U.S.
