From Matt Lesher, Search Consultant at Real8 Group
I spend a significant amount of time helping institutional clients evaluate candidates for owner-side facilities and construction roles. Universities, health systems, and cultural institutions often bring me in not just to find candidates, but to help assess them once they are in the process. And one of the things I have noticed consistently is that the hiring teams with the best outcomes are the ones who know what they are actually looking for beyond the resume.
The technical credentials for a VP of Facilities or Director of Construction role at a university or health system are usually table stakes. What separates candidates who succeed in these roles from those who struggle is a set of dimensions that are harder to see on paper and harder to assess in a standard interview. This post is about those dimensions.
Technical Competence Is Necessary but Not Sufficient
Every candidate for a senior facilities or construction role at an institutional organization needs to demonstrate command of their core discipline. For a VP of Facilities, that means credible experience managing large, complex physical plants, deferred maintenance programs, and capital renewal pipelines. For a Director of Construction, it means a track record of delivering major capital projects on schedule and within budget in environments with significant stakeholder complexity.
But I have seen technically excellent candidates fail in owner-side institutional roles because they could not operate effectively in the environment. And I have seen candidates with slightly less impressive technical credentials succeed because they had the right combination of judgment, communication skill, and institutional awareness. The organizations that assess only the technical dimension often end up with the wrong hire.
What to Actually Look For
Comfort with Shared Governance and Slow Decisions
Institutional environments make decisions slowly and through consensus. A VP of Facilities at a research university may need to navigate approvals from a provost, a VP of Finance, a board committee, and sometimes a faculty senate before a significant capital project can move forward. Candidates who are accustomed to moving quickly in a private or commercial environment often find this pace profoundly frustrating.
The candidates who succeed understand that the approval process is not an obstacle to work around; it is part of the role. Ask candidates directly about their experience operating in governance-heavy environments. Their answer, and the tone in which they give it, tells you a great deal about how they will perform.
Stakeholder Communication Across Non-Technical Audiences
In an institutional setting, the facilities or construction leader has to communicate effectively with people who have no technical background: faculty, senior administrators, board members, donors, and sometimes the press. The ability to translate complex capital project status, deferred maintenance risk, or infrastructure failure into language that a university president or hospital CEO can understand and act on is a genuine skill, and it is not universal among technically strong candidates.
In interviews, I look for candidates who can explain what they have done in plain language. If they default immediately to technical jargon when talking to a non-technical audience, that is a signal about how they will communicate with institutional leadership.
Experience Managing Through Regulatory and Compliance Complexity
Universities and health systems operate under a thicker layer of regulatory, accreditation, and compliance requirements than most private sector real estate environments. Joint Commission standards in healthcare, state capital outlay requirements at public universities, historic preservation constraints at many cultural institutions, and unionized workforce agreements all create complexity that a candidate needs to have navigated before.
Candidates who have only worked in commercial or private sector construction environments frequently underestimate this dimension. They assume that good project management skills translate directly. Sometimes they do. But more often, the regulatory and compliance layer creates surprises that slow them down and erode credibility with institutional leadership.
Track Record of Building and Retaining Teams
Owner-side institutional facilities and construction departments are not flush with talent. The candidate pools for their internal roles are often as constrained as the candidate pool for the leadership role itself. A VP of Facilities who is a strong individual contributor but a weak talent developer will inherit a struggling team and struggle to improve it.
Ask candidates specifically about the people they have developed and promoted. Ask who on their current or previous team moved into more senior roles because of exposure and mentorship they provided. The answers to these questions reveal something important about whether the candidate will strengthen the institutional function over time or simply occupy the seat.
Genuine Alignment with Institutional Mission
This one is harder to assess and easier to fake in an interview, but it matters. Candidates who are genuinely motivated by the work of a university, hospital, or cultural institution bring a different energy to their role than candidates who see it as a lateral move that happens to be available. The former will advocate for the institution in difficult budget conversations, invest in relationships with academic or clinical leadership, and accept the slower pace and lower compensation ceiling as part of the value exchange. The latter will often leave within two or three years when a higher-paying commercial opportunity emerges.
I have found that the best way to assess this is to ask candidates what they know about the organization’s current challenges and priorities, and what specifically draws them to this type of institution rather than a commercial real estate or construction firm role. Their level of preparation and the specificity of their answer tells you a great deal.
How to Structure the Assessment
The most effective process I have seen for owner-side institutional facilities and construction searches combines a structured behavioral interview with at least one working session or case-based exercise. The working session does not need to be elaborate. It can be a 30-minute conversation where the candidate is given a scenario, a deferred maintenance backlog with a constrained budget and multiple competing stakeholders, and asked to walk through how they would approach it.
What you are looking for in that exercise is not a correct answer. You are looking for how the candidate thinks, how they communicate under mild pressure, and whether their instincts match the institutional environment they would be entering.
If you are filling a VP of Facilities, Director of Construction, or Senior Project Manager role at a university, health system, or cultural institution and want to talk through how to structure the assessment process, I am glad to be a resource. Learn more about Matt Lesher and the Real8 Group team, see how we approach institutional facilities and construction searches, or reach out directly. You can also explore our approach to finding the right talent for these specialized roles.
Real8 Group is a specialized executive search firm serving the real estate, construction, engineering, and facilities operations sectors across the U.S.
