My counterpart at TOA recently shared a story about a job interview gone wrong thanks to a candidate’s misguided application of economic principles. It was a lovely storytelling attempt, no doubt about it, but I think he missed a few important aspects of the story. This is why the work related stuff around here is my domain! So, let me add some thoughts today to help you understand the most relevant lessons from that job interview situation.
First, some of you may be wondering – why continue the interview at all? Surely, after the candidate’s hypothetical example sucked all the oxygen out of the interview room, everyone in the hiring team would have agreed that the hiring decision was clear. Wouldn’t continuing on when the result was already obvious be a clear waste of everyone’s time?
Reader, my response is simple – our team needed the practice. This was a situation with a live job candidate who was giving it his best shot to convince us that he was the ideal person for the job. Our team needed all the chances it could get to interview such people. Without practice, there was no way to improve at conducting job interviews. If I had sent this candidate home after the first round, we would have thrown away an opportunity to hone the skills we would need to conduct a good interview when the right candidate eventually did show up in our room.
This brings me to a larger point about the team. One of our basic operating principles was that we would try to learn from each other every day. This principle looked good on paper (doesn’t it?) but I knew that in many teams such principles often gave way under the many short-term pressures organizations faced all the time (profits, managerial whims, sudden changes of direction, and so on). Under these conditions, I felt just stating the principle wasn’t enough. In order for the team to improve every day, I had to translate the vague concept into a simple action we could take every day – practice.
I’ve written about the value of practice on this space in the past. It’s hard to know exactly what this means, though, in the context of a work environment. In my prior post, I did not make the effort to explain what I considered practice. What did practice mean for a team like mine? It meant training until the trainee was as capable as the trainer. We built up the skills required in a number of ways. We created test projects for new people to work on so that we could assess performance and identify training gaps. We paired novices with experts and arranged shadowing sessions so that knowledge could be transferred informally while also creating formal reference material in the form of documentation and FAQs. We made sure the inexperienced always knew how to get a more experienced teammate to help so that they could fail safely until they demonstrated their readiness to succeed.
All of these methods fall under one general concept – apprenticeship. The essence of our learning principle was a belief that people learned best when they helped someone who already knew what to do. Therefore, practice in our team meant helping someone else complete a job. This resulted in our team becoming a series of ever-changing partnerships where the trainee was responsible for helping the trainer complete an assignment; in return, the trainer would help the trainee learn over time in order to eventually to take over the responsibility for successfully completing future assignments.
At the time of this job interview, the apprenticeship method was already well established within our hiring process. What had started with just me reviewing resumes, reading cover letters, and conducting interviews had expanded to involve most of the team helping me make decisions. I had gone from simply sharing examples of accepted and rejected resumes with the group to asking for the team to make decisions on marginal applications. I was also in the process of transitioning the bulk of the speaking during phone interviews to a team member who had shadowed me on the screening calls since the first day.
The training progression for in-person interviews, however, was very much still in its early days. This was due mostly to a scarcity of strong candidates. Therefore, even though team members had been shadowing me during the interviews since the start of our hiring round, each person had only witnessed a handful of real conversations. So, on this day, even though I already knew the outcome I went back into the room with two more analysts and finished up the second round of the interview as if everything was left to be decided.
I can’t say for sure if I made the right decision (I suppose it isn’t possible to ever know these things for sure). But if I had to do it over again, I would probably make the same decision. Our team’s operating principle meant I asked everyone in the group to learn every day. This meant my role as the leader was to ensure I gave the team every opportunity to learn through relevant practice. If I had cut short the interview after the first round, I would have deprived part of my team the opportunity to practice and failed in my responsibility as the leader.
There is also a broader lesson here about principled leadership. Although principles are important to have on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, the real value of a principle comes during those one-off situations that no one anticipates (and no expects to ever come up again). These moments put the principle to the test. A strong leader in these moments frames the situation in the context of the team’s principles and makes a decision consistent with those ideals. It might not always be easy to do this but a strong leader always remembers that leadership isn’t about me, but we. It’s about becoming the leader we all wished we had when we were younger.
Leadership, like any skill, is mastered through practice, the deliberate repetition of a desired action. The opportunities to practice leadership are few and far between. When such an opportunity comes around, a leader knows it isn’t time to walk away – it’s time to get to work.
Signed,
The Business Bro
