Elaine Baran

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Don’t play too small – that’s the name of one of my stories.  I’ve told it countless times, have it culled down to a fairly brief tale, but can expand and elaborate if necessary.  The bare facts are short and to the point.  Early in my career, I made a mistake in my job as president of a small company – forgot to process some piece of paperwork – and found myself feeling pretty bad about it.  When I wrote it up to the people I reported to, I gave them all the facts and accepted full responsibility for the error (a possible $3,000 mistake).  Their response:  “oh, a boo-boo”.   It makes me laugh now, but it was an eye-opening experience at the time.  I had thought that I had made major error, would negate our entire quarter profits by this action and had come down pretty hard on myself.  What I realized, after seeing the absurdity of it, was that if you want to have a large business, you need to be able to make large decisions.  If I was too afraid of making a $3,000 mistake, how could I ever hope to make a $3,000,000 mistake.   Not that I dream of making $3M mistakes, but I realized that it’s the level of risk that defines the playing field.  And bigger risks allow for bigger visions.

I’ve learned and grown over the years.  I’ve had numerous life-changing experiences, both large and small.  Many of these experiences were translated into my “stories” – those shorthand versions of lessons learned, values formed, and character developed.

Just as individuals do, I think that often organizations evolve out of the “stories we tell ourselves”.  These stories create the reality for both the organization and the people who work there.  New people are attracted to the ‘story’; others are repelled.  We’ve often seen how new hires either ‘get it’ or don’t, often leaving within a short period of time in an organization that has a strong culture.   If the company, with its values, mores and culture fits with your personal system, all will go well and you will likely have a lengthy and productive engagement.  If, on the other hand, there is no ‘fit’, then even the most talented of hires will likely not last.

Recently I’ve been working on a great project – helping a small company redesign their business model to deal with the new realities of their industry (travel) and still grow and prosper.   In working through all the parts of the project that one might assume would be present (financial model, marketing strategy, competitive analysis, etc.) I was serendipitously privileged to learn some great new skills that fit into my overall model of how I see organizations functioning as they relate to internal and external story telling.

This organization’s restructure created an environment in which new hiring was necessary.   As a result, I got the privilege of working with a professional HR consultant who had spent years in the business.  I usually find their gatekeeper function extremely frustrating, so it was quite an experience working with someone who not only understood business, but had an amazing grasp of human dynamics and could quickly and easily identify operating styles and cut right to the point of what was needed.

What was needed in this small organization was ‘behavioral-based’ interviewing, because what this type of interviewing does is ferret out the ‘stories’ of your interviewee so that you can check for their unstated values, goals, dreams, fears and issues.  A good match does not rely only on skill sets, but on the ability to work within the organization as it is, as well as help to shape the organization that will emerge.

Almost everyone thinks they know how to hire – you post a job listing, get a few resumes, call in the best ones, ask them a bunch of questions about their last few jobs, throw in some gut feelings and make a decision.  Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.  Que sera sera.  Does this sound like how your organization does hiring and, perhaps, how you’ve felt your hiring process has gone in the past?

Imagine a scenario where the type of feedback you get all during the interview process is “you ask really good questions” and “oh, that’s a hard question” immediately followed by a thoughtful and complete response.  This was the type of interaction that we found when we based our questions not on a hypothetical exploration of what they wanted, to see if it matched our ideal (‘where do you want to be in five years?), but on an in-depth exploration of what their stories were and what they told us about the candidate.

A few concrete examples are in order.

One of the mainstays of this type of interview is the “Tell me about a time…” question.  It’s a great way to address your concerns about a person’s resume without asking them directly.  Since this was a small company with many virtual employees and few people located in their office, we used the question “Tell me about a time when you worked in a small office – what did you like about it; what didn’t you like about it.”  The answers ranged, as one might expect.  The messages though, were clear – a person who didn’t like small offices and preferred the vast camaraderie and structure of a large organization struggled to come up with the ‘like about it’ section.   Another who preferred small companies, breezed through this question, offering a clear assessment of her personal preference and comparing it with her negative experience in larger offices.  The details of their stories enabled us to make the contextual shifts necessary to determine if we thought they would be able to handle our specific situation.

Our telephone pre-screening questions enabled us to eliminate over half the resumes we liked, including some that under the old method we might have had in for an interview.  Our initial phone screens only took 5-10 minutes, but we knew within that time whether it made any sense to conduct a full interview.  Compare that with how many times you’ve pulled in a candidate for a face-to-face and knew in the first 5 minutes that it wasn’t going to work…   Our screening questions were simple – what caught your attention about this job?  What caught your attention about our company?  What do you do well?  What don’t you do very well?  For a key management position, we found that the ‘don’t do well’ question provided great insight.  An ability to clearly understand the limits of your own skills, especially as a manager, is a key indicator of management maturity.  We usually knew the person wasn’t ready to manage a staff (despite their stated history), if they couldn’t confidently speak to what they knew they would need to delegate to more qualified staff.

“Tell me about a great coworker/boss, and one that was not so great.”  Talk about being put on the spot. Yet this is a question that everyone should be able to answer.  We’ve all worked with great people – what was it that made them great?  And we’ve all work with some that weren’t so great – what was it that made them not so great?   Our new manager wanted to ask directly about on-time performance and absenteeism.  I dissuaded her from doing that, telling her that for people for whom this is important, it almost always shows up in the behavioral questions.  Sure enough – our best candidates often cited ‘worst’ co-workers as those who were late, absent, didn’t meet obligations, etc.  It was clear that this was important to them and we didn’t have to ask them to self-report.   This oblique method also seems more reliable – everyone says they’re punctual.  

The candidate’s stories about those times when they stepped into the fray (Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a crisis?), took on extra work (Tell me about a time when you had an operational difficulty?), successfully dealt with a difficult co-worker (Tell me about a time when you had a difficult personal interaction at work – how did you deal with it and what did you learn?) and managed a project through to completion lay bare whether their personal stories would fit in with the stories of the hiring organization.