Interviewing Is Story Curation
When an organization interviews a candidate for a job opening the interviewer is most often focused on a candidate’s skills and experiences. It’s too seldom understood that the most valuable and impactful interviews go beyond these basic components to include a greater sense of the candidate’s professional story, inclusive of their values and motivations. This means asking better questions and practicing much deeper listening and conversational reflection and mirroring.
A more powerful wheilding of the interview process can be found in exploring the intersection of the candidates professional and personal story arc and the organizations own story and narrative direction. To capture that value, the interview must move beyond a skills and experience inventory and inspection approach to venturing into deeper waters.
Much like a movie director pulls the context and meaning out of a script to transform it and create an impactful experience on screen, interviewers can work within a larger frame that creates a broader landscape for both the candidate and the hiring organization. It allows both parties to attain better clarity and a sense of the potential opportunity related to joining into one another’s stories. In most organizations, there is room to develop interviewing skills to be more impactful and foster the benefits that come from becoming intentional story curators.
The Practice Path
It takes exposure and interaction with your own experiences to drive elevating your abilities and developing your craft in your own unique way. Putting in the repetitions of doing the work is the only sustainable path and it’s not a quick shortcut scenario.
A well-known quote from Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers: The story of success says, “Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
Take heart in the process along the way and realize that investing in yourself has a compounding effect on the value you offer and your own satisfaction and confidence of doing what you do well in the service of others.
Calculated Risk
Any given day that you make the intentional choice to open your mouth to share thoughts, ideas, understanding or insights, is a calculated risk. You can potentially be seen as wrong and misunderstood or you can be right on the money and positively impact any number of others.
What is your own risk-reward scenario?
Keeping your mouth shut will offer zero gain but saying something can create an opportunity that you may be unable to see completely but potentially realize unharvested value.
We all like clarity and guaranteed outcomes but the uncertainty that resides within some degree of unknown chaos is where the opportunity lives. Taking the occasional leap is good for the mind and body. It’s how you develop demonstrable competency and foster your confidence.
Taking that calculated risk is the only path to the payoff of trying, learning, growing, and generating positive change in yourself and others around you. Your life is a living, active, and flexing container. Don’t mistakenly treat it like an infrequently visited wing at the museum.
Looking For Lighting
Take one minute and reflect back to time when a number of things came together unexpectedly to significantly change how you were approaching or thinking about a given topic or situation. These moments can often be personal and can occur anyplace at any time. All it takes is the right mix of new ideas, coinciding events, and timing to trigger a shift that changes everything.
When you reach a breakthrough event, things shift significantly. How you see things will change and it can potentially be uncomfortable but exhilarating at the same time. Vibrant growth professionally or personally will share this hallmark. A key thing to remember is that these breaking change events in your experiences are unique to you and an important part of creating your own story, impacting others but more importantly you.
It’s next to impossible to conjure and engineer these events on purpose or put them on a schedule, but there are things that can be done to create a more optimized environment with favorable conditions. Similar to how we can’t control the weather, yet with some insight on how weather systems organize themselves, we may be able to see an opportunity to increase the likelihood for lighting to strike, but in a positive way.
· Look for opportunities to foster spaces for growth breakthroughs.
· Create calm opportunities to think, reflect, learn, and reduce unhelpful noise.
· Take in a variety of perspectives related to “active zones” for exploration and opportunity.
· Connect to communities that are characterized by expansion over contraction thinking.
Look for lightning and you may find things get really interesting in a fantastic way.
Do A Thing
People don’t learn new things because you make them do a thing. They learn by watching you do a thing.
Fit For Change
We all know the feeling, when a change is needed in an organization or team, but it can be a very hard sell. It is especially difficult when it requires getting a group of people rowing in the same direction and feeling confident and excited about it. Often that challenge of change is that if flows against the current of conflicting agendas or just the innate comfort of what has been familiar.
One powerful technique that can help generate much-needed alignment is to tell the shared story of the group and how this new change fits with the overall growth and positive direction of everyone.
When it’s time to communicate and promote what’s next, be sure to pull in the story of what came before. Creating that connectivity helps to put individuals into the story that they are a part of as opposed to feeling left behind or run over. Showing people where they fit and are valued is like magic.
In Orbit
If you are a leader of an organization, a department, or a team of people, your job is to externalize the soul and mission of that people group. As a leader, if you have not put that into words then it only lives in you and not in others.
Unhealthy organizations and teams share the common characteristic of over dependence upon a single individual where everything related to direction, priority, strategy, and decision resides within that one leader.
When members of this kind of organization go asking about what to do or how to do something they say, “I don’t know, we better go ask our leader.”
Leaders will not be effective if they are the sun at the center of the solar system. Leaders must externalize the values and purpose of the organization and its various parts. That narrative is what the organization needs to orbit around.
Decentralizing yourself as a leader and placing that clear narrative in the center allows you to empower more leaders and provides a beacon that everyone can see and then run towards it.
The Hidden Chasm Podcast Interview
This summer I had a fantastic opportunity to be a guest on The Hidden Chasm podcast sponsored by United Effects. A one hour conversation with United Effects Founder & CEO Bo Motlagh and Co-Founder Designer Josh Smith where we talk about "People Architecture" and its vital role in team dynamics and building escalators to success for people and teams in organizations.
Click here for the episode on “Building Escalators” (Episode 5 of The Hidden Chasm).
Key Focus Areas
- Leveraging individual strengths to build cohesive teams 🎯
- Navigating the complexities of middle management and upskilling 🔄
- Aligning leadership strategies with organizational goals 📈
"Organizations in typical corporate America are very focused on treating companies like machinery. The problem is, it's full of people, and people are kind of messy."