Control the Dialogue

What is your message?

The employment interview is one situation that exploits the capacities for friendliness and imaginative empathy to its fullest extent. Our natural tendency to sympathise with the person across the table drives us to make excuses for their weaknesses or to read more substance into their work or personal experiences than truly exists. At the same time, our programming for classification—sorting people into in-groups and out-groups—can make us harshly judge those who appear to be in the out-group. We will even focus on and exaggerate the differences we perceive. Thus, strict controls and lengthy training are needed to make interviews effective procedures for objective judgment, and even then they remain highly vulnerable to empathy and mind-reading biases.

HBR – How Hardwired Is Human Behaviour?

So, we find ourselves in the interview, a bit nervous and uncertain how things are going to go. We might not have slept very well, we have crammed for a whole bunch of potential questions and we now await their initial entry point into the interview. What’s going to happen next and how am I going to perform under pressure?

Why are we so nervous and what impact does this have on our capacity to handle the situation?

Power Dynamics

When your focus is on “I should do whatever it takes to get offered this job, and I need my interviewer to like me,” you’re more likely to miss danger signs that you’ll be miserable in a job or bad at it. You’re less likely to ask the questions that you need to get answered in order to determine if this is a job that you’d want, in a culture you want, working with people who you’d want to work with. (Alison Green – Slate.com)

The major issue in an interview situation, is the imbalance of power that exists in the relationship. When a person has power, it has an effect the people, environments, and events around them, even if they have no desire to do so.

According to Good Therapy, there are a number of different types of power. In the 1950s, psychologists John French and Bertram Raven theorised there are five main types of power (later they added two more to make seven). These power types are:

• Coercive power: The ability to offer punishments to deter certain actions. We see this in the work environment, where promotions are given on the basis of doing what the leader wants. In an interview scenario, we might feel that failure to perform might result in a punishment, such as not getting the role.
• Reward power: The ability to give out rewards for desired behaviour. This can be the outcome of an interview process, where you can be rewarded for performing well.
• Formal power: This power comes from having an official position. The people that are interviewing you will often be in a superior position to you and given that they work for the organisation, they are in control of the situation.
• Connection power: The ability to offer access to certain people or resources. Getting the role may open up opportunities , networks or relationships that can have significant impact. It might be an important ,moment in your early career.
• Referent power: Influence that comes from being liked by others. Our self esteem is influenced by their reaction to us, we want them to like us and we want them to respond well to us.
• Informational power: Influence that comes from knowledge and information. They know the company, the product, the politics, the vision, the strategy. They have all the information and though I have some information, it is an incomplete picture.
• Expert power: Influence that comes from having exceptional skills. They know more about the product than I do.

Equal Terms

In an ideal world, the interview process would be a shared process, with both parties contributing equally to the conversation. In fact, this is how mature organisations work, understanding that an interrogation is the least effective way of getting to know the character and competence of an individual. Essentially, an interview process is a subjective process, because it involves a person with decision making capacity, making a decision to punish or reward another individual, depending on how they feel about them. That immediately sets up a dynamic that is largely unbalanced, creating a stress for the participant.

Our inclination when we feel that there is a power imbalance, is to take the subservient role. I cede control to the other person and my subconscious intent is to please them enough to secure the reward. The moment we do that, the interview process becomes a “teacher / student” relationship, one where my emotional state, my mindset and my behaviours is of lessor importance then the more powerful decision maker that is asking the questions.

We can’t control the conversation, we can only control our component of the discussion and the rest takes care of itself.

What can we do to ensure as best we can, that we have a degree of control over the process.

5 steps to taking control

Be prepared – You never walk into an interview, without understanding what it is that you want to say. You have prepared your story board, you understand your key messages, you know the competencies / gifts that support these messages and you know the stories required to demonstrate your achievements.

Practice until your messaging and stories become second nature – You have spent a lot of time rehearsing what you want to say. Pressure can do interesting things to people, including bringing about a complete ‘mind blank’ in an important moment. Practice until you know every story back to front and can use them seamlessly, to demonstrate different things.

Don’t attached emotion to the outcome – The moment we want something, we create the potential for nerves to play a role. Your job is not to make the decision, but to influence the decision and the way that we do that, is through our nudging. Indecisiveness, slow reactions, nervous stories our forgetfulness are not the outcomes we are looking for. You know what you want to say, focus on saying that to the best of your ability.

Focus on the message that you want to get across – This is about what you want to say, not what you think that they need to hear. If you have done your homework, you know what the issues are and what you need to focus on. Bring the dialogue back to your key messages and make sure that they are heard.

Don’t be intimidated by the humans that are cross the table – They might be smarter, richer, in more senior positions or more powerful, but at the end of the day, they are human beings. On that basis, we need to understand that we share the same bias’s and innate human weaknesses. Focus on being a good human being and demonstrating the best working version of that human being, and let them decide if that is impressive enough.

What do you want them to know about your character and your competence that is going to leave them, with a favourable impression?

Work on delivering it with honesty and humility. People want to connect, and you compromise the prospect of connection by making a pitch. Even worse .. you’re making a pitch and to don’t know what success looks like. Stop pitching and start connecting with authenticity. Walk away feeling great about the fact that the conversation got across the message that you wanted to deliver and let the rest take care of itself.

A balanced relationship, or one in which power is, for the most part, held equally, might be represented by some of the following outcomes of the process:

• Both parties know their value and walk away from the discussion happy in the knowledge they have gleaned and the process they have been through.
• People feel listened to, heard and understood by the other party.
• Both parties respect each other, feel that the process was more than adequate and fair, and they were able to demonstrate the best version of themselves.

What’s next?

In the next lesson, we are going to give you a list of questions that you might like to use, to establish communication throughout the process. Ideally, we are looking to turn this into two way dialogue between equals, discussing the situation and how you both might benefit from the exchange.