For some weeks I’ve been tweeting “Strange but true interview questions” that I’ve discovered. Interview questions such as “Why are manhole covers round?” and “If you were a salad, what type of salad dressing would you choose and why?”. Whenever I’ve asked interviewers the purpose of such questions the replies usually include “It brings some humour to the interview”, “I want to see if the candidate can think on their feet”. I’ve never been convinced by the answer.

An antidote to boredom
I was delighted to discover that Peter Honey the chartered psychologist and the founder of Peter Honey Publications Ltd agrees with me that such questions are a waste of time and could only be useful to someone trained in Psychology. In his article in People Management Peter states that It has nothing to do with assessing candidates; they have been invented
purely to entertain interviewers.They are an antidote to boredom and I must admit I totally agree with him and the reason that I’ve recommended that my clients don’t use such questions.

Interviews are stacked against interviewee
Peter considers that interviews are being stacked against interviewees who are not well turned out, have poor body
language, are not verbally fluent and who are too honest. This is
despite the fact that he or she might be perfectly capable of meeting
the demands of the job.
It is one of the reasons why my business Assimilating-Talent developed the “Interviewless Interview” process some years ago as a way of reducing prejudice and poor interview selection.

Much of my time is spent working with executives on increasing their personal impact and team productivity. An important area is social intelligence.

Social intelligence includes the ability to read people and predict behaviour. I’m not talking about body language.  am talking about how one can influence other people’s behaviour through observation and creating appropriate actions as a result.

Let’s take an example: During our career we have used our understanding to predict our boss’s, colleagues and even life partner’s reaction to certain situations or news. The result is that we know, or think we can assess, the right time to deliver bad news.

Another example of when we heighten our use of social intelligence is at the job interview. The candidate tries to identify where the interviewer stands on certain topics by reading the reaction to answers. Generally this involves detecting negative responses to what’s being said and then to modify or alter the answer accordingly. It’s called self-preservation.

However, many executives don’t use their social intelligence most  effectively despite there being many occasions when they want to influence their team to undertake a new project, accept company targets and then looking for buy-in versus compliance.

When this happens the executive will rely on compliance. The problem with compliance, however, is that it’s often destined to fail or achieve only fleeting short-term gains. Using Social Intelligence increases the chance of long term buy-in and project success. TOne of the main keys is understanding normal human traits. 

• People are natural pleasers: They will try to look good to those that lead them 
• People like simple solutions: So managers should reduce the number of alternatives when outlining a new project. 
• People want results “Now”: The Latin term is Myopia Temporal and it’s where poeple will discount future consequences in place of a  result that looks good for them right now. (Supermarkets use this to get people to buy sweets at the checkout, even when they are on a diet)
• People will follow a crowd: This is useful to a manager to persuade others to buy into a system 

Command and control cultures have a tendency of delivering only short-term results. Alternatively Social intelligence is a process that most managers should find easy to develop with practice. Two keys include: 

1) Identifying with the team the actions and values that generate success. Then support those that are considered valuable and move away from those considered less supportive.

2) Sharing decision making with the team. That is not to say that they share in the decision making just that they understand the route to the decision process. This allows for dissent but in the face of a majority a dissenter will generally align with the majority. This style of consensus management creates creativity and innovation and is used with considerable effect at Google and Apple. 

Creating buy-in with a team used to command  and control systems isn’t always easy. However, using the techniques above eventually creates teams that will begin to operate in a more incluse manner.

As Mahatma Ghandi suggested to one observer “I must hurry, for I’m their leader…and there they go”

This information is taken from the new event: “You’re Here…But How To Get There” that shows Executives how to utilse their personal presence to deliver outstanding team results.

If you would like more information on the event “You’re Here…But How To Get There” or on this article please contact me at Stephen@assimilating-talent.com or phone 01727 838321.