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Horrible Bosses: Not Just a Movie

Interview Warning Signs

Job interviews can be a very stressful experience. When you are being interviewed, you feel tested and like you’re being inspected through a magnifying glass. However, the candidates aren’t the only ones being scrutinized: the interviewer himself is also under your examination. While he assesses your compatibility for the position and the organization, you’re studying his compatibility as a potential boss.

How can you tell whether the person interviewing you will be a good boss? Here are the interview warning signs that will tell you the type of boss whom you don’t want to work for.

Interview Delivery Style

  • Introduction – Did he shake your hand? Or maybe you held your hand for a shake and he stayed seated while shaking hands? This is a sign of disrespect. Right from the beginning, he is showing you that he does not value you.
  • Focus & Attention – Is he attentive and present in the interview? Or is he distracted, interrupted by his PA, making calls, and reading emails during the interview? This is another sign of disrespect. The interviewer is supposed to be looking for the best employee for himself and the company.  A lot is at stake in this situation, and he can’t be bothered to take a break to concentrate on that? A clear warning sign! If this is how he acts during the interview, what will happen if you actually work for him? You need someone who gives you his undivided attention.
  • Interpersonal Communication

    • Eye Contact – Did he make eye contact during the interview? Or was he looking at your resume/CV, his computer, and off to the side the entire time? This says something about his interpersonal communication skills. This aspect does not necessarily mean he’s a bad person to work for, but it does suggest that you may have difficulties communicating while working together.
    • Facial Expressions – Did he smile when he introduced himself and throughout the interview? Or did he look solemn and stern? A lack of a smile could indicate that he is a very serious person, maybe even severe. The interviewer has the job of representing the company. His objective is to make people want to work for him and/or his company, so part of his job is to show the interviewee what work life will be like if he gets the job. A smile is so basic.
  • Patience -Did he let you fully answer questions after asking them? Or did he constantly interrupt you in the middle of a sentence? This could be an indicator of someone who is not willing to let his employees be creative, and someone who is overly controlling. Be aware of interviewers like this.

Interview Content

  • Introduction – Did he introduce himself? Name, position, vision, etc.  It may sound very basic, but sometimes it is overlooked. An interviewer’s duty is to introduce himself. If he didn’t, it may imply that it wasn’t important enough for him. If this person was speaking with a potential client, you can be sure that and introduction would be important, so how can he forget it when interviewing a potential employee?
  • Professional vs. Personal – Were all of the questions purely professional? Or did he take the time to get to know about you as a person? In an interview, it is obvious that you will be asked about your professional experience and knowledge. However, an interview is also meant to get to know the person behind the profession, to see if his personality will mesh with the company climate and mentality. An interviewer who doesn’t ask a few personal questions to get to know the person in front of him is a warning sign.
  • Appropriate Questions – Were the questions all appropriate? Or did the interviewer ask questions that got too personal, such as asking about marital status and age? While some personal questions, such as your hobbies and interests, are appropriate, some questions cross the line. If you feel uncomfortable during the interview, chances are you’ll also feel uncomfortable if you take the job.

After you finished the interview, what is the process going forward?

  • Did he ask you if you had any questions at the end? Or did he just rush to finish the interview? A good employer will want to give you as much information as possible. If he’s hurrying you along, he clearly does not want you to ask questions.
  • How long did he speak, and how long did you speak? You as an interviewee need to speak more than the interviewer did. The interview is the process by which a potential employer gets to know you. If he talked too much about himself, this is probably not a good fit for you.
  • Pay attention to the order of the interviewer questions. For example: if one of the firsts questions he asks is about how many hours you worked per day at your last job, rather than what you did during those hours, you can tell that he is just looking for someone to give as many hours as possible. The order of the questions can indicate his priorities and needs.

Take these warning signs into account before your next interview. Regardless of whether or not you feel a job is a good fit for you, an interviewer should not be trying to make you uncomfortable. If you get a bad vibe from the interviewer, chances are it’s not a good fit for you. Move on, and find the right employer and company for you.

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Conscripting Innovation

By, Gur Braslavi and Stephen Fox

We often associate great intellectual breakthroughs with a single eureka moment of a single inventor, such as Newton’s apple. The reality, though, is that innovation is the moment when many smaller ideas are pulled together to deliver a unified solution to a specific problem. Those who are skilled enough to accomplish this alone come around once in a lifetime. What about the manager who needs to innovate within his own company? There must be a better solution than waiting to hire the next Albert Einstein to the R&D department. Rather, managers must learn to harness the existing powers of their organizations in order to find solutions faster and more reliably. The answer is conscripting innovation.

What exactly does it mean to conscript innovation? The word “conscript” is typically a military term, meaning to be drafted or compelled into service. So to conscript innovation means to be drawn to be innovative, drafted into being creative.

The challenge is not for us to provide the solutions to our own problems, but rather to conscript a wide spectrum of talents together in order to innovate. Introducing new lines of thought and skills into the solution process allows us to break free from the internalized boundaries we have set for ourselves and find solutions that may otherwise have been overlooked. The problem is how to entice others to join you on your quest for the next great idea that will change your business, or maybe even your entire industry.

Conscripting innovation is a three-part process that will allow you to create an ideal environment to accomplish your goals, including focusing on a specific problem, fostering an environment for success, and making a problem fun to work on.

Part 1: The first step towards conscripting innovation requires managers to have their employees focus on a single objective and direct certain people to solve a single problem. Managers must take complicated ideas and strip them down into a simpler goal that others will be easily understood. With new perspective come new solutions. Take a look at the aircraft company, Boeing, during the early 1990s; individual departments within the company lacked coordination with each other, which lead to a lot of wasted time, resources, and money. Rather than implement changes from the top down, management decided to tackle this problem by opening the lines of communication between the departments and developing “accelerated improvement retreats” for the top employees in each group. When working together, they found that many of their processes overlapped, allowing the company to cut down significantly on the overall manufacturing costs.[1] The solutions did not come from around the boardroom table, but rather used the perspective of engineers, assembly workers, warehouse managers and pilots to find innovative solutions to the company’s process of manufacturing planes.

Part 2: The second step in conscripting innovation is to foster a creative, yet productive work environment. In general, this must be done through a long process of creating a supportive company culture. While creating “thinking spaces” with bean bag chairs and foosball tables can help, the way innovative ideas are treated by upper level management is what will decide whether or not employees are willing to put their necks out on the line. The way to achieve it is to develop a culture of innovation that does not punish employees for taking calculated risks, even if they fail. HP Software has implemented an impressive program called the “innovation stream” in order to overcome this problem. The stream flows throughout the organization, asking for input from all departments and levels, similar to the way Boeing had done; however, the difference is in the encouragement that HP gives their employees. They can receive points for submitting ideas, critiquing the ideas of others, and lending their expertise to design teams for the best ideas. These points can be used to purchase days off and other benefits. More importantly though, employees who are serious about working on their innovations are given time each week to work in development teams. HP has found that when employees are allowed to take the lead on their own ideas, it allows the large company to develop the entrepreneurial spirit that used to be reserved for smaller, start-up companies. This culture of innovation gives employees the courage to put forth their ideas and the support to turn them into products that will help HP continue to grow.[2]

Part 3: The third step of conscripting innovation says that the assignments employees are working on must be fun and enjoyable. Studies have found that people are far more willing to expend their time, energy and resources on tasks that they enjoy. An example of this can be seen in the discovery of supernova, where each year more professional and amateur astronomers search larger portions of the sky for these rare phenomena. The result has been an exponential increase in the discovery rate of supernova and many more associated breakthroughs in the astronomy community.[3]

In finding an innovative solution to your own problem, the dilemma becomes how to conscript others to work together. This requires focus on the question at hand, a culture that promotes innovation, and most of all, a fun and enticing process that attracts others to actually want to invest their time. You are not trying to bring the solution to others, nor are you assuming to know what the solution may be, nor are you saying there is even a viable solution. What you can do is bring together the collective knowledge necessary to find an innovative solution. So what is the focus of your company: on finding the solution to your problems or learning how to conscript others to innovate with you?

[1] “Can Boeing Fly High Again?” Http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~nora/FT351-3/CS.pdf. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.
[2] Gvirtsman, Ahi. “HP Innovation Stream.” Tel Aviv, Israel. 13 Nov. 2012. Lecture.
[3] http://www.universetoday.com/26495/a-supernova-story/

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Are employees snoozing through your meetings? Here's the solution

In most organizations, team meetings are perceived as useless and boring.  No matter how hard you may try to make it interesting, your employees still seem restless.  How can we make these meetings effective AND engaging?  Before we try to understand how to do that, let’s ask ourselves the following question: what are the classic problems managers run into during staff meetings?

  • Employees show lack of interest and are busy chatting.
  • Employees arrive late.
  • Employees walk out to take phone calls.
  • There is no internalization and implementation of the points raised in the meeting.

However, this is not a one-way street.  If we were to ask your employees the exact same question, they would probably say that:

  • Meetings start late.
  • Meetings don’t end on time.
  • They are boring.
  • They are ineffective.
  • The message isn’t clear.
  • There’s information overload.
  • The topic doesn’t pertain to everyone present but only to some departments.

The following model attempts to tackle some of these problems:

A Model for Constructing Staff Meetings to Motivate Employees

  1. Present the meeting objectives in a precise and concise manner.  A clear objective and vision instill commitment among employees.
  2. Present the rationale behind the objectives (for example: other ruled-out alternatives, examples of past experiences, your position in relation to competitors, case studies that led to developing such a procedure, simulations, roll switching, etc.) – the “what” isn’t enough; it’s also important to understand the “why.”  The more an employee takes part in making decisions, the more committed he is to perform his tasks in the best way possible.
  3. The implications (value, benefit) of meeting objectives on any level (individual/group/school) – what do we gain by achieving our goals? It is important for employees to see the end result of their hard work and effort.
  4. Predicting and presenting possible resistance – when a manager knows how to detect and bring to the surface possible backlash before his employees do, he’s able to minimize the degree of resistance and show that he knows the situation up close.
  5. Holding a discussion about the working methods to achieve the goals – a good manager should encourage creative thinking and teamwork.

When a manager builds his staff meetings based on this model, the message he is sending is a positive one.  It shows he’s truly invested in his employees, that meeting them is important to him, that he doesn’t want to waste their time, that he understands their motives, and that he knows how to appreciate their hard work.  Above all, a manager should serve as a role model and set a personal example for his employees (a factor that has been found to be key in motivating employees in the long run).