CIO = Chief INNOVATION Officer

When I look at annual reports of public companies, I often read the CEO comments about creating shareholder value through organic growth and through acquisition. However, I think the CIO’s greatest responsibility in creating value — and where the CIO actually can add value — is leading that growth agenda through innovation.

In today’s world, technology is often at the center of innovation.  IT-enabled innovation can help differentiate a company’s product or service whether it is technology-based or delivered using technology.  In our service dominated economy, technology-driven process innovation can enable more effective delivery of consistent services.

In the May 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review, Ken Favaro, David Meer, and Samrat Sharma of Booz and Company developed an organic growth assessment for the CEO. The article, “Creating an Organic Growth Machine,” identified questions the CIO also can use to demonstrate executive-level leadership in driving organic innovation throughout the enterprise. The key question is: Does my company have distinctive enterprise-level capabilities that enable operating units to achieve more organic growth than our competitors do?

The CIO who runs an agile IT organization has the potential to create that powerful enterprise-level capability. I have found the corporate IT center can enable agility in operating units by creating an efficient platform, providing mentoring to units to speed agile adoption, and developing a project management framework that is founded in the nimble approach. However, while the center can provide frameworks, expertise, and tools, local implementation still is critical to operating unit success.

How Does Agile Discipline Support Growth?

In the book 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution, authors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble characterize innovation as strategic experiments: “The essence of strategic experiments is that much more is unknown than known. No amount of research and planning can resolve the unknown in advance.” They go on to say, “the winner is not necessarily the company that starts with the best plan. Rather, it is often the one that learns and adapts the quickest.”

Isn’t this the essence of agility? One only needs to review the breakthrough “Agile Manifesto” for software development to answer this question. Specifically, I’d like to point out 3 of the 12 principles in the manifesto:

Agile Principle	Applicability to Innovation
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.	If strategic experiments are more about the unknown than the known, having a technology process that welcomes changing requirements is crucial to success.
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter time scale.	If the winning company is the one that learns and adapts the quickest, shortening the time scale and delivering tangible deliverables is the way to go.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.	Again, strategic innovation is about learning fast. Agile enables rapid learning at the team level, where it counts most.

“Large established companies can beat startups if they can succeed in leveraging their enormous assets and capabilities,” Govindarajan and Trimble also point out. The truth is smaller organizations can compete today without spending scarce capital funds. Smaller organizations can leverage the cloud to spin up environments quickly for innovative initiatives. However, large companies have the advantage if they put their resources to good use. That is especially true when creating technical environments that support innovative efforts. The CIO can create a sandbox environment that team members can leverage quickly to experiment with new technology. Large organizations can invest in an on-demand infrastructure that operating units can grab for their strategic, agile experiments.

As Govindarajan and Trimble assert: “Success depends more on an ability to experiment and learn than on the initial strategy.” CIOs can demonstrate executive-level leadership and create growth in their organizations by creating enterprisewide capabilities. An agile approach to technology and creation of an on-demand sandbox environment can make those capabilities innovative.

via CIO = Chief INNOVATION Officer.

CIO = Chief INNOVATION Officer

Google Course On Unconscious Bias

Here’s What Google Teaches Employees In Its Course On Unconscious Bias

Like almost every other tech company, Google has a diversity problem: 70% of its employees are guys, 61% are white, and only 21% of people in leadership roles are women.

With those unflattering statistics staring them in the face, Google has tried to figure out why the numbers are so skewed toward white dudes.

One conclusion: Unconscious bias, the sometimes useful tendency to make snap judgments (that subway car is empty for a reason), guides us into unexamined bigotry (she’s a woman, not a leader).

Google made as much understandable to its employees with the below video.

Google HR boss Laszlo Bock was tipped to the possibility of unconscious bias at the company when he read a New York Times story about a Yale University study, which concluded that “science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills.”

If this could happen to male and female science professors, Google realized it could happen at Google.

“This is a pretty genteel environment, and you don’t usually see outright manifestations of bias,” Bock said. “Occasionally you’ll have some idiot do something stupid and hurtful, and I like to fire those people.”

It wouldn’t just be nice to have greater diversity. It would be good for business, Bock argued, since research shows diverse teams make better decisions.

So Google’s HR department is spearheading a major pro-diversity initiative, and half of Google’s 49,000 employees have already taken the centerpiece workshop.

via Google Course On Unconscious Bias – Business Insider.

Google Course On Unconscious Bias

The IT Talent Shortage Debate

Talk to employers and job hunters about the state of the IT talent market, and you hear two words repeatedly: speed and pain. IT leaders must staff projects quickly, often requiring specialized skills that most job hunters — especially generalists or those looking to change tech tracks — don’t have.

As a result, hiring organizations see an IT talent shortage, while job hunters insist that employers are botching the hiring process, screening out too many good candidates. Both sides agree on one thing: They’re frustrated.

Third-party recruiters say that while IT leaders cry shortage and job hunters cry foul, the job slots sit empty for too long, hurting business results and team morale. But they doubt the picture will change unless hiring managers get more creative and realistic, and job hunters come to a fuller understanding of market realities.

Which brings us back to the question: Is there an IT talent crunch? It’s a simple question with no simple answer. InformationWeek asked the IT community: Do you see an IT talent shortage today in one or more technology areas important to your business? Yes, said 73% of respondents at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, and a whopping 88% of respondents at larger companies.

But is a botched hiring process aggravating this talent shortfall? Business technologists are sharply divided: About half of survey respondents at those larger companies see it as broken or too stringent, while 45% of the folks at smaller companies see things that way.

Any discussion of IT hiring must include what companies are willing to pay to fill open positions. Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University and a longtime critic of the H-1B visa program, recently called the IT talent shortage “imaginary,” a front for companies that want to hire relatively inexpensive foreign guest workers. Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis who collaborates with Hira, takes the argument a step further: “The biggest single problem, as I’ve said before, is age discrimination,” Matloff says. “The employers typically define job openings to be entry level, automatically rejecting those at the midcareer level.”

Another disliked hiring tactic is a “purple squirrel” hunt, whereby companies seek a job candidate whose mix of skills and experience is impossible to find. “The ‘purple squirrel’ job postings arise in many cases because HR needs a way to thin out the mountains of applicants that they have,” Matloff says. “So again, the claimed shortage is actually an embarrassment of riches.”

Talk with employers and recruiters and you hear a more nuanced story. It’s not just about how many IT job applicants are in the US talent pool, or about salaries, but how the IT hiring process has changed in recent years. Like them or not, would-be applicants need to know the rules of today’s employment game.

Need for speed

“This kind of feels like 1999 or 2007,” says Matt Rivera, VP of marketing at IT staffing firm Yoh. “… The technologies are moving so fast, it’s hard for [employers and job hunters] to keep up. It’s hard to engage that talent pool far enough ahead of the need.”

IT organizations are under intense pressure to deliver projects faster than before — and that need for speed necessarily influences IT hiring. The IT generalists, and even some topic generalists, such as infrastructure managers, have found their roles left by the side of the road, as project leaders hire for deep experience in specific niches, such as cloud security, DevOps, and data analysis and architecture.

“There’s a lot of desperation on both sides out there,” Rivera says. One sign of that desperation: 63% of IT hiring managers reported catching lies on resumés, according to a recent Harris Poll/CareerBuilder survey. IT candidates rank as the third biggest liars; only financial services and hospitality candidates fib more, according to the survey.

“The trend has gone into more specialized skill sets,” says Asal Naraghi, director of talent acquisition for healthcare services company Best Doctors. As an HR pro, she “absolutely” sees an IT talent shortage. “In terms of being able to innovate, the tools that are out there are more complex,” she says. “What are your competitors doing? You have to keep up with that. We also focus on people who are a culture fit with us and are passionate about our mission.”

She gives the example of a recent search for a user-experience expert, a talent category that’s in high demand as companies prioritize mobile development. The position had been outsourced — and after interviews, the company kept it outsourced, she says, because it didn’t find a person with deep skills and a fit with the company’s mission.

CIOs echo the need for deep experience. “The broader skill sets, I think you’ll see those in analyst roles, Scrum-master-type roles …some management roles,” says David Wright, CIO of McGraw-Hill Education. “But more and more, the hands-on coders, we’re looking for people who are just really deep in whatever discipline we’re trying to hire.”

Giorgos Zacharia, CTO of online travel company Kayak, says he’s having a hard time finding UI engineers and mobile developers, noting that he seeks both entry-level and experienced people. Kayak offers great perks and pays generously, he says, yet the company still struggles to fill open slots even with its proximity to Boston and wealth of local universities. Paying dividends for Kayak are the three internal recruiters it has hired since 2013 and the hackathons it has attended to connect with talented IT pros.

Even so, Zacharia this year turned to holders of H-1B visas — which let non-US citizens work in the US in a specialized field for up to six years — to fill six slots, and he expects the company to do about the same level of H-1B hiring in 2015. Kayak is also hiring more people overseas, especially in Berlin, he says.

Seeking Mr. Right

For employers, hiring can feel like dating: You spend a long time looking for the perfect match. But how many chances will you take? How flexible will employers be during the hiring process? This is where both the recruiters and the job seekers voice exasperation.

Tracy Cashman, senior VP and partner in the IT search practice of WinterWyman, sees a genuine talent shortage. “There are more jobs than people who are skilled,” she says. While she’s starting to see an uptick in engineering graduates, “we’ve been feeling this since the [dot-com] bubble burst,” Cashman says, when college students were worried that all IT jobs would move to India. “And we’re still fighting that,” she says.

On the flip side, some employers have become “persnickety,” says Cashman, who advises CIOs to remove their perfection goggles. Companies wait too long to fill open positions, which not only hurts the business but also heaps extra work on the existing team. Delays also turn off qualified candidates, who assume that if a slot is open too long it’s like an unsold house that has “issues.”

You don’t see the “best available athlete” mentality, Cashman laments, referring to the professional sports strategy of signing the best player available rather than hiring a lesser player to fill a specific position. Hire a smart, creative person who’s eager to learn, and train that person on the rest, she advises clients, before the other valuable people on your team walk out or you blow the business deadline.

What are the ramifications of the so-called IT talent shortage and unfilled slots? Among the respondents to our survey who work at large companies, 79% cited delayed IT projects, 48% cited poor-quality IT projects, and 33%

cited missed revenue opportunities. That last point should grab IT leaders’ attention; it’s sure to grab the CEO’s.

The only category where Cashman sees IT groups regularly willing to bring in people and train them for the job is help desk positions, which are among the lowest-paying, least-training-intensive positions.

Some employers must experience serious pain — a missed revenue target, a delayed product launch, or a customer service blow-up — before taking off the hiring perfection goggles. “Even then,” Cashman says, “contractors often are brought in to fix the pain. It’s wait, wait, hurry.”

Holes in the screens

That scenario sounds familiar to IT veteran Stuart Lathrop, now a marketing enterprise solution architect for ESAB, a welding and automation equipment supply company.

Midcareer IT pros know Lathrop’s recent job hunt story all too well. Job hunters struggle to make it through the first electronic filters of resumés, and when they do, the follow-up phone screenings prove frustrating. Interviewers show little willingness to bend on specific technical requirements or to consider transferable skills.

In 2012, Lathrop voluntarily left a full-time IT job (at a time of change within the company), did independent consulting for about a year, then started to look for a new full-time role in the fall of 2013.

“The only people I could have a conversation with were headhunters and recruiters,” he says. “The on-site interview would be the first time I would talk to anyone who had IT experience.”

He cast a wide net online and generated an application-response rate of 12% to 15%. But the callbacks were mostly for junior roles, for which he knew he was overqualified. “If I’m hiring, I don’t want someone to undersell themselves to fill a role,” Lathrop says. “They’re going to be bored and won’t be with you long.”

Lathrop won his current role after a contact recommended him to come in and solve a thorny problem. He solved the problem and worked as a contractor for about eight months, at which point ESAB created a position for him. “That’s a trend, bringing someone in as a contractor,” he says. “Frankly I’ve used it myself.”

What concerns Lathrop is the disconnect between HR and IT. He cites trust and language issues. For instance, if he’s looking at the resumé of someone who says he has run an Oracle shop, using versions X through Y of a system, he would realize why that experience is a good match, even for a role keyed to a different software system. “I know what’s involved in running an Oracle shop and having that kind of longevity,” he says. “HR doesn’t understand our side of the business well enough to make those interpretations.”

A better approach, Lathrop says, would be for HR to sort candidates into an A pile and a B pile and let IT see all of them, before people are green- or red-lighted for in-person interviews. But that, of course, takes time. [ Editor"s note: As this story was publishing, Lathrop learned his full-time job at ESAB is going away as part of a reorganization. In November, he will once again be a contractor with the company. ]

Adrianne McDonald had 17 years of IT experience and was working in a director-level infrastructure service delivery position for Time Warner Cable, running back-office disaster recovery efforts, when she began hunting for a new job in the fall of 2013 because of a reorganization.

“I was surprised when I came out at the difference in job hunting versus 2002,” McDonald says. “About a third of the time, people contacted me for positions that were completely inappropriate.” Although she was seeking a senior infrastructure position, she got calls for everything from entry-level business analyst to data mining roles. Whatever the recruiters were using to match job openings with candidates, it wasn’t working. “I wanted to ask about the algorithm,” she says.

McDonald was careful to apply only for positions in her wheelhouse, so she got a call back from an outside recruiter or HR pro about 70% of the time, she estimates. But to no avail. “When I got on the phone it was painful,” she says.

The recruiters were always in a rush, McDonald says, but they weren’t asking the questions that would have matched her or ruled her out in an informed way. “It’s one of those pay now or pay later situations,” she says.

McDonald didn’t find the right position, and in December 2013 set up her own consulting firm, Transformation Leadership, where she does IT transformation and leadership development projects. Her decision to go solo — the same route Lathrop took earlier in his career — isn’t unusual among midlevel IT pros. Some move back and forth several times between solo and company jobs. The most common reason to do contracting or consulting work is higher pay, our InformationWeek Salary Survey finds. Just 10% of managers and 28% of staffers who went that route say it’s because they couldn’t find full-time employment.

The only piece of good employment news I heard consistently — and I heard it from almost every single recruiter and employer I spoke with — is that it has become easier for IT pros to switch between industries, if you have deep experience in a desired skill. “Almost no one in our engineering team had travel experience,” says Kayak’s Zacharia. “We believe good technical skills easily transfer.”

Especially when it comes to red-hot skills such as big data, companies have had to become more flexible on industry knowledge. “I tell them if they’re looking for consumer packaged goods experience, they’ll be looking a very long time,” says Linda Burtch, founder and managing director of executive recruiting firm Burtch Works, which specializes in data analysis roles. Are companies now wise to that reality? “They tend not to be at the beginning of the process,” she says, “but then they get there.”

Companies innovate to draw talent

Some companies are getting creative about marketing themselves to and courting top tech talent.

Online retailer Gilt hired Lauri Apple as its technology evangelist about two years ago. Her job: to promote the cool projects and technologies that power Gilt.

“Really great talent will find a job,” Apple says. “They’re working already. You have to think of getting those folks as a long-term strategy, so you can get them when they’re ready.”

For example, Gilt offers day-long courses on hot skills such as Scala and Hadoop, taught by experts, and has tech gurus such as former Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft come in to speak. Gilt invites the local tech community to attend and builds in time for networking.

“What I’m set up to do is raise awareness of what’s going on here, … and hopefully that will inspire people to apply,” Apple says. Does she know anyone else in a similar role? No — but she’s getting more calls to discuss it. “I think you’re going to see more of this competitive culture develop,” she says.

Another best practice is to get involved with the informal networks that IT pros develop within their specialty areas. (You’ve experienced one if you’ve been to a cloud computing conference.) “We’ve seen companies be successful networking into those groups,” says Yoh’s Rivera, referring to events, user groups, and associations. “Get to know those groups … and then be respectful when you have openings.” It’s a give and take — companies need to offer up their time and expertise to the community in order to connect with potential hires.

Meantime, don’t just recycle old job descriptions, Cashman warns. IT and HR need to talk about the status of the project they’re hiring for and the specific project challenges. And don’t overload job descriptions with a dream list of skills. “If you miss the passive job seeker who thinks, ‘They won’t go for me because I don’t have three of the 10 things required,’ you do yourself a disservice,” Cashman says.

Think of your job description as a place to sell your organization’s culture. Gilt sells the fact that its tech people “get to work with a CTO who still codes,” Apple says. Best Doctors touts its culture of tinkering.

When we asked in our survey about top obstacles to IT hiring, 50% of respondents at large companies cited low salaries. A significant 41% cited unrealistic expectations about skills and experience — expectations that feed job descriptions.

Both IT pros and hiring managers must adapt to the fact that tech skills are changing faster than ever before. In the past, a networking or security pro could confidently craft a three-, five-, and maybe 10-year career plan. Those long paths aren’t clear anymore.

Your next job hunt will be different, as McDonald found. Your technology niche may start hot and turn cool. Personal networking and project portfolios are as important as ever, even for entry-level roles. For more job hunt tips for new IT pros, see our related article: 9 IT Job Hunt Tips For Beginners.) Leaders like Bill Martin, CIO of Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., say that’s just how IT careers work in the age of digital business.

“I’ve been the CIO at Royal Caribbean for seven years,” says Martin, “and I like to tell people I’m in my third generation of IT, because it cycles about every three years, and the toolsets are completely different. How you approach problems is different. How the business looks at technology changes. If you want a career in IT, you need to be ready to change.”

via The IT Talent Shortage Debate – InformationWeek.

The IT Talent Shortage Debate

Why You Lead Determines How Well You Lead

One of the most telling questions you can ask someone in any kind of leadership role is what motivates them to be a better leader. Some will say it’s to enhance their personal effectiveness, or that leading is an expected part of their professional development. Others may say that they lead because of a sense of leader identity, purpose, or personal obligation to serve their organization and the people with whom they work. Many will proffer a mix of instrumental, external motivations (like pay or career progression) and more intrinsic, internal rationales (like the obligation to serve).  The group with a combination of motives has the most reasons to lead, and so it seems intuitively reasonable to assume that they would be the most committed, high performing leaders. Right?

In a recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, colleagues and I examined this assumption. Our study, massive in scale, tracked more than 10,000 Army leaders from their entrance into West Point, through graduation, and well into their careers. For perspective, the sample represents approximately 20% of the living graduates of West Point. We examined the motivations driving their decision to attend the Academy and become Army leaders, and we looked at their performance and potential as leaders in the years following their graduation. A key leader performance measure was identification of early promotion potential. Army performance appraisals are designed to compare officers’ performance to the organization’s leadership framework. Each annual performance appraisal gauged the officer’s potential to lead at higher levels, as judged by immediate and higher-level supervisors serving in positions to observe officers’ demonstrated performance in leader roles.

As one might predict, we found that those with internal, intrinsic motives performed better than those with external, instrumental rationales for their service — a common finding in studies of motivation. We were surprised to find, however, that those with both internal and external rationales proved to be worse investments as leaders than those with fewer, but predominantly internal, motivations. Adding external motives didn’t make leaders perform better — additional motivations reduced the selection to top leadership by more than 20%.  Thus, external motivations, even atop strong internal motivations, were leadership poison.

Many believe that the best way to influence behavior is to incentivize it, and such external incentives certainly work with lab rats. In our study, however, adding external incentives clearly did not improve leader performance. In practice, consider leaders in the Veteran’s Health Administration, most of whom have strong, internal motivations to serve America’s veterans. Yet add hefty bonuses as motivation, and the VA finds itself with a significant leadership problem, where some administrators appear to have lost sight of the core purpose of the organization. One step in righting the ship will be a renewed focus on the internal motivation to help sick and injured veterans. Robert McDonald, awaiting confirmation as the new Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs, wrote about his own internal motive to lead while CEO of Procter & Gamble.  In a personally authored document titled “What I Believe In,” McDonald kicks off three pages of leadership principles by first describing his motivation to lead:

“Living a life driven by purpose is more meaningful and rewarding than meandering through life without direction. My life’s purpose is to improve lives. This operates on many levels. I work to improve the lives of the 6.5 billion people in the world with P&G brands, and I work every day to have a positive impact in the life of just one person.”

One of the longstanding dichotomies in the field of leader development is whether to teach leadership as skills that lead to higher performance (a competency-based model that is relatively easy to metric), or to teach leadership as a complex moral relationship between the leader and the led (a values-based model that is challenging to metric).  Our study demonstrates that those who lead primarily from values-based motivations, which are inherently internal, outperform those who lead with additional instrumental outcomes and rewards.

The implications of this study for leader development — and practice — are profound. In business, the cost of leader development programs is often measured, or at least estimated, as an instrumental consequence — an increase in performance of the organization resulting in a return on investment for the program. This is reasonable, given estimates that place the annual cost of leader development at more than $60B . It is important, though, that talent managers and executive decision makers do not allow external consequences of leader development to become external motivations among organizational leaders.  If those we seek to develop as leaders adopt external justifications for leading well — such as an increase in shareholder value, better pay or perquisites, or increased profits — they are likely to be less successful as leaders in comparison to those who seek to lead for more internal, intrinsic reasons alone.

If you aspire to lead in business or society, first ask yourself, “Why do I want to be a leader?” The answer to that question, as it turns out, will make a significant difference in how well you lead.

via Why You Lead Determines How Well You Lead – Tom Kolditz – Harvard Business Review.

Why You Lead Determines How Well You Lead

How to Understand Interviewer Questions and Techniques

Before you jump into the interview, it is crucial that we first take a step backward and try to see the interview purely from the interviewer’s point of view.

What is he looking for? What does he want? What qualities, skills and experience is he looking for?

If you can discover what he really wants – and match those requirements one-by-one, you’ll be amazed at how smooth and successful the interview can be.

Key requirements:

Ability

Let’s not kid ourselves.

You can know all the tricks of the trade. Be an expert in every aspect of interview psychology. And even have the prettiest, hand-printed resumes – it really won’t make the slightest difference unless you have the actual skills and ability to do the job advertised.

This is any interviewer’s first objective: to ascertain if you have the ability to successfully carry out the functions you will be given if you get the job.

But during the interview, it is not only essential that you inform the interviewer of your qualifications to do the job, but that you can prove it to him there and then.

It is one thing being able to actually do the job – but quite another thing being able to convince the interviewer of this reality in a positive and enthusiastic manner during the brief span of an interview.

In fact, this ability is the key difference that separates the winners from the losers.

Let’s take an example.

Mr. Joe Ordinary is going for an interview for the position of computer programmer. The company is looking for a hardworking computer programmer who will help them develop a new software program.

The interviewer asks Mr. Ordinary, “Can you do the job?”

Joe Ordinary smiles: “Yes I can…….. It should be good……very interesting….looking forward to it……”

Now notice the difference when Mr. Joe Winner is asked the same question.

He knows he must not only tell his interviewer that he can do the job but prove it in such a way that the interviewer will not believe him but be excited by his potential.

But how?

The secret is, in fact very simple: for every skill you list, always recall an incident in which you successfully used that skill.

Paint a picture in words for the interviewers so that they can actually see you using this skill in their mind’s eye.

Before we get back to our computer programmer, let me give you this example:

Anne Malone desperately wanted the job of manager at her local florist shop. During the interview, the owner said she was looking for someone who was hardworking and very ambitious to look after and build up the business.

Most applicants would have said, “Yes, I’m determined and will definitely strive to increase your turnover and profits. Yes I can do it…..definitely.”

Anne, however not only made a similar statement, but she backed it up with a real-life practical example.

She brought her statement to life.

She recalled her part-time summer job in a florist shop when she was a student. She told the story of how when she started the job, she noticed that the shop looked ‘run-down – that it lacked ‘sparkle’ and a sense of ‘freshness’

So she told the interviewer how she went to the shop’s owner and how she managed to get her to agree that when she worked in the shop over the weekend, she would get an extra commission for all the extra customers she could attract to the shop.

So the following weekend Anne used her own money and managed to persuade her family and friends to help her re-paint and re-fashion the shop and deliver a single fresh free flower to every house in the surrounding area. And the shop’s sales blossomed.

Can you now see the difference between just saying to an interviewer ” I can do the job” to actually bringing such a statement to life.

And that’s how Mr. Joe Winner answers his questions. When he is asked can he do the job -he not only confirms his ability but he backs it up with personal examples of how, for example he programmed similar software for other High-Tec companies. In fact for every skill he lists he backs it up with personal examples. He paints vivid word pictures.

Yes, this seem simple.

Yet in the thousands and thousands of interviews, I have sat through the vast majority of people will simply answer such questions with a bland ..”Yes, I’m confident I can do the job… and leave it at that hoping the interviewer will be happy with that.

He may be happy but will he be impressed? After the interview will you stand out from the other candidates?

Remember: every time you detail a specific skill that you can contribute to the business don’t just make a bland statement, “I can do this and I can do that” – always back it up with personal real-life examples. Paint a picture of yourself putting these skills into practical and profitable use so that the interviewer can see this picture in his/her mind.

And, of course, always bring with you any documentation (neatly assembled in a smart folder) that will add weight and substance to your claims. Extra references, awards or prizes, for example you may have won or articles and reports that you may have written that stand out.

Proving that you can do the job is the essential first step of the interview and the interviewer’s first and main concern. Before he proceeds to the next stage of the interview, he will want to be sure in his own mind you are capable of doing the job. It is your job to convince him.

Suitability

The interview proceeds.

The tone has changed. It has become more open, more relaxed. The original awkwardness you felt is beginning to dissipate. The interviewer is now happy that you at least have the necessary ability to carry out the basic requirements of the job. Now he’ll want to know more about you. After all, he and his fellow colleagues may be spending a lot of their lives working with you.

So he will now try to find out if you are personally suitable for the job. He’ll start to focus on trying to ascertain what type of person you are.

To do this, most interviewers will try to see how you measure up under the following headings.

Desire / energy: Do you seem energetic? A person who gets up and does things with enthusiasm. Do you seem the type of person who wants to get ahead – who’ll make a real difference?

Confidence / determination: Do you seem a relaxed, friendly yet confident person? Someone who’ll be able to get on with others? Also someone who’ll stick to a task until it is done.

Independent. What the interviewer is looking for here is someone who can be a team player and follow the directions of his supervisor but yet still have the maturity to be able to work unsupervised and direct and motivate herself. The employer is looking to see if you have this balance.

Motivation: Are you the type of person who wants to do well. To get ahead. To impress with your professionalism. To innovate. To build.

Power of communication: Have you the ability to mix and get on with people by communicating clearly and effectively. Will you be able to take extra responsibility in the future and be able to lead and motivate people through effective communication skills?

Likability: Do you seem a friendly, OK person. This does not mean that you have to be perfect or the most popular person around. They just want to know if you are a friendly and easy person to get along with. Someone who will add to their existing team and not disrupt it.

How Professional Are You?

A new stage of the interview now starts to emerge.

The interviewer has now got to know you even more. There is a definite softening in the atmosphere.

An embryonic personal relationship seems to be developing between you and your fellow interviewers and you notice most of your pre-interview tension seems to have gone. You begin to allow yourself to relax a bit more.

The interviewer, too seems ‘more human’. At this stage, he is convinced you have the skills to do the job; he likes you; he feels you are personally suitable and he finds it easy to communicate with you.

In his own mind, he is now beginning to see you not as an interviewee but as a potential employee.

For the interviewer, this is an important turning point. And he’ll now want to take an even closer look at you from a professional business point of view.

He’ll want to make sure that you’ll be an asset to the firm, that you’ll act in a professional manner and be loyal, reliable and trustworthy and be committed to the company.

As you speak and answer his questions, he’ll now be trying to evaluate you under the following main headings.

Reliability: Do you seem honest, reliable. Someone who will do an honest day’s work? Someone who is straightforward and has enough respect and pride in themselves to always want to do a good job.

Honesty: Do you seem an honest, trustworthy person? Someone whom they can have full confidence in? Someone they could leave the keys to lock up at the end of the day?

Dedication? Do you seem hardworking and dedicated? Someone who starts a project and finishes it? A starter and a finisher? Someone who does not look for excuses to cover up failings and moans about everything?

Communication: As discussed earlier under personal suitability, are you the type of person who can get on with and communicate with all levels of the company from the tea lady to the M.D.?

Commitment: The interviewer is trying to judge if you got the job would you commit yourself fully to it?

For example, what would you say if you were going for the job as a middle- manager and the interviewer asked you: “As an employee, would you clean the floors?” What the interviewer really wants to find out here is how committed you would be to the team – how willing you would be to roll up your sleeves and do whatever is necessary to help your team get the job done.

Don’t only answer yes, but make sure you also give a personal example of a similar situation where you helped out to back up your answer.

The Last Check?

Let’s see how the interviewer’s thought processes are operating now.

He’s happy you can do the job and that you are personally suitable. He’s also confident that you’ll get on with most of the staff and that you have all the necessary professional commercial qualities that he requires from his employees.

You almost have the job!

The interviewer is now beginning to visualize you as a future colleague. Someone who he will be working with and someone he will possibly be responsible for managing.

Manageability

All during the interview, this question will be at the back of the interviewer’s mind. How manageable will you be? The last thing a manager wants is an employee who he thinks might cause trouble in the future and cause him sleepless nights!

And so a lot of his questions will be aimed at helping him come to a considered judgment on your ability not only to work alone unsupervised but also on your ability to work with others. He will also want to judge your ability to take direction and criticism not only when it is honestly given but also when you may be treated unfairly.

The interviewer/manager knows that a lot of the time, in the real business world things go wrong, people make mistakes, deadlines and commitments are broken and tempers are ignited. The interviewer wants to consider how you might react to such circumstances?

So be aware of these questions when they arise and the real motivation behind them. Also when you sense such questions are being asked treat it as a positive sign that the interviewer is seriously considering you for the position.

Last thoughts

What we have presented here is only a very general outline of the interviewer’s possible thought processes as the interview progresses.

Each interview is unique and it’s structure and tempo will change and adopt to accommodate the different personalities involved.

However, it is very helpful to be aware of the key stages of your interview and to have a deepening understanding of what your interviewer is really looking for when he asks you certain questions.

via How to Understand Interviewer Questions and Techniques.

How to Understand Interviewer Questions and Techniques

Most Managers Think of Themselves as Coaches

As a manager, do you think of yourself as a leader or as a coach? Do you, for instance, feel it’s important that your staff see you as an expert or do you prefer to create an egalitarian environment? Are you the person who solves problems or helps your staff come up with their own solutions? Are you more comfortable being directive or collaborative?

Results of a survey we’ve been conducting indicate a stronger desire to display coaching attributes than we were expecting.

Our assessment consists of 30 items we have tested and correlated to the most important attributes associated either with strong, top-down leadership or excellent coaches.  (If you have not yet, we encourage you to take the assessment now, so that you can compare your scores with the those we present below.)

More than 2,000 readers responded to the survey. The results represent a global audience with 60% of respondents from the U.S., 10% from Europe, 9% from Asia, 6% from Canada, 2% from Central/South America, 2% from Africa, and 11% who did not identify their location.  Respondents represent a fairly even mix of all levels in the organization: 20% executive management, 23% senior management, 27% middle management, and 30% supervisors or individual contributors.

You can compare your scores to others in the chart below here, which displays ranges of scores we’ve so far collected for the three different attributes. A negative score indicates a preference strong, direct leadership, managing through applying your expertise and through giving advice and clear direction. A positive score indicates a greater desire to act as a coach. Generally speaking, we have found through our research and our experience, excellent coaches would rather help others discover an answer for themselves than give advice. They prefer to act collaboratively rather than tell people what to do. And they prefer to act as an equal rather than as an expert.  And as we analyzed the data, we were surprised (and frankly, pleased) to see that three-quarters of scores were positive, indicating that the vast majority preferred to manage through coaching.

 

 

Years ago, Joe recalls sitting through an introduction by the CEO of a Fortune 50 company that had grown dramatically by acquisition. In his presentation, he said, “The reason we bought all these different companies was that we felt like they would be worth more together than they would running as separate entities. The only way we get that value is through your efforts to collaborate and work together.”  Most of the CEOs across the world have given that same speech. Apparently, people are hearing the message.

Well, perhaps. What we’ve tracked here are people’s desire to act in a particular way, not what they actually do. We imagine many readers are saying to themselves, “My boss does not seem that interested in letting me discover my own solutions.”  Or many could be musing, “It’s true that sometimes we desire an open, collaborative conversation only to find ourselves barking out directions and orders.” That can happen, but there’s a world of difference between organizations in which people fall short of a collaborative ideal and those that don’t subscribe to it at all.

As we looked further into the results, we found those in top management positions to have the strongest desire to be more collaborative and help others find their own solutions; supervisors ranked the lowest. That jibes with our own experience, in which we find supervisors often believe that they are expected to give advice, give orders, and assure that orders are executed. But, remarkably, even this group prefers coaching to directive leadership to some degree.

 

We find these results so heartening because, frankly, we’ve seen supervisors and managers who were really good at getting results by giving lots of direction and advice and staying on top of all the details.  A really effective autocratic leader can be efficient and quick about getting things done. But something suffers in the process.  People wait for orders.  They stop taking initiative.  Their level of engagement declines slowly—and often rapidly—as time progresses.  It can be easy in the effort to get the job done to lose sight of the long-term goal of helping people get better at getting the job done. The enormous value of coaching is what it does to develop people and create an ever more engaged and empowered team of employees.

via Most Managers Think of Themselves as Coaches – Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman – Harvard Business Review.

Most Managers Think of Themselves as Coaches

INFOGRAPHIC: It"s Not Easy To Be A CIO

The demand for chief information officers has risen in the past two decade. The amount of data on the Internet is increasing exponentially, and with the rise of cloud computing, the role of the CIO will continue to change. Wikibon put together an infographic showing what we can expect in the coming years:

via INFOGRAPHIC: It’s Not Easy To Be A CIO – Business Insider.

INFOGRAPHIC: It"s Not Easy To Be A CIO