The Interview Process is part of Rule 3 - Hiring is the Manager's Most Important Decision

     Over the past couple of months, I have interviewed for two positions; and I have to say, I have been pretty appalled at the process.  Everyone in government is enamored of the structured interview process, because the number one goal is to not be subject to an equal opportunity complaint, even thought the goal should be to hire the best qualified candidate. If you are unfamiliar with the structured interview, you can read the entire OPM treatise, but the tl;dr version goes like this.  The candidate gets asked a series of timed, canned questions by the panel, WITH NO FURTHER INTERACTION! Dumbness squared.

     In the first of the two interviews, I was doing it mostly for practice, because it wasn't the job I really wanted. I knew that it would get me the question bank for when the job I really wanted came open.  The bureaucracy did not disappoint.  Taking good notes netted me six out of the eight questions for the job interview I actually wanted. Conclusion: either a well-prepared candidate (like me) or a complete sociopath would do well in this process. Why the sociopath?  Because there were tons of questions that were seemingly situational but highly predictable, but the sociopath could just make up a story, or just read answers to the question on line.  Without follow up questions about details, there was no way to tell if the candidate was lying or not. Knowing there is lack of follow up is bad for the candidate as well, because one might be tempted to exaggerate unverifiable details. 

     What is to be done? If you are a federal manager, or any manager in a large bureaucracy, you are facing pressure to prove that your hiring process won't get your organization sued.  I am here to help.  The surprising answer is to conduct a structured interview, but just add follow up questions. Step 2 is to ask questions that will smoke out the liars and sociopaths. The first part is easy, conduct a structured interview, but set time aside for follow up from the panel.  Panel members can then deep dive an answer to ascertain what the candidate is really saying, and to get a better sense of the context for the answer.  Letting candidates understand that this is the process ahead of time will also help coax better behavior out of the interview process.  It can be surprisingly revealing as well.  I have had more than one candidate withdraw from consideration during the interview process when the probing revealed actual lack of qualifications, because the resume had some "puffery," to use a Judge Judy term.

     The harder part is the design of the questions.  You are looking for questions that are revealing in ways that the candidate doesn't realize or can't help but reveal.  My favorite example follows. If you are looking for a candidate with project management experience, you can ask a series of questions that are all negative in nature, but are inevitably going to happen if you perform project management long enough. You tell the candidate that if the situation never happened, you will just move on to the next question.  The liars and sociopaths will never admit to any of the negative situations, because they lack the empathy to understand that the interview panel isn't looking for evidence of bad behavior, but for evidence of how the candidate handles difficulty.  I had one candidate who actually took umbrage (feigned or not, I couldn't tell) that we would suggest that any of these things had ever happened.  Here are the questions, developed by my friend with initials PV:

Describe a time as a project manager where you experienced _______. If you never had that experience, we will just move on to the next situation.  

a.      A project where you had difficulty achieving partnership with a customer.
b.      An assignment where you were called upon to ensure the future success of a program or project with a long history of failure and a demoralized team.
c.      A project related business situation where your professional and personal integrity were seriously called into question.
d.     A never-ending project that you could not complete to the satisfaction of the business.
e.      A situation where program/project sponsors were determined to pursue a course of action that violated regulations, organizational rules, and/or your own personal sense of ethics.

Once the answer is yes to one of the situations, make them describe it, and ask follow up questions, even uncomfortable ones.  The outstanding candidate will have insight as to what they could have done better and, more importantly, an understanding of the organizational context that led to the difficulty.  Liars and sociopaths will not want to reveal anything negative and deny that any such thing could ever happen; but by so stating, they have revealed themselves.

     Big caveat: This process is designed for situations where many of your candidates are total strangers.  More often than not, we are hiring people who we already know, or who are already established in our organization.  Professional reputation is much more important in that context. However, if you have to compare those whom you know to complete strangers, this process will level the playing field and help give you good results. The other caveat is that the interview is only one small part of the hiring process.

    To recap, if you use the structured interview process, then you will be subject to applicants who took advice from this guy. God help you.

Plan to Do Nothing

Rule 1. Plan to Do Nothing and You Will Certainly Achieve Your Goals.

This rule started out as a bit of joke, along the lines of if your plan for a goal of doing nothing, you can always achieve that goal. But then I noticed something as a manager, the busier I was, the more I was doing every day, the less effective I was.  At first, it seemed like a wicked problem, with no real solution. (I may write on some real wicked problems later, but for now, you can check out this somewhat depressing treatise.)  Fortunately, managerial busy-ness has a cure, planning to do nothing.  Posh you say, the speed of today's work means that he manager will always be busy. Managers are the hardest workers of all, if they are to be successful, or so we are told.

That view fails to answer: what is the work of management? The key concept here is planning.  The manager must be working very hard at planning!  And what is he planning? TO DO NOTHING! This doesn't mean that the organization is doing nothing; the mission and the work remain and must be accomplished.  But the rule should look like this: Every predictable aspect of the team's effort should be planned as to who has responsibility for execution.  Further, the responsibility for any routine work should NEVER be allocated to the manager.  This allows all routine and predictable work to flow to the correct performer.

Does this mean the manager is doing nothing? Of course not. Unpredictable new tasking is always arriving. The changing environment is always causing work to be re-planned. There is always a crisis.  But if your day is filled with executing routine work, where is the time to handle the all of the predictable crises? Not that each crisis is predictable, or you would have planned for it. But it is predictable that there will be crises. And some crises do become predictable; so we PLAN to be ready for them.

I once went through a period where we were tasked to produce a "stop-light" chart with detailed notes to show what additional funding we needed to get our portion of a major defense program to green.  We put the brief together, it was presented by our program manager, and we congratulated ourselves on a job well done.  But then a funny thing happened.  We didn't get all of the funding. And another opportunity to brief came up on short notice, late on Friday with a Monday deadline.  And this happened again.  Third time was the charm; we just started keeping our charts up to date because the short notice tasking wasn't going to cease, and didn't for about 9 months. But as manager, I didn't keep up the charts, my project controller did so by coralling necessary input from product leads on a weekly basis. 

Once the routine work and predictable crises are planned, we can start to do our real job, which is making things better. Some like to call that "continuous process improvement," but that sounds way too bureaucratic and non-value add. Making things better is just asking basic questions over and over to make sure your team is performing well.

1. Is the team fully productive? If not, who is under performing and how can we help them improve.

2. Do my reporting processes give me the right, TIMELY, information for decision making? Do they give my boss the correct and TIMELY information?

3. Do we have the right people on the bus? (H/T Jim Collins.) Who do we need to hire or fire?

4. Are we organized effectively? Is work flow efficient? Do we have the right tools?

5. What is the next threat or opportunity? How do we get ahead of it?

Answering these questions may not feel like "real work." But if you don't plan to have the time to answer them, you will lurch from one crisis to the next, and always be busy and ineffective.

Riehm's Rules - All Ten

I skipped rule 6 in my last post, because I had apparently lost track of the count.  It gave me an opportunity to revisit my rules in light of my more recent experience. I had thought of adding Rule 5 "Simulate Concern." But that only has situational applicability, and was already taken by someone else.  Besides, I need a rule 6.  Here is the new list.

1.  Plan to do nothing, and you will certainly achieve your goals.
2.  Management is hard, leadership is better and supervision is most difficult of all. Corollary: Hire people who don't need supervision.
3.  Hiring is the manager's most important decision.
4.  Stay on message. Communicate consistently. Repeat your theme repetitively.
5.  The commodity in shortest supply is management attention. Corollary 1: The most important word in a manager's vocabulary is "no." Corollary 2: Email is an evil leach of your time.
6.  Don't fight market forces.
7.  Understand your firm's economic engine and your unit's.
8.  Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
9.  Deliver the bad news yourself, let your people deliver the good news.
10. If you can't cover yourself in glory, cover yourself in paper.

Not fighting market forces can have different meanings, depending on your organizational context. Two key elements stand out.

1. Broad market forces are going to drive technology available for you to conduct business. That's obvious but bears repeating, I often see arguments for using the "better technology," but if no industrial base exists in five years to support the choice, it wasn't a good choice.  Managers also have to show some common sense regarding technology trends.  One example, you can expect a mutually reinforcing cycle of operating system upgrades and hardware upgrades to be required of all your embedded technology, not just your laptop.  This means we should lean forward to be at the high end of the state of the shelf to avoid technology obsolescence, announced or otherwise.

2. Your organization is an ecosystem with market forces of its own. Attempting to force fit new technical solutions, except when absolutely necessary, is another way we can be fighting market forces.  We make more allies within our organization and deliver faster with lower sustainment costs when we cause the already delivered enterprise solutions to be modified rather trying to bypass them.  For a seemingly ludicrous example, the Department of Defense has been billions on a public key infrastructure technology.  There are occasions when the technology doesn't fit a particular use case. But reverting to user name and password log delivers low security that will either cost a lot due to a breach or cost a lot when the organization directs an upgrade.

Next up. Start outlining all of the rules in a more rational order.

Riehm's Rules of Management

After quoting myself one too many times, a friend of mine suggested I write down my management principles for all to see. Perhaps he thought to avoid my repetitive remarks. Regardless of his motives, it seemed like a good idea. I am too lazy to write a book, more on that in my rules, but a series of blog posts that I incrementally improve seemed achievable.

I am a civilian manager for the U.S. Navy working in technology management and acquisition.  My experience probably translates well to any large English speaking organization, but your mileage may vary (YMMV). Years ago I wrote the outline below.  I went searching for it to see if it stood the test of time.

1. Plan to do nothing, and you will certainly achieve your goals.

2. Management is hard, leadership is better and supervision is most difficult of all. Corollary: Hire people who don't need supervision.

3. Hiring is the manager's most important decision.

4. Stay on message. Communicate consistently. Repeat your theme repetitively.

5. The commodity in shortest supply is management attention. Corollary 1: The most important word in a manager's vocabulary is "no." Corollary 2: Email is an evil leach of your time.

7. Understand your firm's economic engine and your unit's.

8. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

9. Deliver the bad news yourself, let your people deliver the good news.

10. If you can't cover yourself in glory, cover yourself in paper.

Did they stand up? Apparently not, because I skipped number six while counting to ten, which I attribute to not completing kindergarten. That's a story for another day. Since I first wrote these down, I was deeply influenced by Scott Adams book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big and Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan. Those two books will influence my updates.

That's enough work for today.