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Very, very good (and revealing) interview questions

Courtesy of a story in today’s Careers section in the Globe and Mail by Tony Martin.

Six questions that six seasoned hiring managers ask job candidates.

1. I had a really bad day. Can you tell me something funny?  Wrong answer — sorry, I can’t think of anything amusing.
2. What is the greatest service experience you’ve had? Wrong answer — being clueless about the difference between good from truly great service.
3. Tell us what began as your most frustrating or tough day, and what you did so that it ended up being your most productive day? Wrong answer — revealing a lack of personal initiative.
4. Which of your strengths can lead to problems? Wrong answer — pretending you don’t have a weakness which exposes an interview-killing lack of self-awareness.
5. Tell us about a time you had a great idea and what you did with it? Wrong answer — drawing a blank and acting as though you’ve never had a good idea or any idea at all.
6. What do you hope this job is not? Wrong answer — saying that you like to do anything and everything.

Get the right answers here.

Book review: Leadership by focusing on the fundamentals

Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference – The Revolutionary Old-School Approach

By James Kilts, Crown Business, $35

I got lucky and had a chance to work for Hamilton’s answer to Jack Welch. He was a hometown CEO who took a company on the ropes and turned it into an industry leader.

He quarterbacked the turnaround by overhauling the company’s culture. Entitlement was out. Engagement was in. Respect and teamwork were core values and rewards were shared. He invested heavily in people and technology, banked on innovation and got everyone focused less on pushing commodity products and more on selling value-added solutions to customers.

When an industry association served up executive of the year honours, he insisted the entire senior leadership team be photographed for a magazine shoot. And he would have shoehorned the entire workforce into the shot had there been a wide enough camera lens.

Here’s the story I tell others when they ask about the CEO. The company created an award-winning essential skills program to help employees shore up their reading, writing and computer skills. The CEO championed the program and made sure it had the right people, resources and money to be a success. Employees were paid for the first hour they spent in the program each week so both staff and the company had some skin in the game. And the CEO made time to personally congratulate staff at their graduation ceremonies.

The program made smart business sense. To fire on all cylinders, the company needed a highly skilled workforce. Everyone comes to work wanting to do a good job, the CEO said more than once. Yet the payoff went well beyond employees doing more on the job. They could now help their kids with their homework and read bedtime stories to their grandkids. Here was yet another example of the company and its leader demonstrating respect for employees and doing the right thing.

So it’s no surprise that staff engagement, satisfaction and discretionary effort were off the charts. Or that confidence in senior management and the future of the company never wavered.

A quick endnote. If there had been a CEO fan club, the co-ordinator of the essential skills program would have been its president. She was the heart and soul of the program and was a leader herself when it came to literacy in the community.

When she was putting up the good fight against cancer, the then-retired CEO paid a hospital visit. A few months later, he went to the funeral home to quietly pay his respects to the co-ordinator’s family.

How this CEO led mirrors a lot of what author James Kilts did as CEO of Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft. His key to success? Focus on the fundamentals and stick with what matters.

"Whether you’re the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company, the brand manager for a struggling product, a director of human resources, or an entrepreneur starting your own business, you’re always confronted with an insurmountable amount of information and a number of options, conflicting opinions and management theories that are as endless as they are confusing," says Kilts.

"Making these decisions isn’t a job for the timid or weak of heart. It takes guts to say these are the things that really matter; I’ll pay absolutely no attention to the rest. That’s the challenge everyone faces."

So what matters? Kilts says intellectual integrity, enthusiasm, action and understanding the right things matters. Having the right team and leadership process matters. So too does having the right road map and thinking for the long term.

Kilts’ advice for anyone stepping into a leadership role should be required reading.

"Your first day of a new job should be like the first hours of the D-Day landing by the Allies during World War II. It should be that intense and that filled with action. By the end of the Day 1, you should feel like a presidential candidate who has just completed a cross-country, 20 city campaign tour."

When he took over the helm at Gillette, Kilts started his day with an early morning breakfast meeting in the employee cafeteria and finished with a dinner date with the acting CEO. Even before he’d stepped foot in the building, Kilts had fired off an e-mail missive free of sugar-coating. Within a week, another e-mail went out, this time a 2,700 word state-of-the-union Q&A.

On his first day, Kilts held more than a dozen meetings, including a three-hour huddle with his direct reports. Most leaders opt for a flurry of perfunctory meet-and-greets and Kilts says that’s a mistake.

"A very different message is communicated when the new boss calls everyone together, dispenses with the meet and greet in three minutes, and spends the balance of three hours going through a detailed agenda of business issues, management process and personal expectations. This approach tells the group that you’re a person of action. You have a sense of urgency and will be engaged and involved."

In these meetings, Kilts defined his leadership style (what you see is what you get, no games or hidden agendas), made a promise to judge people based on performance and to reward excellent performance at a level that would surprise staff, admitted that he would be often wrong but never uncertain and called for innovation to define how everyone at Gillette would think and act.

There’s a whole lot more to this book. While the focus is on razor blades and shaving cream, the lessons about business fundamentals are transferable to any organization and to anyone in, or aspiring to a leadership role.

Great news for all C students

Great article in the Sept. 10 issue of Maclean’s on why C+ students end up running the world (Do Grades Really Matter?).

"Creative thinkers, the kind who transform how we see things, have characteristics such as curiosity, appetite for risk and an open mind," says reporter Sarah Scott. These students aren’t so good at being told what to do.

"So a student might be bored and unmotivated in class, but then, once he discovers something that fires him up, works so hard that he becomes a resounding success."

So there’s hope yet for all us students who never really shone in high school and who were continually told we’d get better grades if we did a better job of applying ourselves.

Last word to Hamilton’s own entrepreneur Bob Young. "As for those of us who didn’t figure out how the system works, we became bank robbers or entrepreneurs. That’s what makes a lot of us poor students into successful people. Typically, our success does not come from working within the system. It comes from reinventing the system."

Guilt trip

Went to Canada’s Wonderland with my daughter this weekend.

We’d been talking about this trip all summer. She’d really wanted to take a day off from daycare. Maybe a Monday or Friday to make it a long weekend.

Yet we never did. Somehow, the summer got away from me and there was no time to get away in the last 3-4 weeks. Hands done the fastest summer ever. When I was my daughter’s age, summer seemed to stretch on forever.

We still had a great time yet I felt guilty. And still do. When I’m down to the last sentence in life’s final chapter, I seriously doubt my daughter and I will reminisce about the summer of 2007 when I didn’t take a single day off. But she just might talk about going on some totally awesome rides (she’s fearless).

Easy to say nothing’s more important than your family. Finding it harder to do.

Life lessons build better leaders

What Made jack welch Jack Welch: How Ordinary People Become Extraordinary Leaders

By Stephen H. Baum,

Crown Business, $32

I used to joke that my kids could do anything they wanted when they grew up so long as they became doctors.

But then my wife started to shoot me the look. "Why put that kind of pressure on our children when they haven’t even started elementary school," she’d ask in a way that was less a question and more an indictment.

Point taken. So, like a good parent, I now pledge my unconditional support for whatever life journey my pride and joy choose to take.

Actually, there’s one condition. I want my kids to be leaders. I’m not talking Fortune 500 celebrity CEOs who send their parents on world cruises and buy them retirement condos in the Florida Keys and the Muskokas. I’m talking about my kids being leaders in the community. Making a difference wherever they wind up putting down roots.

I don’t want my kids to be standing on the sidelines saying that something should be done. I want them to be the first to roll up their sleeves and ask "what can I do to help?". I want them to jump right in and never shy away from a challenge. I want them to always believe that anything’s possible and to remember that doing the impossible usually just takes a little longer.

I’m not being unreasonable here. Everyone — my kids, your kids, you and me — we all have the potential in us to be leaders. There’s no elusive leadership gene. You don’t have to be born into the right family, be blessed with the right connections or be the smartest kid in your class.

What’s more, it’s never too late to become a leader. So you weren’t the captain of your peewee soccer team, high school president or a senior executive before your 30th birthday? No worries.

Leaders are made and a surprising number are late bloomers, says CEO coach and author Stephen Baum, whose drawn on years of research and personal conversations with some of the great leaders of our times.

"One of the first things I noticed in my research is how far all these leaders had come from their beginnings. It’s astonishing. With only a couple of exceptions, they started out not much different from the rest of us. Their beginnings were ordinary, as were their families."

Take Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. Welch’s father was a train conductor. His mother stayed home. Welch spent a summer working a drill press and later joined GE as an engineer.

So what turns ordinary people into extraordinary leaders? Baum credits something called archetypal shaping experiences. It’s those unexpected life moments that put us to the test. Baum’s come up with a short list of 10 experiences:

1. Swimming in water that’s over our heads, where we take personal risks without having a clue as to what we’re doing or if it’ll all pan out.

2. Making tough choices.

3. Getting to the root of a seemingly intractable problem that leads to a golden opportunity.

4. Helping others grow and perform exceptionally.

5. Getting others to buy in by first winning their hearts and minds.

6. Connecting with others and understanding what motivates them.

7. Building a team and getting average members to perform like superstars.

8. Getting good at thinking, talking and acting on our feet.

9. Developing a finely tuned "crap detector" to weed out folks whose words and behaviors aren’t what they pretend them to be.

10. Learning to look in the mirror and honestly assess our values, beliefs and behaviors.

Most of us look at these experiences and say "why bother?". We hold back or we’re afraid to stray beyond our comfort zone. Leaders say "why not?" and jump in without a lot of self-doubt or second thoughts.

"If you aspire to a leadership role, you must seize these experiences, use them to test and develop your leadership core. You must take even the most ordinary situations and turn them into extraordinary moments of personal growth."

That personal growth will help you develop what Baum says are five core leadership traits: the appetite to take charge, character and integrity, the confidence to seek challenges and embrace risk, the capacity to act and the ability to engage and inspire others.

"The link between shaping experiences and leadership traits is simple," says Baum. "When you have a shaping experience, your gut instincts and your patterns of thought change forever. Experience changes habits.

Shaping experiences make you the home-run hitter, seeing the challenge clearly as it roars down toward you and meeting it adroitly while others swing and miss or don’t swing at all."

So here’s a thought. As parents, we should seek out ordinary experiences that will help us and our kids become extraordinary leaders. And just imagine what could happen in our community if everyone stopped saying "something should be done", started asking "what can I do right now to help make Hamilton an even better place to live, work and play?" and then took on leadership roles in making it happen.

Be brave and JUMP!

Remember when you were learning how to swim (I had to go to an unheated city-run pool at 8:30 in the morning during the coldest July on record). You stood at the edge of the pool and froze. You thought and thought and thought about jumping in but got yourself all worked out and went nowhere (or got pushed in if you went to the same pool as me).

Met a colleague the other day who’s stuck at the edge of the pool. She’s got a great idea and she’s got the enthusiasm and smarts to pull it off. But she’s preoccupied with how her idea will play out with those higher up on the org chart. Will they approve? Disapprove? Will her idea help or hurt her career?

It took 30-plus years but I’ve now learned to just jump. In all the places I’ve worked, I’ve yet to see someone get sacked for taking the initiative. And I’ve seen many fallen comrades who did the Dead Man Walking because they did next to nothing. If showing initiative is a career limiting move in your organization, take heart. There will be a dozen other employers lining up to hire you.

I had a great boss who once took me aside, closed his office door, told me to take a seat and ordered by to stop asking for permission. "Are you fishing for a no," he asked. "No" I said. "Just want to keep you in the loop."

"I’m busy, you’re smart and you’re not going to get anyone killed with this idea so go for it," he said. And I’ve been doing that ever since.

You don’t really want to be remembered as the person who had lots of great ideas. You want to be known as the person who took a great idea, ran with it and made it happen.

Jump in.