Interviewing Exercise
Designed by Chauncey Bell
This is a very new and different kind of practice for people. As in any new practice we learn it will feel awkward at first, and novices will tend to fall back on familiar habits. Almost everyone will assume they know how to do this; they will assume that we are offering a slightly nuanced approach. It is not.
Many of us participate in sports, and are clear that a true master of the sport we play is actually playing a different game, performed at a different level with dramatically different results. In this approach to building trust through interviewing, we are inviting you to begin learning to play a different game, even though you might think you know the basic moves.
1. Cultivate your mood for the interview from the assumption that the person you are going to interview may have important insights that you had not considered, or in any event may be competent for his or her job in ways that you do not yet understand. You are not there to figure out if participants in your interviews know how to do their jobs. Rather start from the premise that your interviewee is, in their own way, working on having an admirable life.
2. Take notes in writing during the interview. Writing careful notes produces the assessment that you are taking the person's reports seriously. This assessment helps develop trust. Take notes that are designed to allow you to reconstruct what your interviewee(s) said. Don’t take note of your thoughts or assessments – take notes about what the interviewee(s) say. And, take note of everything they say – not only the parts that are more interesting to you but also the parts that make no sense or seem wrong.
3. The interviewer's job is to LISTEN – not to offer agreement, disagreement, justification, or re-interpretation. If you have to summarize in your questioning to see if you have understood a point, make sure that you ask your interviewee if you are right and that you do not mind being wrong, because you really want to get what he or she thinks. Avoid summarizing in your note taking.
4. The interview consists of a conversation in five parts, listed below. Conduct your interview in the order listed. Do not change the order of the sections. Most interviews will take from 40 – 80 minutes.
5. We usually soften the mood of the interview by saying, at the beginning, that although this is “called” an interview, it is really just a conversation in which we will be exploring aspects of the other person’s world.
A. Roles
You will ask about the participant’s role and promises in the company or enterprise in which they work: What roles do you play in the company? What promises do you make and to whom do you make those promises? Do not ask or allow the participant to enter into a description of his or her tasks or individual responsibilities. You are looking for the overall role and main promises. You do not want a “job description” here. This part of the interview is not for the purpose of gathering information, but rather about building a rapport where the participant talks about something he knows well and sees that he or she has an interested listener. As an interviewer, you need to build enough trust for a frank conversation to follow.
Describe your role in the conversation: most often this will be that you are a member of a team that is responding to some request from someone in the participant’s enterprise to examine, repair, replace, or reinvent some aspect of that enterprise. It is fine and often appropriate to say something to the effect of, “We have been asked to look at the company’s sales processes and to say what might be done to improve them. When you have permission to do so, it builds trust to name the person in the organization who has initiated the engagement or opportunity to explore something.
B. Concerns and Dissatisfactions
In this part of the interview you are interested to discover what aspects of their work life are in their day-to-day attention. They will have positive or negative assessments about those aspects of their work, and they will think about them outside of working hours as well, for example in the shower or in their dreams. In some cases they may have discovered that there is some mystery in some aspect of their work. More often, they will be thinking about “what is wrong” with something, or “what we need to do that we are not doing.” This part of the interview can take a lot of time. It is fine to spend as much as 75-80% of your time with the interviewee on this part.
Ask questions such as: What are the aspects of your work upon which you have your attention? What is broken, in the way, or missing in your world at this moment? What do you find yourself thinking about when you are away from your work?
Prompt for both negative assessments and for opportunities: What has gone wrong in the past or is going wrong right now? What future breakdowns are they anticipating, or what opportunities do they think are being missed or going to be missed?
Another question in this section could be: What complaints do your customers (and/or suppliers) make about your company?
Write the concerns that you listen to the interviewee speak in your notes, numbering them as “#1”, “#2”, and so forth. When you get a long pause before the next concern, you can ask if there is anything else that occurs to them immediately, and if not go on to the next part of the interview.
Throughout the conversation, continue building trust. Remember that this person is talking about taking care of what they consider to be important concerns in their world. Indicate that you are listening and following what they are saying. Avoid “I agree,” “You are so right,” “That is so terrible,” and all manner of agreement, or worse, disagreement with them. On the other hand, asking questions and asking for examples can help develop your understanding: Can you explain more what you see going on there? Can you give me an example of that kind of event?
C. Coping
Here you want to discover what are the key requests and promises around which they do their work, how their work appears before them, and how they involve others or delegate work to others. You can ask questions such as: What does your typical day look like? What requests are made of you, by whom; what requests do you make of others? What promises do you make?
Explore the coordination of action in the person's job: how do they bring action, how do they deal with interruptions, etc.
It is OK to speak of requests and promises or commitments, but do not encourage them to begin to speak in our distinctions as jargon. Ask how they ask for things to be done. Ask about how they go about trying to get things done. Ask about how action happens in their enterprise.
D. Practices
The intent of this part of the conversation is to catch any important tools or practices that have not as yet shown up in the conversation. What are the tools and systems you use to get your work done? Or, Other than what you have already described, what other tools and systems, meetings, devices, or whatever, are helpful in getting your work done?
Look for ways that materiel and information processes are involved (including how they may help or impede). This would include important forms, systems, mediums (telephone, memos, fax, etc.). Often much of this will have emerged in the responses to the third part of the interview, but a separate prompt may surface and help identify aspects not previously mentioned.
E. Binding
This is the moment in the interview when you act to begin to build a specific relationship with the interviewee where they will become part of your team for moving the organization, and you a part of their team. Do it by asking the interviewee to ask you to do something for them.
For example, you could say, By now you have some interpretation of what I am looking for. Do you have any requests of me as part of this work? If I were doing some work in your company, is there anything that you would like me or our team to be sure to address, illuminate, or the like?
In this last part of the interview, you are inviting the interviewee to make a request to you. If they do, make a promise in return, if it is appropriate, or fulfill the request on the spot. You may be tempted to make a superficial, tranquilizing promise. Don’t do that. The intention is to continue to build trust. The point here is to open the possibility of connecting more deeply and having the interviewee enter into some commitment that is relevant to the success of the engagement in which you are entering.
