A KWIC response under pressure

I’ve never been in an interview where I have felt myself. Just to be clear, felt like myself.  They are pressure situations, often in front of several people, where you sit and wait for the next complexly worded question. Each one asked by a different person so you don’t know where to look. Many are lengthy with several parts.

“It’s OK if you need us to repeat the question,” she said. I suspected that if I tried that avenue someone would casually make a small note beside the question, perhaps “trouble focusing,” or “poor short term memory” or simply doodling the equivalent of, “tsk, tsk.”

Some things do seem to come easily at interviews. I have no trouble sweating. I clear my throat regularly as if I have some undiagnosed ailment, causing everyone to slowly lean back in their chairs and bring their hands to their face as if deep in thought, but really hoping to fend off any germs. I can even quickly discover how the mechanical chair works, one time knocking the control with a stray hand and instantly finding my chin on the table looking up at everyone.

I came across something called KWIC in Marlene Caroselli’s “Critical Thinking,” a book with a number of activities I use in teaching and facilitation. KWIC provides a framework for formulating a reply under pressure and at least fend off some of the desire to tell the panel whatever thought comes to mind in whatever order they hit your mouth.

KWIC gives you a way of building a story and fits well with behavioral interviews. The “K” is for Kernel – the purpose of your story or, in an interview, the problem, opportunity or challenge you are going to tell your interviewers where you excelled. One sentence should be enough to set the stage.

The “W” is for Widen. Expand on your introduction and tell more about the story. Remember, you should be at the center of the story; you are the hero. The “I” is for Illustrate and is where you give specific examples or details that support or prove what you did. And finally, the “C” is for Conclude. Here you sum your accomplishments with as measurable a statement as the case will allow. It represents the value you provide.

In addition to pressure situations requiring a quick verbal response, KWIC provides a good structure for written responses. For example, responding to an email or structuring written responses to application questions. Like anything, practice will make you better, and developing a set of KWIC stories of your accomplishments in advance (and practicing them orally) will help you prepare for interviews.

Though it isn’t of much use when your chair unexpectedly drops a foot.  A KWIC “oops” and a laugh seemed sufficient.

I got that job.

Same ole?

I didn’t even see him, just heard, “Same ole?”

I spotted the smiling round face behind the row of coffee urns at the Second Cup I now frequent calling out in his accented English if I want the same drink as usual. It amazes me how fast he learned my rather average drink (large dark coffee), though my frequency and bright orange jacket may be a factor.

Getting to Second Cup from where I currently work involves passing the temptation of two other places that serve coffee. One sells coffee in support of their food selection and never has a line up, which having tried the coffee is perfectly understandable. The old, glass carraffs sitting on hot plates remind me of the old days. Could be the same coffee, too.

The other is Tim Hortons. I used to like Tim’s coffee. Tim Horton was my favorite hockey player. Whenever I would play sports where I received a number, I always wanted #7.

“Why do you want that number,” I was asked. “Lucky 7?”

“No,” I replied. “It’s the number Tim Horton wore when he played for Toronto.”

“Who?”

“Tim Horton. The hockey player,” I said to a blank stare. “Never mind, just give me the number.” I fear Tim will be remembered more for “Tim Bits” than his stellar defensive work and participating in Toronto’s last Stanley Cup. Alas, it won’t be for the coffee.

As I pass Tim’s I watch a long line of customers slowly move towards three servers, each with a sense of urgency written on their face. No recognition. No acknowledgement. They take the order and the customer moves to the side to pick up their food and drink from someone else as “next” is shouted. It all seems so automated; a human imitation of a vending machine. And that’s how the coffee tastes to me – mechanical. The image of the service is reflected in my perception of the taste. Tim’s is a place you stop on your way somewhere else; it’s not a destination any more. Not to me.

Both Tim’s and Second Cup are successful in their chosen models; they know who they are. As I continue along the tunnel to satisfy my new habit, it makes me ponder about what I want to be. I reflect on how I have unleashed more creativity and expression than in the past, particularly when teaching or facilitating. I enjoy seeing the “light go on” in others. I think about disruptive innovation as I hear, “Same Ole.”

The irony of satisfying a habit while thinking about breaking out of them is not lost on me.

“Yes,” I say.

My name is ghatry

My name is ghatry. At least that’s what comes out when I type with my bandaged left index finger, a result of too little space, a self-imposed sense of urgency and sharp knife. Ah, the shortcut. What’s the attraction?

Shortcuts invariably come with high risk. My cooking shortcut led to a “short cut” of my finger, delaying the dinner I was trying to keep on time, one hand held over my head as I applied pressure on my pulsating finger  while sprinkling basil over the food with the other. It might have gone unnoticed with some Spanish music and a few ole’s, but alas the drops of blood gave me away.

It seems those who least can bear the risk are most apt to take the shortcut.

My class at college had six weeks to prepare an assignment. I spent an hour reviewing exactly what I was looking for and the grading for each element. I even gave ideas on what I would find attractive. I find myself with two sets of papers that show the undeniable evidence of collusion. The students who decided on this particular shortcut may now find themselves repeating the course, their marks insufficient to withstand the penalty this particular shortcut brings. Something that could have been completed in three hours of toil now requires an entire semester in front of, well, me.

I was snowshoeing the last time I learned a lesson taking a shortcut. Tired, I spotted a small creek that I thought would be a quick jaunt back to our townhouse. In fact I could see it from where we were. It took about 45 minutes of tough slogging through waist high snow and knee-high water for us to pull ourselves out of the woods into the clearing by our townhouse; me carrying Molly-the-Doodle who, a puppy caked with snow, had pretty much given up.

In change management projects, everyone seems to be looking for a quick fix, special event or magic bullet that aligns the organization and instantly infuses a new culture. I find myself resisting these shortcuts, though my bandaged finger reminds me of the irony in that statement, but shortcuts come with unknown risk that goes by a name most of us are familiar with and at one point or another, have been its victim.

Murphy’s Law.

I need a horn

I’ve decided I need a horn. I drive in to work twice a week on the days I teach at Humber College. Otherwise, I enjoy reading the newspaper on my IPad while dangling from some just reachable pole on our lovely transit system.

I’ve noticed that any change of weather causes driver memory loss and at times blindness. The change to a sunny day is as fraught as one with rain. On this day, raining, I started on my journey with plenty of time and a coffee at hand, and braved the Toronto commute from the east side of the city to the north-west.

Thirty minutes into the commute, having been cut off or suffered waiting while someone couldn’t indicate they were turning, the frustration began to build. Forty-five minutes in someone pulled out of a driveway in front of me forcing me to brake and fifty feet up the road turned into another driveway, forcing me to brake a second time. My hand rarely finds the horn, but on this occasion I leaned on it for his entire break-and-turn. Message delivered.

And I felt better. Guilty, but better. From that point on, I had no further “incidents.” Perhaps I should have sounded the horn earlier!

Arriving at the office I noticed an email from a bank I once applied to. I get at least 10 a day indicating I had opted to have an email sent whenever there was a job posted that met my criteria. Problem was, it wasn’t my criteria. While I applied for an organizational development position in Toronto, I daily receive messages for positions all across Canada for financial representative positions. I’ve reached the point where I am finally ready to brave the complexity of their recruitment system to try and turn it off.

Then I remembered the magical effect of the horn and thought it might be a good idea to have a personal horn. Something I could honk whenever the frustration got too much. Can’t give up coffee; get a horn.

Of course, it would have to be silent. Else I would need a good pair of sneakers to go with it.

To run away.

My Friend Tom

It was somewhere between the strawberries and the blueberries at the grocery store when I got the email telling me about Tom. The email, from his sister said Tom had unexpectedly passed away last Friday.

After a relationship spanning over 40 years, I only saw Tom once in the past seven – a chance encounter a few months ago. We spent time catching up as best we could in the middle of Canadian Tire, though much of his recent life was left unsaid. He looked leaner than I remembered, but healthy. Sometimes we don’t know the last time we see someone will be the last time.

I was eleven when I met Tom in public school. Our birthday’s two-weeks apart, he always reminded me he was younger. We hung around in the same crowd through school and over time, became good friends. We went on skiing trips during our university years, took our kids to the Christmas Parade and spent countless weekends at his cottage.

Standing in the middle of the grocery store looking at the email I was flooded with random images.

Tom pulling the chair out from under me as I went to sit down at bar in cottage country. Me laughing staring up at him from the floor. Lying on the floor of a train station trying to sleep waiting hours for a train because the alternator of our rental car had died returning from a skiing trip to Quebec. Snowmobiling across the lake by his cottage, listening to the cracking of ice behind us while Tom shouted to keep going. Fast. Sneaking the top half of a manikin into his bed and taking photographs of him with this mysterious woman. Riding mechanical bulls in Vancouver wearing our new cowboy hats. Exploring Georgetown in Washington D.C. when we both worked for Xerox.

Tom lived in the moment, and stretched each moment to its fullest. He would start making a Caesar salad at seven and we wouldn’t eat until after ten, as I watched him move between conversations, activities and back to the next step in a time-tested recipe that wouldn’t be rushed. He was the last to say goodnight and the last to get up in the morning.

And Tom liked his jokes. He would taste some food and with a straight face assure me that no, the mustard wasn’t hot and no, the dip wasn’t blue cheese and, like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football encouragingly held by Lucy, I dived in only to see him chuckling at my horrified reaction. I once raced back to my apartment in response to a message I received about a small fire, but was told not to worry, everything was OK. At home, I couldn’t find any sign of a fire and when the phone rang and Tom asked what I was doing at home this time of the day I put it all together. We both laughed over that one many times.

But there is one memory of Tom that is always with me. Tom’s love of his cottage drew us there on many weekends. I remember sitting with him on the deck of his cottage one evening, sipping beer and listening to the last of the rain gently fall on the lake and drip off the trees. He took a sip, looked out over the lake and said what he valued about our friendship was how comfortable he felt being silent. That he could just “be.”

The last few years of Tom’s life were hard and conflicted. I hope he has found a silence in which he can just be. And for me, I’m going to try and stay a little more in this moment, and worry a little less about the next one.

Don’t mind me, I’m listening.

There is something ironic about discussing the people side of change management while the participants around the table frequently check-out of the conversation to respond to their phones. I’m old enough to remember when meetings were only interrupted by something important, like a fire alarm or the arrival of lunch. Now people absentmindedly rise from the table, staring at their phone as they slowly exit the room without saying a word; eerily mimicking sleepwalking or the scene from some late-night zombie movie.

They were pretty attentive during the interviews. No phones in sight. Well, in sight but dormant. The equivalent of a nicotine patch – reassuringly near without being tempted. As soon as I was hired they were no longer able to focus on my face for more than a minute without being pulled to chase the latest interruption. I’ve started to imagine the interview if it was treated like a normal internal meeting; giving me a glimpse of what it would really be like to work here.

“Can you explain more about how you accomplished that,” said the interviewer. His eyes were looking at me while his head was still angled toward his phone.

“Gladly,” I replied as I watched his eyes return to something more urgent, important or interesting than my answers. I need more compelling stories or a different audience. I turned my gaze to the other individual on the panel, her ear turned toward me while looking at her laptop.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m listening.”

“I used magic,” I continued. “I found a wand in an old attic that lets me change behavior with a few well aimed incantations. I had to turn the CEO into a frog, but it got the team onside.”

“Excellent,” he said without looking up. “We are always looking for new ideas and tools. Shall we move on to the next question?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Shall I text the answer or do you prefer email?”

I’ve learned to look on this behavior as amusing rather than upsetting. I stopped taking it personally. There are a lot of ways to check out of a meeting, many of which are not as visible as checking your phone, and at least I can visibly see which points are important to which people. I’m consciously competent about my own behavior, choosing to ignore the buzzing in my pocket and continue to daydream about lands far away. But I still wander in and out of conversations.

Besides, the almost silent melody of cell-phone typing is much more pleasant than loud snoring and looking down the throats of massive yawns.

Persistance pays

It turns out that being persistant does pay, but requires patience. That’s a lot of words starting with the letter “P.” Perhaps a new book on, “Why you Should Give a P!” Or perhaps not.

It all started last June when I applied for a two-year contract in change management for a organization going through a significant modernization that really was transformational in nature. After a phone interview and two panel interviews where I was assured I was their first choice, there was nothing but silence. The hiring manager encouraged me to continue to follow up but on one such occassion I caught her during a computer crisis and after an abrupt conversation thought it best to wait.

Several months went by when, out of nowhere I received an, “Are you still interested in the position?” call.

“Yes,” I replied.

“We are going to re-post the position shortly, as soon as I get a final OK on the job description. Unfortunately, you will have to start the process over again,” she explained.

I was delighted, but it was another month before the position was posted and I began to go through the same process. A phone interview with HR. An initial panel interview. Then a phone interview with an individual I could be working with at a remote location. That call I did while pacing the halls of the college I teach at in search of a quiet space, not easy at a college. Then another interview with another manager in the same department. Then an interview with the Executive Director. I was becoming well aquainted with the receptionist and explaining to others what to do with the visitor tag when they were leaving.

Then silence. Again. I follow up. Can we have references. I forwarded references, which for a contract position I thought was a little over the top, but that might just be me. Silence. I follow up. Some thoughts around changing the job description again, which gave me visions of going through this for a third time. Weeks later I got a call with a verbal offer and then a written version sent by email.

I accepted the offer and after a six month dance, would start in two weeks. My persistance and patience came from a strong desire to be part of this project. I felt I had real value, would learn from the experience and could say I was a part of something visible.

Two weeks later I announced myself and sat in the lobby. Silence. I waited over an hour before someone came to get me. But then, what did I expect?

You have my phone

“Did you find this phone?” said the unknown female caller. I did, too, managing to refrain from pointing out the obvious. While walking Molly the Doodle that night I noticed a smart phone in the middle of the sidewalk. It was password protected, so I tucked it into my pocket and waited for someone to call. The caller was going to call her boyfriend, the owner of the now found phone.

This was the second major find in a week. I discovered a women’s wallet in the middle of the sidewalk a few doors down from my place. Unlike the phone, I could look to find a piece of identification and, finding it was a neighbour, left a message on their door to give me a call when they returned. The call came about four hours later; she hadn’t realized that she had lost it until she saw the note on her door.

She seemed more annoyed than thankful, like I had somehow caused her to loose the wallet in the first place. “I have to change all my information anyway as we are moving in a couple of weeks,” she said in response to my small talk about the inconvenience of loosing what looked like by the overly stuffed wallet every piece of identification she had.

I don’t normally find things and when I do, it usually involves pain from kicking something or tripping over it. I routinely discover Molly the Doodle’s balls and bones without ever using my eyes. It made me think of how aware some people are of their environments. I worked for someone who, in a crowd, was the only one to ever see a coin on the ground. Recently, playing a board game, my daughter-in-law figured out my strategy by what I wasn’t doing. Scary.

A month earlier I found a VISA card on the sidewalk. I’m surprised I don’t walk into more things considering how much time I seem to be looking at the sidewalk. I guess walking Molly has taught me to be more observant about the immediate vicinity as I am constantly looking for things she might try to gobble up or other dogs heading towards us. I called VISA so the owner wouldn’t have to worry about the card.

“You have my phone,” said the male caller. As if I had somehow managed to slip it away from him, or had picked it up by accident rather than found it. It was an accusation more than a question. About 30 minutes later he left, obviously happy to be reunited with his recently acquired new investment.

“Well Molly,” I said closing the door. “I wonder what we will find next.”

The endorsement game

I like LinkedIn for a number of reasons. A grown up, less “personal” network than Facebook. It does push out a lot of updates, some of which are of value such as stories I may be interested in reading. A recent update alerted me to contacts that had recently added new skills to their profile. The problem is I didn’t think they in fact had those skills, despite having endorsements from others.

Adding skills to your profile makes sense. Then, every time someone goes to your page, they are offered the opportunity to endorse the skill set you have put there. It is easy to hit the endorse button, but that endorses the entire list presented – you have to delete the ones you don’t want to endorse, which is neither obvious nor intuitive. Later, updates declare the endorsement to the world.

There doesn’t seem to be any control on the process. I’m not sure a high number of endorsements on a skill is any different from being “liked” on Facebook, which in my mind starts to tarnish the value of the entire feature. It would be good if each skill was directly tied to a story of how the skill was applied or how it was learned. What good is an endorsement if anyone can provide it? If I’m endorsed by someone, I feel some obligation to endorse them in return whether or not I am qualified to do so.

I think being endorsed is a good way to differentiate, to let people know that others have experienced your use of the skill. A good concept seems to be morphing into a popularity contest and a way to make potential boasts look legitimate.

If you are looking to have others provide insight to your abilities, I would suggest sticking with the recommendations feature, which allows others to share their insights beyond the click of the endorse button.

 

Should I call or should I wait?

I feel like a teenager again. Not the good part, where your body feels strong and heals quickly. No, the awkward part where you don’t know what to say to a girl. Only instead of trying to court a girl, I’m courting a new career. Well, a job at any rate; I guess it will be a career if we get “married.”

The opportunities I’m looking at are acting coy. That’s right, coy. They make me feel like they are interested in me, then seem to leave me hanging, waiting for the promised next step. But did they really promise it? They described the next step, but do I actually remember being included?

I jump when the phone rings, as if I’ve never heard the sound before. Yes I’m still interested. Yes I would like to see you again. Yes I’ll wait for your email. Yes I’ll wait, seduced by the promise.

As the days pass, I wonder if I’ve been forgotten. Should I call or should I wait? I keep singing “Should I go or should I stay,” the hit by the Clash over and over in my head, a constant reminder of who is in control. The weekend roles over; Monday, a new start. A good time to call.

I’ve rehearsed it over and over again in my head. What I’ll say. How I can make it seem natural I should call. Interested without being eager or obvious. Just following up on last week’s conversation going into a busy week. Want to make sure I have time to see you. Yes we are still trying to coordinate the schedule she says. Yes we want to see you this week she says. Yes I think we can work with those dates she says. I feel a little more in control.

The confirming email comes in a matter of hours. The unknown now known. I can focus on the next step. I’m glad I called. The application process strips you bare. The interview process digs deeper. How would you react to this situation? How have you dealt with that in the past? What is your greatest weakness? Where have you failed in the past? No where to hide.

I think about my first day on the job, getting off the elevator, naked, claiming there is nothing they don’t already know.

Perhaps if they make an offer, I’ll just be coy instead.