The Process
As a consultant one thing I have faced is tons of job interviews. In this time I have been poked for all my weakness and out of this I have grown and raised my game each time I failed to secure a job. When I approach an interview, I act as if I am a business, in my case I am a Corporation selling immediate expertise. My integrity, work ethics, value, personality, experiences and culture shapes my business directly and has a profound impact in how I sell myself, sell my skills when looking for the next contract.
A No is not forever, a No is only for now.
I have been rejected many times and it never feels good, you will have your moments of misses. I personally treat a no as an opportunity to grow, my blind-spot has been uncovered and I discover where I must grow and adjust before the next interview. I gap my interviews a week or two apart so I have time to calibrate. Top institutions will throw you back into the pool to come up again. The good news, the real talent pool is finite, there are only a handful of great workers the rest are stuck in purgatory of living out their average life and working at their average job with average skills. My message to you is this, get use to failing, get use to no, get use to living at the edge of who you are, it’s a scary place of continued weakness and growth. Don’t settle and stand still in your own comfort zone, for it is a prison with no walls and a prison of the mind.
You must continue to grow into your future Self.
Most people when looking for a job will look for one they readily fit, most of the time this means doing the same thing you did in your previous place of employment. I will tell you this is a growth killer, you need to continue to push past your limits and continue to grow. In order to do all this you need to seek new challenging opportunities that you need to grow into, don’t bother sharing this with interviewers, they will see this as weakness and will pass on you. Interviewers are people who look for fit, their mindset and goal do not completely align with yours. I have lost job offers because I uttered the words I will need to grow into this role when speaking to the hiring manager. No one sets out to build the largest water dam in the world, it is the first ever! These people don’t go around saying I will need to grow into the world largest dam builder. They talk like champs, “I am the best at what I do, there is nothing I cannot achieve.” This is the mindset you need to walk in, be a master of yourself and your skills. No one will tell you this, but it’s absolutely OK to talk like this, risk big and fall flat on your face. Overtime you will fall better and eventually success will be at your feet. Others who never try will be missing out on a big secret to success, that of confronting your fears and weakness and pushing forward. Only then can you walk the talk before you do great work you have never done before. The other thing I learned from my interviewing is to stop talking in terms of “we” and start taking credit for the work I did and speak in terms of “I”. Somehow we’ve been shamed into talking in terms of “we” and told there is no “I” in team. However this is one time you need to speak in terms of “I” and take ownership. Let your mastery shine, forget the team, it’s all about you!
Leave a place or person better off then you found it.
I’ve come to understand no one is going to train you at work. No one is going to share what they themselves have worked hard to gain, sometimes spending years to acquire the specialized knowledge. There are very few true mentors out there, they exist and I try to be one when I am given an opportunity. I believe in Karma and bettering the world.
The best never rest and stand still waiting for things to happen.
In the absences of a mentor, you need to become your own. Train like an athlete and be methodical. What that means is have methods for your mastery.
Have a schedule and do things over and over until you can do it effortlessly. Create a project management of your career life, break it down into items you need to work on, learn and practice with purpose. It must be written down, it must have a quantum of time. Start small, keep it simple and do these exercises over and over until it becomes ingrained in your mind.
Here is something I started to play around with using a simple spreadsheet.
Don’t stop there, you need to drill down for each week, and get more precise and start to track your time, stay focused, avoid wasting idle time being distracted surfing the web and develop self discipline to stay accountable.
I’ve started to track my time to the minute. Over time I plan to have better metrics to person development and be able to predict progress on fresh things. With prediction I can then go to the next level of optimization and begin to measure things like acceleration, how fast I can read, reflect on what I read and comprehend what I’ve read. Arm with this metric I won’t need to guess how long it will take me to read something and acquire new skills or knowledge. I will be able to point to it using past metrics. Doing this I will be developing new productive habits. This can go all the way to collecting metrics on how fast you can code up concepts, code up design patterns. This will make you a better worker, more efficient with your time and you will simply kill it at work!
Prediction is meaningless in the absence of measurements.
Lately I have been pushing myself to become a better typist. As a software developer, my tool is the keyboard, it makes sense that I am one with the keyboard and that I have mastered my tool of trade. I make each keystroke count and I expend little energy typing, more time thinking and letting my thoughts flow down into my fingers to become a manifestation of my creative powers. For a long time I was a peek-and-poke typist and it never dawned on me to learn to type, I spent a lot of time typing with 2 fingers and hunting for those letters on the keyboard. It felt slow and laborious and I didn’t realize how much this one thing was slowing me down and making me mentally fatigued. My keyboard today is a 60% mechanical keyboard.
You will notice a few things, it’s compact, there are no cursors keys or function keys or a number pad. Most of the time my hands hardly move. It’s all about staying still and in the zone when typing. All the keys from a regular 101 keyboard are there I just need to use a function key with another key. In the short little time I’ve owned it, about 1 month I have improved my typing speed and accuracy. I can touch type without looking down for long periods of time.
If you do what you already do, you will know what you already know.
This keyboard set me back $110, and it’s a great investment that most hackers and typist will never make for themselves. They will remain with what is familiar, they will stick to their comfort zone. They will not want to grow and they will not question what if I was better at typing, and why this even matters. I can tell you the impact is huge. In a way this is an analogy with how most people continue to stick to what they know. We’ve discuss a few things about self development. However it won’t matter much if you get stuck in a dead end job.
First don’t join a team with rock stars.
Don’t work for weak teams and weak organizations, such organizations will have one or two “rock star” type workers, they will be high achievers and will handle most of the important work load, they will not mentor, they will not explain, they will work alone and they will keep busy and look busy to avoid helping others. Yet the rock star is the go to guy?
A rock star doesn’t share the spotlight.
Why would you want to work in this environment? the team is structured for failure. A rock star by his very nature is a person who needs and wants the spotlight, they will do what it takes to keep it on them. They will readily poke holes in other people’s work, skills, and effort. The ugly side of these people is they are political animals and they will back-stab you and undermine you each chance they get. I’ve been ripped into and questioned about my greatness as a Sr. developer, mostly by people who covet power and knowledge.
Work with 8s going to 9s and 10s!
A rock star team at best will have someone who is a 6 or 7 on a scale of 10. These types of people will always hire down to a 4 or 5, they will not hire anyone who is a 7, and never will hire someone who is a 8 or 9.
To put this scale into perspective, someone just learning will be a 1, an average person will be at most a 4. The levels from 4 and 6 is full of competition between individuals, and each level up expect others to fall in line. The level from 6 to 7 is the rise of the rock star.
These type of rock star structure tend to keep the team weak while retaining all the power to themselves as the go to person. This individual will have an additive team impact. When they hire they add to themselves to get to the next level and add anyone else to take care of menial work, the kind of work that keeps you busy and your wheels spinning going nowhere.
People who are 8s and 9s want to work with others 8s and 9s and 10s, they believe in strong team structures. They believe in hiring up not down, they believe in doing the best work of their career and most of all help each other raise their level. The 8s, 9s and 10s have a multiplicative team impact, they raise the entire team up. When the team is full of 8s and 9s there is no single rock star, the team as a whole is the rock star. This keeps the team structure sound and in check. Whereas in teams of 6s and 7s people will tend to come and go and eventually these teams will implode in on themselves.
If you are at a company with high turn-overs, then management and leads are running a ship of 6s and 7s and most likely they are 6s and 7s themselves. Get this in your head, no 8, 9 or 10 will want to work with 6s and 7s, they definitely will not put up with a rock star archetype. I’ve seem this happen both at a team level when it self destructs and at a company level when it implodes and goes out of business, or there is mass lay-offs, or a department gets decimated and restructured for poor performance. Don’t waste your talent and life at these dead-pool companies, there are better places for you to be. If you choose to hang around you will be shown the door in due time and no better for your choice. Remember not choosing and not doing anything is still a choice you’re making, there is no escape from this responsibility.
Don’t forget to interview the interviews
People at interviews get stuck in the trap of believing it’s all one way, and usually they come in with a mindset that they hope they get an offer, coming from a place of hope or desperation. If you feel desperation at interviews then most likely you fall somewhere as a 3 to 5. This is a tough place to be, the good thing is no one but you knows what level you’re at. So act like you’re in the level you want to be.
The good news is everything you need to raise your game is inside you. Once you identified where you are, you will need to get to work to raise your level to where you ought to be. There are many ways you can go about doing this, which I will save for another article.
Let’s focus on interviewing for a winning role, one where you will leap-frog from a 4 to 7 during your tenure. Going to interviews is not a one way street, you must be willing to dig down into the company culture and structure. The team size matters, it should be big enough for you to get any task you can handle, yet small enough you don’t go unnoticed until end of year reviews! A team size of 4 to 6 is best. The bigger the size the lower the level of each team member, the two are inversely proportional. Next you need to ask who these individuals are, their skills level, their work experiences. Ask the interviewer for his full name, ask the manager for the names of people on the team you are being interviewed for then do your own due diligence after.
If you’re a software developer you can ask the interviewer how people share skills there? if you get a weak answer or a blank look you’re dealing with a team of 6s or 7s. Ask if they blog and read them up. Find out if they have any open source projects, go home and inspect their style of coding and design and level of mastery of a programming language. Remember this individual is interviewing you from a position of power, it’s easy to sit back with the answer but how do they really measure up, you need to be able to answer this. Determine if and how the team is involved with the open source community? what project has it contributed too and what project has it open sourced to the community? This project needs to be active, otherwise it may be from a team of people long gone. Ask the interviewer what the most challenging work he’s done, then follow it up with what’s the biggest contribution he made since joining the team! Keep digging and ask if he ever took a huge risk and failed doing something. These are all relevant questions both at a skill level and personality level, it will tell you a lot about team dynamics and cultural value. Just be sure to ask in a way that you’re curious. Take the temperature of the company and ask how would they rate their team on a level of 1 to 10? What is the lowest level on their team and what is the highest level on their team? Ask them to define what a 10 means, if they don’t ask you this first. Ask how many top performers are there on the team and what’s the biggest thing the team has achieved.
Know who you are
I’ve been to interview where the company will try to over interview for skills and intimidate you into feeling you are lucky to have been summoned to their interview for their team or company. Trust me when I tell you to run away from these organization, they are infested with people who think they are good but when you get inside you will utter, this is it, the great organization? Most of the time these tactics are employed to make you lower your asking rate sometimes even below current market rate. Please have more self respect for yourself and stay firm and true to who you are, what you bring and what you are worth.
If you don’t define yourself others will do this for you.
Never! sacrifice pay for a cool job
The hours in your life is finite, every minute has been accounted for, you must be willing to see from the end to now. So put away money for rainy days, old age and everything else that life throws at you with family, kids, and emergencies, you will have a life crisis, count on it. Don’t trade NOW for later and sell your future, that’s a fools game. All we have is NOW, everything we do in the NOW will unfold the future we live into. Take a moment now, put everything aside and think and imagine the end you want for yourself. Write your ending and live in to it.
May your life journey be full of success.
Before you go please leave me a comment, I love to know maybe I’ve helped in some small way.
