GROUP DYNAMICS/TEAM WORK/LEADERSHIP

1. Most people do not really analyse how their team/group is different from some others that they use for comparison. Structures, hierarchies, interdependence etc make teams and groups unique. A basketball team requires great interdependence between members. There is an element of sacrifice involved, purely for the sake of others. On the other hand, members of a boxing team have no interdependence. Boxers of the same team, but representing different categories ( Flyweight, Bantam weight, Heavy weight etc ) have no interaction among themselves. There are absolutely no requirements of trust or sacrifice. Since the basketball and boxing teams operate in totally different environments, you can not copy the coaching style of one into another.

2. Most team leaders maintain that since high spirit and morale are co-terminus with job success, developing these will ensure success on the job. While it may be true to a degree, mostly these conditions are the result of success rather than the causes of it. Explaining this concept here is difficult, but I stand by it. In my army command, I have seen too many units making the mistake of offering sops etc just to ‘increase morale’, in the hope of finally improving job performance. Smart units, however, take measures to ensure ‘initial success on the job’ to increase morale and they do it by ensuring individual accountability and systematically correcting the process. The movie ‘12 0’ Clock High’, which I screen in my programs, makes this point excellently.

INTERVIEWING SKILLS

1. Preparation - Most interviewers jump too quickly to actual interviewing. They spend very little time in studying the CV, matching it with the job and looking for the focus areas for that specific candidate. On probing, their reasons for this comes out as one or more of the following –
1. They just do not have the time.
2. They see no need to ‘waste’ time on getting to know what to look for in the candidate. Isn’t the job profile, as handed over by the HR, good enough?
3. No guidance is available to them to match a CV with a Job profile.

2. Validity & Reliability - Most interviewers do not understand these essential requirements of a good interview. On these, they make the following errors –
1. Validity – Many interviewers ask questions purely for the sake of asking, without considering whether or not it is a valid question. A valid question is one which actually checks the aspect whatever it is supposed to be check. Here, an important derivative of validity comes to mind. Not only should the question be checking what it is supposed to check, the aspect being checked should actually be contributing to job success. It is possible to end up asking questions which do check what they purport to check, but the aspects being checked have nothing or very little relation to job success. What a waste!
2. Reliability – An interviewing process would be termed reliable if the evaluation ratings by two interviewers to the same response are not too different one from the other. Alternately, the same response given by two candidates separately to an interviewer must not get significantly different ratings. Reliability increases when the possible responses to a question are considered beforehand and graded on a scale. On first thoughts, such a system appears too mechanistic to many. When it happens in my sessions, I ask them a pointed question - How would they react to an interviewing process in which the result depended not so much on their own responses but on who ( Mr X or Mr Y ) happened to be the interviewer? Most people see the point immediately.

3. Approaches to framing questions - Most interviewers do not understand the various approaches to framing questions. They just take up the CV and start a conversation. Actually, there are distinctly 3 approaches to framing questions, each having its own strengths & weaknesses for different interviewing scenarios-
1. The TELL ME approach – Behavioural approach and the Situational approach.
2. The biography/ behavioural signs approach
3. The SHOW ME ( Job audition, job simulation ) approach.