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Don’t focus solely on skill
Every leader’s number one question when doing job interviews is, “Is this person actually going to be good at the work, and are they going to be effective in this culture?” So what most leaders do is they look to past experience as an indicator of future potential. That turns out to be a horrible idea.
There was a meta-analysis, a study of studies, looking at data from thousands of people doing hundreds of different jobs, every study that had ever been done looking at the relationship between past work experience and future job performance. And empirically, the average correlation between experience and performance is .06. Statistically, there is not a meaningful relationship between how many years of experience people have in a job and how well they do that job.
If somebody has 20 years of work experience in a job, you don’t know whether they actually have 20 years of learning or whether they just have done the same year 20 times in a row. So what most of us do to try to get closer to future potential is we look at past performance, thinking if you’ve been good at the job before, you’re probably going to be good at it again.
But that doesn’t really work that well either. Number one, you may not have done the job in the past, and so you may not have relevant performance data. Number two, past performance is often a signal of your ability level or your initial talent, not your ability to learn. We don’t want to know how good you are today. We want to know how motivated and capable you are of learning tomorrow.
Consider 2 key factors
In the NFL draft, there was a quarterback who was deemed too slow and too weak to make it. He can’t throw very far either. And a bunch of scouts say this guy is never going to succeed in the NFL. Now, you probably know this quarterback’s name. His name is Tom Brady.
Tom Brady was picked after nearly 200 players because his physical abilities were not that great. And looking back, a bunch of scouts said, “You know, we missed his potential because we failed to open up his chest and look at his heart. We failed to measure his spine. We failed to account for nerves of steel.”
And I think this is the systematic mistake that leaders and managers make when they hire, is they focus a lot on skill. What they don’t consider is motivation and opportunity. Motivation drives how far you can go with your existing level of talent. And opportunity drives whether you actually have the chance to work on your skills. So what Brady lacked in physical talent, he obviously made up in motivation and drive. I think if we bring this into an organizational setting, what I want to know is what is your motivation and capability to learn?
Assess for motivation and capability to learn
So if I’m interviewing as a leader, I don’t just want to look at your past experience or your past performance. I want to get closer to your future potential by setting you up with an opportunity to learn and then seeing how motivated and capable you are of overcoming a challenge that I put in front of you.
There’s a powerful example at an organization called Call Yachol. It’s an Israeli call center that hires people with disabilities. And they want to know whether you can keep your cool when a customer calls in with a whole bunch of complaints. They could challenge you to try to learn the products and services that people are complaining about and then, you know, a bunch of weeks later bring you in and see how well you can handle complaints in that realm. But they want to do this efficiently. So they give you a task to learn that’s already a little bit familiar to you. They ask you to talk with one of their employees who’s playing the role of a teenager who does not want to put down their phone at dinner. And the teenager’s complaining, like, “This should not be a phone-free meal. I need to be texting my friends.” And your job is to try to calmly reason with the teenager and figure out whether you can get them to actually go along with the family plan.
At the end of the exercise, the interviewer has a clear sense of your ability to keep your cool, your thoughtfulness, your persuasiveness. And most of us would stop there and say if you did a great job, you’re hired. If not, sorry, but you’re not a fit for us. Call Yachol says, “No, we want to look at your ability to learn. So we’re going to ask you, “How do you think you did?” And then if you weren’t happy with your performance, we’re going to give you a do-over. And that way, we can gauge your growth from the first round to the second. What if every interview did that?
What if in every interview, instead of gauging people based on their ability in their first answer, we gave them a chance to do a second response, and then we gauge their growth from the initial one to the do-over? It’s such a powerful way to see people’s potential as opposed to just judge their performance.