Last week I came across the CV I had prepared for job applications when I first came to the UK. Wow! Talk about how such documents can take you back in time and the insights you can gain!
I was struck by the technical slant of it. Role after role, it listed the technical skills I had learnt over the years. Nothing wrong with that for an Information Technology specialist, but where were the soft skills? Communication skills, organisational skills, project, team leading and management skills I had already demonstrated? The gap was just so obvious. Without anyone to prod me and challenge me, asking what value I bring and what else I had to offer, it did not even occur to me to acknowledge those soft skills and add them to my CV.
I know I am speaking now with fourteen years of hindsight. But oh! What a disservice I did myself. It would have been so much wiser to work with someone. But no! The independent streak in me won out again.
This brings me to point number one: Never underestimate the power of working with another person. Someone who can coach you, mentor you, prod you and challenge you to bring out the best in you, the WHOLE story of you. No need to give a half-baked story like I did in my CV all those years ago. When you give the full picture, you give yourself the opportunity at the interview to tell the story that demonstrates the skill the interviewer is inquiring about, especially soft skills. And in you telling those stories, the interviewer gets a much better sense of who you are, what you stand for, what you can do and how you match what the organisation is looking for.
Stories are powerful. They give the bland facts meaning. Like the CEO who was asked to explain what it felt like to lead a large organisation in the current economic climate.
Being a very large institution, the CEO addresses several groups in and outside the organisation to share information, especially when it comes to quarterly and year-end financial results. He will paint a picture of the organisation, its financial position, market conditions past and future and show excerpts of the balance sheet and cash flow position to illustrate his point.
This is all very dry stuff for Information Technology people. It does not mean much. I guess if you had to talk to the CEO about the nitty-gritty of IT, computer operating systems, server farms, real-time processing, JAVA and so on, it would not mean much to him either.
The challenge as ever is to make it meaningful.
At one of these meetings, a woman asked: ‘So, you’ve told us about the situation, what you did and the results… Can you tell us how you feel about it?’
‘Yes,’ replied the CEO, ‘we did this with the balance sheet and that with the cash flow and the results speak for themselves.’
‘Thank you, but can you tell us how you FEEL about it all?’ the woman persisted.
Once more the CEO answered her question in terms of the balance sheet and cash flow situation. This was clearly not what she was after and she doggedly persisted with her question. After going round and round like this for a while, he finally got it.
‘I am a guy! These things don’t come to me easily; it took me a while to understand what she was asking,’ he admitted in the meeting with the Information Technology Group. Then he went on to explain:
‘Imagine climbing a hill with a heavy backpack. I am struggling, straining and sweating. I look over at the competition to see how they are doing and they seem to be going at it easily and comfortably. It makes me wonder why. Then I notice the size of their backpacks. And I notice mine. And I see that mine is bigger, much bigger than theirs.’
My source says that story gave him more insight into the man himself, the current market conditions and the organisation he is working for than the preceding presentation and all previous staff meetings on that subject. It suddenly made sense and he understood much more than ever, not in a way that he could articulate in words, but deep and meaningful none the less. Just like that, through the telling of a simple story, the CEO connected and got through to at least one person, leaving him with the intended message.
This brings me to the second point: Never underestimate the power of a story. It engages people’s hearts and minds. Yes we can agree on facts and minds meet, but it is in the meaning we give it, the story we tell, that we ignite feelings, stir up emotions and connect heart to heart. In that moment we feel understood and that we understand. That, according to Ralph Nichols, is the most basic of all human needs: the need to understand and be understood.
And the third point: Never underestimate the power of a question, no matter how silly, stupid, or irrelevant it seems to you. The question you are not asking is often in a few other minds as well. You will be doing everyone a huge favour by asking that question. Look what happened when the woman persisted with her question.
Photo Credit: RGBStock.com
