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Leading with Emotional Intelligence E-Zine - Issue No. 26/July 2008

Dear Reader,

Are you challenged with hiring great talents? Is creativity something you look for in your candidates?

If you answer any of these two questions with yes, then we might be able to support you in two ways:

1) Please read Sebastien's article below which looks at hiring from a quite unique angle

2) We are currently supporting the launch of a new and innovative assessment solution designed to revolutionize how hiring is done. If you want to know more, send an email to
successful-hiring@progressu.com
with the subject line "Assess for Success" and we'll send you more info on what this is all about.

Let's keep progressing!

Charlie Lang
Executive Coach and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.
Author of The Groupness Factor

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HIRING PEOPLE YOU DON’T LIKE!

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by Sebastien Henry,Executive Coach & Trainer Emotional Intelligence Expert for Progress-U Ltd.

I just finished reading a very thought-provoking book called “Weird Ideas That Work - How To Build a Creative Company” by Stanford professor Robert Sutton.

This month, I would like to share with you one insight I found in that book. It is one interesting application of Emotional Intelligence to the hiring process.

The “weird idea” is presented by Sutton in a provocative way: hire people you don't like!

The key idea here is to learn to overcome our negative feelings when interviewing people for a new position, and when appropriate, to hire people we don’t like on a personal level and don’t feel comfortable with.

This doesn’t seem to make much sense, but there is a strong rationale for this.

Basically, this suggestion is based on the findings that, as managers, 1) we have a strong bias towards hiring people we like and 2) people we like most are people who look like and function like us.

The assertion that people we like most are people who look like us and function like us is well established in psychology experiments. It is also the base for the concept of matching in Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (NLP), an innovative psychology approach developed in the 70s.

The concept of matching fully takes into account this assertion. The corollary is that, if we want people to like us, we can make a conscious effort to look more like them.

This includes the way we dress, speak (speed, tone of voice, words we use, level of language), and move our body (body language).

Another powerful implication is that we dislike certain people simply because they don’t look and function like us.

As managers, we tend to follow our own preferences, and recruit people who have similar styles to ours because we appreciate them more during the recruiting process.

But hiring people who function differently from us could be very good for our company and for our team.

Creating more diversity in our team by hiring people who have different styles (the way they think and behave) could be very good to the company.  They tend to see things we don’t see, and to do things we would not normally do, and this can eventually lead to more creativity.

However, personally, I think one aspect where diversity is not desirable is in values.  As an executive coach, I have seen the importance of making sure that you and your people share your company’s core values.

Sutton makes a very good point when he mentions that the only argument in favor of this “weird idea” is that…it works!

On the other hand, he is right to acknowledge that it is challenging to implement since it involves our guts and emotions.

Sutton recommends to his readers the book that was a landmark in the field of Emotional Intelligence: “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goldman.*

One idea that is strongly documented in Goldman’s book, and that is used by Sutton, is that sometimes emotions “highjack” our logical thinking.

With reference to our topic of recruiting, this means that we may – with more or less awareness – write a candidate off after just a few minutes in the interview because we don’t like him or her.

We keep asking questions out of politeness (after all, this candidate made it all the way to our office), but have made our decision that there is no way we are going to hire him or her.

The challenge for us here is to identify this decision as it is: an emotional reaction that may not necessarily make sense when looking at the kind of candidate you need for the job.

What are we supposed to do, then? Put our emotional reaction on the side and go on with the interview with an open mind, looking at criteria that you selected as essential for the position.

This certainly requires discipline, as negative feelings can be very difficult to overcome. But it may really be worth it, especially if you need more creativity in your team.

Warmly,

Sebastien

*This is a book I reviewed in the Review of Books on Emotional Intelligence, which appeared in one issue of this E-zine.  If you would like to receive a copy, simply e-mail me.

Feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss the content of this article. I am passionate about this issue and always enjoy sharing views and ideas.

For more information related to Progress-U Leadership Training and Coaching, please click here.

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