10 tips on conducting effective interviews

Consideration, planning, and communication savvy all play into the successful interview. Regardless of the issue at hand, you’ll get better results if you follow a few best practices.

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Whether you’re having a discussion with an employee about performance issues, trying to gather information about why a project failed, looking for feedback from a staff member about team dynamics, or evaluating someone for possible promotion, conducting a successful interview requires skill and planning on your part. Here are some pointers that will make it easier to get the information you need.

#1: Determine your objective

Before you schedule the interview, determine why you want to have it. What information can you gain from the interviewee? How will this information help you achieve your other goals? How will you be better off after having conducted this interview?

#2: Outline your areas

You certainly could write out the questions you plan to ask the interviewee and then read them aloud at the interview. However, this approach may make you look stilted and artificial, and it could hinder the flow of information. Furthermore, by reading your questions, you might miss nonverbal cues, such as body language, that could indicate an area for further questioning.

A better approach is to outline the general areas you want to cover. I do so at the top-right corner of the first sheet of the tablet I’m using. After I discuss an area, I cross it out.

#3: Pick the location

Meeting at the interviewee’s office may make that person more at ease. Be aware of the possibility, though, that the interviewee might instead think you are invading his or her space. In that case, a neutral location, such as a conference room, cafeteria, or even Starbucks might be more appropriate. Present these alternatives and work things out with the interviewee.

#4: Observe standards of etiquette

If you’re meeting in the interviewee’s office, knock before entering. Don’t sit down until invited to do so. During the interview, keep things to yourself. If you start invading the interviewee’s personal space (for example, by gradually taking over the person’s desk), the latter will become less willing to talk. See below for other reasons you should keep your notebook and other items near you.

#5: Open with standard rapport/small talk

Before starting the interview, take a few moments to get to know the interviewee. Ask the standard questions and make standard comments about weather or make positive comments about the meeting room or office or mementos on the interviewee’s desk. However, be careful about speculating on photographs. That child whom you think is a grandson or granddaughter might actually be a son or daughter instead. A college or high school photo of the interviewee could cause problems if you say, “You looked great back then.” Instead, keep your comments general, as in, “What a great photograph.”

Once you’ve spent a few minutes with the getting-acquainted talk, you can start transitioning to the interview. To signal this transition, shift position in your seat , begin to take out a notebook or tablet, or say something like, “I appreciate your time. As you know, I’ve come to discuss….”

#6: Distinguish open and closed questions

Open questions begin with words such as “Who,” “What,” “Where,” or “When.” That is, they give the other person a chance to give a narrative response, without being confined by the question. Such questions are good when one is seeking general or background information. Their disadvantage is that they can cause an interviewee to ramble on endlessly.

Closed questions, on the other hand, call for a specific answer, usually a “Yes” or a “No.” A person who asks a closed question is usually seeking a particular answer to a particular question. The disadvantage of closed questions is that in using them, you may be jumping too quickly to conclusions.

Both types of questions have their place during the interview. In general, begin with open questions. At this point, you want to get the big picture and to avoid jumping to conclusions or making wrong assumptions. When you ask open questions, you allow the other person to bring up matters you then can focus on more specifically.

As the interview progresses, use closed questions either to confirm your understanding or to explore in more depth the matter being discussed. You can also use closed questions to help control the rambling interviewee. If you think you know the point he or she is making, cut to the chase by asking a question such as, “So if I understand, your point is that…”? If you’re right, the person will agree, and you will have saved time. If you’re wrong, the person will let you know, and (you hope) will summarize the point quickly.

#7: Use notations to record impressions

When I take notes, I draw a vertical line one-third from the left of the page. On the right side, I will record the interviewee’s comments. On the left side, I will record impressions and reactions, and reminders of things I should follow up on. In particular, if I hear something that clashes with what I already know or have been told, I will note the comment accordingly.

Be careful about your notations, though. People can read upside down. If you write “ridiculous” on the left side, the other person may take offense. A better alternative is to develop your own set of codes — one for “ridiculous,” another for “follow up,” etc.

#8: Hide your notepad and pen

Try to hide your notepad and pen while you’re writing. Rather than write on a table or desk, keep the pad and pen in your lap so that the interviewee can’t see any notations you’ve made. Furthermore, the person won’t be able to see whether you’re writing anything at all. If the interviewee sees you writing in reaction to some comments and not others, it might affect what he or she is saying or planning to say.

#9: Use tact when exploring sensitive issues

You may be conducting an interview to determine the cause of some high profile problem or failure. Perhaps you’re interviewing someone who either caused the problem or is connected to it. In this case, tact and diplomacy are important, not only from a courtesy standpoint, but more pragmatically, to maximize the chances you get the information you are seeking.

Be careful about the word “you,” because its overuse can make people feel defensive. Instead of saying, for example, “What factors led you to make that decision?” consider a passive construction, such as, “What factors led to the making of that decision?” Similarly, a hypothetical construction can soften a question, such as, “What might have caused the accident?”

I’m not saying you always have to use such techniques. Rather, I’m recommending that you consider such alternatives before asking your questions.

#10: Contradict with caution

Be careful when confronting an interviewee who gives you contradictory information. That person might be innocently mistaken or might have recalled things incorrectly. Calling him or her a liar will hardly endear you, and it certainly won’t advance the interview. Instead, consider a statement such as, “That’s interesting, because I’ve heard different things from other people….” Making this kind of statement signals that you may not disagree, but that the other interviewees might. You could go one step further and adopt the Columbo approach — namely, pleading ignorance and lack of familiarity, then asking the interviewee to explain differences with you have heard elsewhere.

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Calvin Sun works with organizations in the areas of customer service, communications, and leadership. His Web site is http://www.calvinsun.com and his e-mail address is csun@calvinsun.com.

The 7 most important communication skills an IT leader should have

Everyone wants to tell IT pros that they need to develop people skills, but no one really tells what those skills are. Here are the most important skills an IT leader should have and how to develop them.

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You hear the advice everywhere: IT pros need to learn how to communicate in order to become leaders in their fields. What so many of the sources of that advice fail to do is define the magnitude of what is meant by the word communicate and how one goes about learning how to do it.

I found a book that does a pretty good job in breaking down the different aspects of communication. The book, Leading IT Transformation: The Roadmap for Success, actually refers to communication as “human interaction skills,” a term I’m not exactly fond of because it sounds like the person who is doing the learning isn’t exactly human to start with. But the points the book makes therein are valid.

Here are the most important communication skills IT leaders and their staff need to have or develop:

Audience profile

The book stresses how important it is to know the history your IT department has with its end-users. They may be enthusiastic about new initiatives or they may be leery because they feel they’ve been burned in the past. The expectations of your clients color how you will enter into a situation.

Listening

The book makes a great statement on this topic: “Incorrect assumptions are the bane of any listener.” I’d go further and say incorrect assumptions are the bane of the speaker too. Do you know how many opportunities there are in the average conversation for meaning to be misconstrued? Seemingly unimportant words can put a sentence’s meaning in a totally different light. Let’s take the word up. If you had a client who said he wanted a system up in two weeks, would he mean up and tested and ready for prime time? Or would he mean live but with the understanding there would be bugs to be worked out? You have to clarify or else you’ll run the chance of having a dissatisfied client.

Empathy

I think if everyone had the innate ability to automatically put themselves into someone else’s shoes, the world would be a better place. You don’t have to agree with everyone, but you have to be able to understand why they feel like they do. The book says this is the IT pro’s Achilles Heel: “Too often, the IT pro’s gut instinct is to defend himself or herself, cut off the other person or flat out make them wrong. But being effective isn’t about the right answer. IT others can’t hear what you have to say because of how you deliver the message, you’ve lost your ability to influence.”

You can demonstrate empathy by simply paraphrasing what the speaker has said or acknowledging the idea before you add your two cents worth.

Diplomacy

Let’s face it, sometimes your clients are just out and out wrong. But if you come barging in with that attitude, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to learn how to disagree in a way that makes the person you’re talking to not be defensive. And sometimes you have to help that person save face. Say something like, “I completely understand why we gave that impression but…” or “You make good points, but if you look at it this way…”

Avoiding emotional hooks

Now what do you do if the person you’re dealing with isn’t diplomatic and refuses to validate your side of the issue? Your first reaction is probably going to be to push back with the same obstinacy and that will get you absolutely nowhere fast. Try to step back and not take the other person’s words personally.

Educating without arrogance

A common failing of IT pros is the perception that everyone is as technically knowledgeable as they are. This can develop into an arrogance toward those people who don’t. You don’t see the marketing staff rolling their eyes and sighing loudly because you don’t know what an ansoff matrix is. The fact is, everyone has their own area of expertise. The IT leader is a valuable resource to have at the big table because you have knowledge that the others probably don’t. But don’t hold that against them.

It’s not just about playing well with others. It’s about developing communications styles that don’t alienate the very people you’ll need to have in your corner when you want new initiatives to pass. It may be your knee-jerk reaction of yours to lose patience when one of your colleagues just “doesn’t get it.” But know that it may eventually be a knee-jerk reaction on the part of that same colleague when asked to reject one of your proposals. This brings us to the last communication skill…

Rapport building

From the book: “The bottom line is that people are much more willing to give others the benefit of the doubt if they feel a mutual connection.” Understand that the users of the technology you implement and maintain are people. If you go out of your way not to speak to these people or develop some kind of rapport, then you’re losing out on a good opportunity. I’m not asking you to take everyone to lunch, but don’t be afraid or averse to just shooting the breeze with someone.

Before I got into IT publishing, I worked at two separate companies where I was almost afraid of the IT pros. In both places the IT pros in charge of the service desk seemed to be surrounded by au aura of hostility. They would practically snap my head off if I couldn’t adequately explain an issue I was having with my computer.

If you want to succeed as an IT leader you have to shed this tendency. The rapport you build with the other departments in your comp will go a long way toward the goal of success.

Five things your boss doesn’t want to hear

If you’d like to develop a better relationship with your CIO, you might want to check out this list of things your boss doesn’t want to hear.

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Mary K. Pratt wrote a good article for Computerworld after she asked a group of 2008 Premier 100 IT Leaders to talk about the kinds of messages they never want to hear from their staffers.

Here’s the list she compiled from the conversations:

Don’t talk only about the technology and not about the business. These CIOs say that technology-for-technology’s-sake won’t get you far. You should couch any technology discussions in terms of what it would mean to the business.

Don’t be too enamored with one solution. Most IT people have a technology preference (just witness some of the fights we’ve had in TechRepublic’s forum over the years about Linux vs. Windows). Be open to all solutions.

Don’t operate from the stance that something is impossible. No CIO wants to hear this word. A task may be insurmountable, but the best way to get that across is to present the challenges in a logical way. Let the CIO come to the conclusion about whether it’s still worth pursuing.

CIOs don’t want to hear you express bad opinions about your colleagues. CIOs want their employees to work out problems on their own.

No surprises. This seems a little contradictory to point number 4 to me. Pratt quotes Ian S. Patterson, CIO at Scottrade Inc., a St. Louis-based online brokerage firm, as saying he “always prefers to hear news — good and bad — directly from his workers.” How would one address the fact that a colleague may be causing delays in a project without expressing a bad opinion? I guess it’s all in the way you say it.

Sanity check: Five reasons why Windows Vista failed

On Friday, Microsoft gave computer makers a six-month extension for offering Windows XP on newly-shipped PCs. While this doesn’t impact enterprise IT — because volume licensing agreements will allow IT to keep installing Windows XP for many years to come — the move is another symbolic nail in Vista’s coffin.

The public reputation of Windows Vista is in shambles, as Microsoft itself tacitly acknowledged in its Mojave ad campaign.

IT departments are largely ignoring Vista. In June (18 months after Vista’s launch), Forrester Research reported that just 8.8% of enterprise PCs worldwide were running Vista. Meanwhile, Microsoft appears to have put Windows 7 on an accelerated schedule that could see it released in 2010. That will provide IT departments with all the justification they need to simply skip Vista and wait to eventually standardize on Windows 7 as the next OS for business.

So how did Vista get left holding the bag? Let’s look at the five most important reasons why Vista failed.

5. Apple successfully demonized Vista

Apple’s clever I’m a Mac ads have successfully driven home the perception that Windows Vista is buggy, boring, and difficult to use. After taking two years of merciless pummeling from Apple, Microsoft recently responded with it’s I’m a PC campaign in order to defend the honor of Windows. This will likely restore some mojo to the PC and Windows brands overall, but it’s too late to save Vista’s perception as a dud.

4. Windows XP is too entrenched

In 2001, when Windows XP was released, there were about 600 million computers in use worldwide. Over 80% of them were running Windows but it was split between two code bases: Windows 95/98 (65%) and Windows NT/2000 (26%), according to IDC. One of the big goals of Windows XP was to unite the Windows 9x and Windows NT code bases, and it eventually accomplished that.

In 2008, there are now over 1.1 billion PCs in use worldwide and over 70% of them are running Windows XP. That means almost 800 million computers are running XP, which makes it the most widely installed operating system of all time. That’s a lot of inertia to overcome, especially for IT departments that have consolidated their deployments and applications around Windows XP.

And, believe it or not, Windows XP could actually increase its market share over the next couple years. How? Low-cost netbooks and nettops are going to be flooding the market. While these inexpensive machines are powerful enough to provide a solid Internet experience for most users, they don’t have enough resources to run Windows Vista, so they all run either Windows XP or Linux. Intel expects this market to explode in the years ahead. (For more on netbooks and nettops, see this fact sheet and this presentation — both are PDFs from Intel.)

3. Vista is too slow

For years Microsoft has been criticized by developers and IT professionals for “software bloat” — adding so many changes and features to its programs that the code gets huge and unwieldy. However, this never seemed to have enough of an effect to impact software sales. With Windows Vista, software bloat appears to have finally caught up with Microsoft.

Vista has over 50 million lines of code. XP had 35 million when it was released, and since then it has grown to about 40 million. This software bloat has had the effect of slowing down Windows Vista, especially when it’s running on anything but the latest and fastest hardware. Even then, the latest version of Windows XP soundly outperforms the latest version of Microsoft Vista. No one wants to use a new computer that is slower than their old one.

2. There wasn’t supposed to be a Vista

It’s easy to forget that when Microsoft launched Windows XP it was actually trying to change its OS business model to move away from shrink-wrapped software and convert customers to software subscribers. That’s why it abandoned the naming convention of Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000, and instead chose Windows XP.

The XP stood for “experience” and was part of Microsoft’s .NET Web services strategy at the time. The master plan was to get users and businesses to pay a yearly subscription fee for the Windows experience — XP would essentially be the on-going product name but would include all software upgrades and updates, as long as you paid for your subscription. Of course, it would disable Windows on your PC if you didn’t pay. That’s why product activation was coupled with Windows XP.

Microsoft released Windows XP and Office XP simultaneously in 2001 and both included product activation and the plan to eventually migrate to subscription products. However, by the end of 2001 Microsoft had already abandoned the subscription concept with Office, and quickly returned to the shrink-wrapped business model and the old product development model with both products.

The idea of doing incremental releases and upgrades of its software — rather than a major shrink-wrapped release every 3-5 years — was a good concept. Microsoft just couldn’t figure out how to make the business model work, but instead of figuring out how to get it right, it took the easy route and went back to an old model that was simply not very well suited to the economic and technical realities of today’s IT world.

1. It broke too much stuff

One of the big reasons that Windows XP caught on was because it had the hardware, software, and driver compatibility of the Windows 9x line plus the stability and industrial strength of the Windows NT line. The compatibility issue was huge. Having a single, highly-compatible Windows platform simplified the computing experience for users, IT departments, and software and hardware vendors.

Microsoft either forgot or disregarded that fact when it released Windows Vista, because, despite a long beta period, a lot of existing software and hardware were not compatible with Vista when it was released in January 2007. Since many important programs and peripherals were unusable in Vista, that made it impossible for a lot of IT departments to adopt it. Many of the incompatibilities were the result of tighter security.

After Windows was targeted by a nasty string of viruses, worms, and malware in the early 2000s, Microsoft embarked on the Trustworthy Computing initiative to make its products more secure. One of the results was Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), which won over IT and paved the way for XP to become the world’s mostly widely deployed OS.

The other big piece of Trustworthy Computing was the even-further-locked-down version of Windows that Microsoft released in Vista. This was definitely the most secure OS that Microsoft had ever released but the price was user-hostile features such as UAC, a far more complicated set of security prompts that accompanied many basic tasks, and a host of software incompatibility issues. In order words, Vista broke a lot of the things that users were used to doing in XP.

Bottom line

There are some who argue that Vista is actually more widely adopted than XP was at this stage after its release, and that it’s highly likely that Vista will eventually replace XP in the enterprise. I don’t agree. With XP, there were clear motivations to migrate: bring Windows 9x machines to a more stable and secure OS and bring Windows NT/2000 machines to an OS with much better hardware and software compatibility. And, you also had the advantage of consolidating all of those machines on a single OS in order to simplify support.

With Vista, there are simply no major incentives for IT to use it over XP. Security isn’t even that big of an issue because XP SP2 (and above) are solid and most IT departments have it locked down quite well. As I wrote in the article Prediction: Microsoft will leapfrog Vista, release Windows 7 early, and change its OS business, Microsoft needs to abandon the strategy of releasing a new OS every 3-5 years and simply stick with a single version of Windows and release updates, patches, and new features on a regular basis. Most IT departments are essentially already on a subscription model with Microsoft so the business strategy is already in place there.

As far as the subscription model goes for small businesses and consumers, instead of disabling Windows on a user’s PC if they don’t renew their subscription, just don’t allow that machine to get any more updates until they renew. Microsoft could also work with OEMs to sell something like a three-year subscription to Windows with every a new PC. Then users would have the choice of renewing on their own after that.