Image Credit: Martin Cron
As IT managers, it is our responsibility to use our IT manager skills to build the best team that we possibly can. We’re going to be asking a lot from our team in terms of being able to deliver complex projects quickly and efficiently. This means that the people we invite to become members of our team will need to be the best of the best. The challenge that we often face is that in the traditional interview process it can be very difficult to use our IT manager training to determine if someone would be a good match for our team. What’s an IT manager to do?
It’s All About Chemistry
When we sit down with someone who is interviewing to join our team, we need to quickly determine if they are going to be a good fit. There are, of course, several characteristics that we can all pick up on easily that will tell us that someone may not be the right choice for our team: lack of eye contact, mumbling, and an inability to answer our questions. However, the bigger question is if they are not clearly the wrong person, are they still not a good fit?
It turns out that what is important is how you react to the person in the first few minutes of meeting them. The burden of making a connection is really on their shoulders. What the candidate needs to be able to do is to create a unique form of interpersonal chemistry called rapport. There are a number of different professions that have this ability: bartenders, retail employees, stand-up comedians, and police investigators.
The time period that the candidate has to create a sense of rapport with you is very limited. They have the amount of time from when they first greet you with a handshake until the time that they take a seat across from you to create this chemistry. This is the time for them to show their personality.
What Makes A Good Candidate For Your Team
When someone is interviewing with you for a position on your team, it’s going to help if they have taken the time to do their homework. This can be as simple as finding out if the person that they’ll be talking with likes to engage in small talk before an interview starts. If it turns out that they are talking with a person who is a task-orientated person who doesn’t like to waste time, then skipping the banter and getting right to the point will be the correct course of action.
What a candidate is going to have to accomplish during an interview with you is to quickly find some elements that they can use to create common ground between the two of you. If they can accomplish this, then they’ll be able to create a spark of trust between the two of you. The goal has to be create an early sense of connection.
When it comes time to evaluate if someone is the right person to join your team, it’s going to come down to the amount of rapport that you feel with them during the interview process. The more rapport that they are going to be able to create between the two of you, will have a very unique influence on your willingness to allow them to join your team. Having the right skills for the job is important, but being able to create the correct chemistry with you may be even more important.
What All Of This Means For You
As an IT manager you have the responsibility to build the best team that you can. Part of this process has to do with the interviewing and selecting of candidates that you think will make a good addition to your team and will allow you to do IT team building. This can be a tough task to accomplish. Many candidates may look promising during an interview, but will turn out to not have what is needed to contribute to your team. IT managers need to be able to select the right people to join their team.
In order to pick the right person, you need to understand that it’s going to be all about chemistry. In the first few minutes of meeting someone they are going to have to be able to create rapport with you. They have very little time to make this happen. By the time that they are seated across from you, they need to have been able to connect with you.
Picking the right person to join your team can be a real challenge. They need to have done their homework in order to find out how you want to be talked to. While they are talking with you, they need to quickly find some common ground between the two of you to build on. Ultimately, the success that a candidate has will come down to how much rapport they are able to build between them and you.
When we are selecting people to join our team, we want to be able to judge their ability to work well with the rest of our team. This can be difficult to do. What we need to understand is that the best candidates are the ones who are able to quickly use chemistry to build rapport with us. When we find them, these are the candidates that are going to make our teams even better than they already are.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™
Question For You: Do you think that there is any way to measure the amount of rapport that someone is able to build with you?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
Let’s face it. Not all IT managers have the IT manager skills to be good bosses. However, for those of us who are, when we encounter one who is not, generally speaking we all have the same thought: just exactly how are they holding on to their job? I think that we can all agree that a boss who mistreats their workers should be fired. However, sometimes this doesn’t happen. Why not?