How to Interview Your Next Boss

Job hunting is stressful. If you're working and job-hunting, you're anxious to make your move. If you're not working, you're under pressure to get a new job fast. As a job-seeker it's easy to forget that you're making as big a decision as your next employer is.

If a manager hires you and doesn't like your brand of jazz, he can cut you loose and find someone new. That will cost money and time, but those are costs of doing business. If you take a job working for the wrong person, it can damage your resume and destroy your mojo. If you've ever worked for someone you didn't mesh with, you know exactly what I mean.

On a job interview, you're interviewing your next boss as surely as he or she is interviewing you. Your job is not to impress anyone. If you're focused on making a good impression, you'll be out of your body, evaluating your own performance, rather than squarely in your body, being yourself. In "Please like me" mode, you'll contort yourself into pretzel shapes trying to say things the hiring manager will like. That's beneath you.

Your job is to stay yourself on a job interview whether the hiring manager likes you or not. If you aren't a particular manager's cup of tea, you haven't failed -- you've dodged a bullet. Only the people who get you deserve you, after all.

Your job on an interview is twofold. You've got to learn enough about the job opening -- and particularly about the business pain behind the job, the pressing problem that warrants an expenditure of precious salary dollars - to be able to gauge whether you and this job are a good match.

Of course, the good match can't just happen in your mind. If you decide that you'd love this job and thrive in it, you've got to make that connection clear to the hiring manager. You'll do that by telling mini-stories. At Human Workplace we call them Dragon-Slaying Stories, because they show your prospective next boss how you slew dragons very much like the ones circling his or her castle right now.

A Dragon-Slaying Story has a simple format. It starts with the problem your current or previous employer was facing, moves on to the solution you found, and ends by explaining why your dragon-slaying move was exactly what the situation called for. Here's an example:

MANAGER: I know you've managed trade shows. We've got a big bottleneck getting new sales leads to the sales team after shows. Have you been around that process?

YOU: Absolutely - I look after that process now. Last year, we ramped up our trade show presence and had the same issue -- a bottleneck, and leads going cold because we couldn't get back to them.

MANAGER: What did you do?

YOU: We couldn't keep feeding leads into a blocked pipeline. Our inside sales guys were swamped, which is a good thing, but there's no use pushing on a rope. We jury-rigged an email campaign that got the trade show leads sorted into High, Medium and Low priority groups based on the prospect's responses. Then I was able to make a case to the sales managers that their inside guys should drop other projects to call the High Priority leads. Two of our territories doubled their sales, and the others had big jumps.

MANAGER: What did you do with the lower-priority leads?

YOU: They got a bunch of email drips and calls to action, and we left the rest up to them. We toyed with the idea of getting some temps on board to call them, but we ended up using email to convert about twenty-five percent of them. The rest are still getting drips.

MANAGER: I like your practical outlook.

Now your hiring manager knows how you roll. Dragon-Slaying Stories will make that part of your job easy. But what about your other priority - learning enough about the job, the company, your personal opportunity in this organization and your potential boss's style to decide whether or not you even want the job?

How do you interview your next boss as he or she is interviewing you?

Here's how.

It's important to mention that this technique, like everything we teach at Human Workplace, is powered by personal mojo. It is sometimes frustrating for smart but change-averse people to realize that the Whole Person Job Search approach we teach at Human Workplace relies less on intellect than on finding your voice in the moment.

That is the one thing that many brilliant, talented professionals fear to do. They are hesitant to try. They've staked their self-image on their Good Boy or Good Girl credentials. They're not used to stepping outside the velvet ropes, and saying or doing unexpected things.

Yet finding your voice in a job interview, like using your influence at work, is not a radical thing to do. It is a matter of remembering your value in the talent equation.

If your mojo is low, you're likely to scoff and say "I can't interview my next manager! How absurd! I'm a job seeker, and I have no power. Liz Ryan is crazy." I understand that reaction, because I hear it all the time.

The Reactionometer below predicts this very reaction. In fear, people think "No! I can't do that!" As their flame grows, they think "Maybe I can do that!"

If my advice seems extreme, check your mojo level. Job-seekers interview their hiring managers all day long -- someone is doing it as you read these words.

Someone is doing it in Hong Kong, and someone else in Poland. People are finding their voices all over the world.

If you don't feel ready to do it yourself at this moment, don't despair! We are all growing new muscles and mojo for the new-millennium workplace. We are doing it together. That's what Human Workplace is all about.

You can interview your next boss to a greater or lesser degree depending on your mojo level. If you happen to have a job interview on a day when your flame is high, you can interview your next boss more aggressively. If you interview on a low-mojo day, use our Low Power setting (below).

Don't try to interview your next boss in a panel interview or one where the questions are highly scripted. If you see your next manager reading from a script in his hands, you may have difficulty getting him off the script.