Growing up in Toronto, Richard Davis used to play a game when travelling on the streetcar with his mother. He would pick out someone with an intriguing appearance and try to guess the story of their lives. Now managing director of executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates, he uses his psychological prowess to deduce how effective people will be in their jobs, notably potential senior executives that companies are considering hiring. And he believes you can do the same using deep-dive interviews, the key elements of psychology he has identified for work and some powerful questions.
He judges people for a living. He calls the skill perceptivity: The ability to discern the character of others and reliably predict their behaviour based on what has been learned about their personality. “Good judgment is, in essence, good people judgment,” he writes in his book Good Judgment.
He has little time for behavioural interviewing, finding it rigid and rote, and also believes we have overblown the importance of emotional intelligence, or EQ, for judging how effective people will be. Emotions are important but he argues transitory so they don’t tell us long-term how a person will act in different situations. Personality traits, on the other hand, are stable and consistent and can be used to judge how effective someone will be when facing the challenges of their job.
“EQ helps us modestly understand how a person is experiencing a given situation, while perceptivity helps us robustly understand who a person is,” he writes. “If we can understand people and how they tick, and if we can learn to discern deeper personality traits by analyzing behaviour, we enjoy a decisive edge when making decisions in business and life. We can anticipate how people are likely to behave.”
A software entrepreneur asked him to assess three candidates to run the core business. While each had important character strengths, Mr. Davis found they also had personality aspects that made them unsuited to the specific job. One revered authority and would never stand up to the owner and raise objections when needed. The other two were strong strategic thinkers, but didn’t have the temperament to dig into the details and operate a complex business day-to-day; but the role was to be an operating dynamo, working for a boss who was a strategic visionary. His client rejected his advice to search again, chose one, and it didn’t work out – as predicted by the individual’s personality.
Most of us are familiar with the Big Five personality model at the heart of modern psychology: Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Mr. Davis has come up with an alternative, also five factors, more suited for the workplace while also incorporating the classic themes:
- Intellect – how people think: This covers how they process information, make decisions and solve problems. It includes how smart they are in a traditional sense, how impulsive or restrained, how analytical or intuitive. Are they decisive, focused, thorough, flexible in thinking and able to tolerate risk and ambiguity?
- Emotionality – how people express emotions: Similar to neuroticism in the Big Five, this looks at whether they lead with their emotions, for example, wearing their heart on their sleeves, or suppress their emotions and detach themselves from issues and other people. What’s their typical mood?
- Sociability – how people engage with others: Combining extroversion and agreeability from the Big Five, this focusses on communication, interpersonal capabilities and how someone gets along socially.
- Drive – why people do what they do: Are they motivated by money, fame, the chance to exert influence, the desire to serve others or some other factor? “To really understand someone, we must understand what motivates their behaviour,” he observes.
- Diligence – how people get stuff done: Similar to the Big Five’s conscientiousness, this explores the habits and capacities a person brings to performing their duties in work and life. They might be structured and disciplined, or laid back and spontaneous, for example.
He calls these facets of personality “boxes” so we will think of gathering information about people and putting each observation in the appropriate box. When preparing for a deep-dive interview, he suggests dividing a page of paper into six boxes where you can write down what you learn, the extra box for additional insights.
After also determining before the interview what is needed to be successful for the job in question, he opens by telling people his hope is to understand them better. He initially asks about their current work life, finding that the best way to build comfort and get them talking. He then goes back to their early childhood and proceeds step by step through various elements of their life, digging to find out how that contributed to their personality.
About halfway through what are normally three-hour sessions, he takes a break, allowing both parties to reflect on what has been said. “In my experience, interviewees tend to divulge more after they’ve had a chance to process what they have already said,” he writes.
His questions flow with the chronology and what is said but at some point he has some challenging but revelatory questions in his hip pocket. When somebody is mentioned who was a big influence on the individual’s life growing up, he will ask: How are you similar to this person personality-wise and how are you different? He also might inquire about the nature of their closest friends, which can be revelatory about the individual’s values.
It’s not fanciful, like the subway game. It’s rigorous, digging into the individual’s personality to determine how it fits with the job at stake.
Cannonballs
- Years ago, touring New York City with a consulting colleague who trained as an architect, Roger Martin realized the buildings he liked achieved their grandeur without making him feel small and insignificant. The former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto says scale has played a big role in business strategy over the past 60 years, with organizations becoming larger and larger, so it’s vital today that executives pursue strategies for maintaining their human scale, the intimacy of their company, regardless of how monumental they become.
- Consultant S. Chris Edmonds asks where your organizational culture falls in the five levels of workplace inspiration: Dysfunction, tension, civility, acknowledgment and validation?
- To study performance, PWC consulting looked at the goals reported by 12,000 employees at companies in various industries. They found those who set small goals regularly (daily or even hourly) are more likely than other employees to hit company performance targets and report higher morale as well. Conclusion: Companies should make goal-setting a habit for employees, helping people to see the benefits themselves and celebrate small wins.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.