Do's And Don'ts For Persuading Public Officials To Hire You During The All-Important Interview
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This article originally appeared in the October 1997 issue of Consensus, a newspaper published jointly by the Consensus Building Institute and the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program. |
We all wonder what goes on in those interview rooms before we enter and after we leave. Well, that’s where I often find myself. I am an assistant professor of environmental conflict, public participation, and public policy at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. I am also an environmental policy analyst in the New York state senate. I have experienced environmental disputes from just about every perspective and role, and I am often invited by federal and state agencies to be a part of teams set up to review proposals and interview candidates for dispute resolution contracts.
No matter how highly ranked your proposal may be when you enter the interview room, what happens during that interview can affect your prospects for landing the job. Time and again I’ve watched top contenders fade and underdogs emerge victoriously.
So what should you do to maximize your chances for success? Although the interview is an opportunity for you to check out the project and consider whether you can work with the hiring parties, your main job is to impress upon them the merit of your proposal and the superior applicability of your talents and skills.
This isn’t just about presenting what you plan to do if you are selected. The interview is a rhetorical act. By rhetorical, I don’t mean lies or manipulative hot air. The interview is a persuasive process, and the interviewee should use all available, ethical ways of influencing people. The interview should be a deliberate, polished attempt to overcome obstacles, with a specific audience, towards a particular goal.
How can you accomplish this? How can you persuade your potential clients to embrace the collaborative process you are recommending and choose you to organize and manage it? This involves a great deal of preparation. It involves carefully reflecting on such elements of presentation as your purpose, audience, persona, tone, structure, supporting materials, and strategies.
Anticipate your audience
I call paying attention to those factors being “rhetorically sensitive.” It
means being acutely aware of your audience’s experiences, views, fears, likes,
dislikes, and egos. It requires framing and delivering your message so they can hear it,
understand it, and accept it.
Most candidates package proposals based on their own ideas, with little consideration for the audience’s concerns. But those concerns may be obstacles you need to overcome.
I work most often with state and federal agency officials, and sometimes with industry representatives. On any given interview team, there will usually be a broad continuum of familiarity and comfort levels with a more inclusive, consensus-based approach to decision-making. The cheerleaders of the process are invaluable, but they are not the audience for your interview performance. It’s the skeptics you need to convince.
Consider what makes some public officials skeptical. First, many are used to administering their duties according to regulations, timelines, and protocols. To some, mediation sounds “touchy-feely” and “mushy.”
Also, some public officials have suffered bad experiences dealing with hostile publics or dug-in stakeholders. They may resent the potential that mediation offers for preventing or resolving disputes that they could not. Some may be afraid that your involvement will be seen as a sign of their inability to deal with the situation at hand.
Perhaps most importantly, some public officials fear losing control. Because many of the issues in environmental challenges are scientific and highly technical—and because many agencies and businesses abide by a command-and-control culture—some officials will fear that their expert status and decision-making authority will be challenged or invalidated.
A rhetorically sensitive practitioner takes these fears into account, then frames his or her message to ease them. An interviewee doomed to fail doesn’t consider what fears the potential clients may have.
I was on the interview team that was looking for one or more mediators to manage a multi-party dialogue about an extensive clean-up project in a conservative rural area. A two-person practitioner team sat at one end of a long table, facing the six interviewers. One of the practitioners (whom I’ll call Smith) had an effective persona throughout the interview. His semi-relaxed and friendly manner mitigated the physical distance between interviewers and interviewees. Smith’s body language was open, his gaze was constant, and he leaned forward as he did the main part of the presentation in an even-paced, comprehensive delivery.
The officials liked Smith, felt he understood their situation, and were leaning towards his team’s proposal, until the follow-up questions. When the interviewers asked Smith typical control-issue questions such as, “What if such-and-such happens?” and “What role for us?” Smith’s dogmatic responses scuttled his team’s chances.
“We know how to do this kind of process,” Smith asserted. “There’s a way, a formula, that we know works in situations like this, and that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to follow it.” What role would the agencies play? “Unless you’re at the table,” Smith insisted, “we won’t take the project.”
The agency officials were incredulous. They were willing to listen to why they should consider a more participatory role, but they were reluctant to be told what to do right away in such an absolute fashion. Besides, the officials felt Smith was suggesting they would need to commit to decisions without first consulting their superiors.
Smith and his colleague lost the contract because they were presenting their vision of the role for agency officials in the process without taking account of the officials’ own ideas and concerns about their role. Afterwards, the officials talked about being “reborn in the cult of Smith.”
Know your proper bounds
While public officials may be concerned or even fearful at the outset about their
potential loss of control, my experience suggests that by the end of the process, many of
their doubts will have dissipated.
Successful interviewees understand this. They don’t discount or try to talk public officials out of their fears during the interview. Rather, they solicit the expression of these fears and respond reassuringly. They might suggest involving the public officials and other representatives to the degree they’re comfortable with initially, modifying that role as the project proceeds. They trust their ability to influence the attitudes of the public officials once the job has begun, and to shape the process itself.
An example from another project illustrates a different kind of failure to anticipate the concerns of the interviewer. A mediator we’ll call Ann Jones probably thought she was doing just the right thing when she began casing the parties as part of her preparation for the interview. She called a number of citizen activists and local government officials to hear their views.
What she didn’t realize, perhaps, was that her role wasn’t clearly understood by those she called. They thought she had already been contracted as the mediator, and so they began telling her more than they otherwise would have. In addition, those she talked with didn’t think she was neutral. Local officials began calling state officials complaining that she was aggressively challenging and rebutting them on issues.
Jones was sunk before she reached the interview because she seemed like a loose cannon. When the incidents were brought up during her interview, she tried to pin the blame on those who had complained about her contacts with them, implying that they were lying.
This practitioner was a top contender before the interview process began. But her strategy was ill-suited for a hiring group that regarded an inclusive consensus-building process with degrees of fear, skepticism, and even resentment about giving up control.
The story shows how important it is to consider the impact of your approach to the community itself as well as to the interview.
Be aware of subtleties
Too often, practitioners spend all their time preparing the content of their
presentations, with little or no concern for delivery.
But non-verbal communication is at least as important as the spoken word. Tone, inflection, and pacing produce intense responses in an audience. Random, unintentional, idiosyncratic behaviors may be misunderstood. Sometimes, when the verbal and non-verbal messages are incongruent, people believe the nonverbal.
Consider what happened to a mediator I’ll call Michael. Michael’s proposal was rated highly enough to earn an interview.
Michael’s proposal had caught the interest of state officials who were confronting a nasty conflict and were eager to convene a mediated process. But within 10 minutes he was eliminated from contention. He had talked non-stop in a slow “warm fuzzy” (their term) manner and he had raised the end of each sentence like it was a question. He used exploratory, hedging language such as, “I mean, I guess, I’d sort of have to consider what the issue would be.”
The officials thought his delivery reflected powerlessness and lack of confidence; they called him a “weenie”afterwards and enjoyed a good laugh at his expense. He also looked too relaxed, leaning back in his chair, eyes upward, pulling on his beard, waving his arms in the air or clasping his hands behind his neck, his tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches there for everyone to see.
Nervous mannerisms can be a detriment. I watched a mediator undermine her two-person team with her unconscious, nervous habits. Her posture was closed, her eyes moved up and down or scanned the room, and her hands kept playing nervously with a pencil. When she tired of the pencil, she began flicking her nails, apparently unaware she was doing it. Moreover, while she had a solid presentation, her delivery was hesitant and tentative-sounding. This bothered officials.
It’s difficult to manage our non-verbal communication, because we are often less immediately aware of it. But it can be marshalled in the service of a rhetorically sensitive presentation, or it can undermine a promising opportunity to gain new work.
So, what are the most important things to remember before you walk into that interview room?
Think about your audience. This means you should plan the structure and the content of what you say, and prepare your materials with that audience in mind. Shape your presentation around their concerns as well as their goals. Point your presentation towards their objectives, and do it without overstepping the bounds of protocol.
Carefully monitor your own delivery. During the interview, be aware of what you are doing as you pitch your proposal—the persona you are presenting through your verbal and non-verbal communication, and the way you are responding to the concerns and questions of your interviewers.
This is the way to get picked out from the crowd.
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