Finding a fit
The first step to empowering employees is finding ones who can handle the power.
For Singer, finding the right employees goes beyond interviewing candidates over dinner to learn about their interests outside of work. In fact, you don’t want them to stay too relaxed because you want to see how they’ll handle the stress of the job when you’re not sitting across the table.
“One of the challenges is that people act differently in an interview than they do when under stress, and in our world, they’re under stress a lot,” Singer says. “And so, in some ways, it’s very difficult to interview someone if you don’t put them under stress during the interview. How they’re going to respond in an interview may be very different to what happens to them when they’re in the heat of battle of saving someone’s life.”
To see how they might react under stress, you can ask candidates about stressful situations they’ve handled in the past. But a candidate can say anything, and it might not be indicative of his or her actual behavior. Singer takes it a step further by simulating stress in the interview.
“In the middle of the basic questions — Where are you from? What kind of schooling did you have? — I’ll all of a sudden launch a question like, ‘By the way, why did they make manhole covers round?’” he says. “And then you watch how they respond to that. Do they creatively come up with some goofy answers? Do they just say, ‘Look, I don’t know,’ and fail to respond?”
The point is that you won’t always be around to hold employees’ hands. You want to see how they handle the unexpected — whether they think through the problem calmly or freak out.
“All of a sudden they’re thrown a question that they never anticipated getting, so they’re under a little stress,” Singer says. “So finding some kind of question that’s totally out of the blue that throws someone a little bit of a curveball will allow you to see how do they think, how do they process, how do they problem solve. The point of the exercise isn’t to get to the right answer. It’s to watch them struggle.”
You also want to see how candidates acted independently in the past. If they’ve taken risks by making autonomous decisions, they’ve likely made mistakes. So Singer asks them about their failures and — more importantly — what they learned.
“I ask a lot more about people’s failures than their successes,” he says. “It’s really interesting because in an interview, the interviewee never wants to talk about their failures. They’re trying to pump themselves up and talk nice of themselves, of all the things they’ve done. I’m almost not interested in that.”
So you’re making progress with a candidate if he or she answers the question at all. Singer spent two years interviewing 65 candidates for the position of chief operating officer before he hired one — the only one who was willing to discuss his failures.
“I could spend an entire interview dissecting why someone failed at something and, at the end, think they’re the best candidate for me because they won’t make those mistakes again,” he says.