Measuring up your next leader

An increasing number of firms are appointing a non-lawyer who is a professional manager as their CEO, and this is expected to increase.

In this article, I want to introduce you to the powerful Cognitive Interview (CI) techniques that we have developed for use by lawyers to ensure that any selection committee can assess who is the best candidate to be the next leader of your firm, assuming your firm has criteria for the role, aligned with your firm's strategy. Clarity and agreement of the criteria is critical to your success, and keeping every individual involved at everyany stage of the selection process, focused on what they are looking for, is equally fundamental to success.

Cognitive Interviewing is a forensic tool, more commonly associated with interviewing witnesses. It consists of a number of memory retrieval techniques designed to access more information, and is more accurate than using a traditional question and answer approach. Using CI will typically generate between 20%-62% additional factual information that studies consistently have shown to be more accurate than answers given in a normal question and answer approach. The whole approach and its success is anchored in:

• Building rapport with the candidate to ensure that they are relaxed – studies show that the more relaxed a candidate is, the better their recall, i.e. the more accurate it is.
• Using the principles during the interview to generate more accurate factual recall.
• Avoiding falling foul of the bad habits that will adversely affect what a candidate will tell you, leading to poor quality assessment of their actual capabilities.

Inevitably, each of these areas contains much to consider, all of which are fully discussed in my recent handbook for lawyers, Unlocking Memories: Cognitive Interviewing for Lawyers. However, we have been able to adapt and refocus the approach for use by interviewers engaged in selection interviewing, and it's been exciting to see just how transferrable the skills are.

So how can you use the CI approach in this selection context and avoid the pitfalls? What follows is intended to provide a short yet practical set of guidelines that will ensure you generate the most accurate and comprehensive factual information possible from any candidate you interview for your next leadership role.

The issues and problems with candidates

In our extensive research over the past twenty years or so, primarily looking at how individuals behave when being interviewed, some significant and relevant behaviours have been noted that are directly linked to the brain and how it reacts in this context.

Take a look at Figure 1, which represents the answers given to interview questions about specific areas being probed by the interviewer (or selection panel). Notice that the yellow boxes represent comprehensive factual information coming from your candidate's actual experience - what they've really done in the past. This is the information we are looking for, and what we need to maximise in order to make good decisions about competence going forward. The problem I'm sure you can see are the grey areas (gaps) between the periods of factual (remembered) recall. Here, the brain is likely to construct a recollection that the candidate may well believe to be true.

Primarily, the brain doesn't like gaps and seeks to complete a story or explanation, and any of the following could be happening in your candidate's head:

You can see here that we are getting at what we need - indications of the candidate's competence, what they personally did, and that they are not claiming credit for what others have done or what they know happened but were not actually responsible for doing themselves.

Avoid making assumptions

Just because you suspect that a candidate is constructing a recollection does not mean that they are lying, far from it. It simply means that there is a possibility that that is so, but much more likely and common is that your candidate is constructing a recollection for one of the other reasons identified above. If you feel that your candidate is doing this, ask the question in a different way which may help to stimulate remembered recall, and build on that with your supplementary questions prepared beforehand. Providing that what your candidate says appears to be relevant, keep going, and pause to allow the full facts to emerge.

Behaviour breeds behaviour

The way people behave towards you is directly related to the way you behave towards them. This is true in day-to-day communication and certainly true in selection interviewing. Here are some practical examples:

• Trying to be helpful.
• Guessing.
• Drawing inappropriate and inaccurate conclusions based on elements of remembered recall.
• ‘Logicing it out’ – i.e. logically, they think ‘X’ must have happened:
• ‘X’ would have happened because it always did, or is the right thing to have happened.
• ‘X’ could have happened because that was most likely in those circumstances. 
• Trying to be evasive.
• Lying.

Listen out for a reduction in detailed recall and your candidate slipping into use of the above generalisations. Candidates that are accurately remembering an occasion when they did 'X' are usually able to offer additional information and facts to support their recollection - I call this the 'I know this because… factor'. For example, your candidate may say something like: 'Yes, we all worked on the input for a new induction process for anyone joining the team but my specific role was to lead on it. I remember it was especially challenging because I had to take one of the associates aside and talk to him about his attitude to the interns - I'd heard a few comments from other members of the team about it.'

• You interrupt. When you have asked your question, unless your candidate begins to answer it within a very few seconds, you say something like: 'I probably didn't make myself clear, can you tell me...' Your candidate gives a short answer and is looking for your next question within moments. What we should be doing is asking our question and waiting, pausing and allowing time for our candidate to (literally) search for the information in their brain.
• You appear in a rush. You are so focused on asking your prepared questions and allow little time for building rapport at the start. Your candidate becomes easily distracted, provides short answers in order to get to the end of the interview as soon as possible.

What we should be doing is taking our time to build rapport at the start, carefully frame our question as an 'open' question with clear parameters (start and finish point) so that they clearly understand what you want to know and then we need to be patient - waiting for the full answer to emerge.

Avoid interruptions

This is clearly linked to some of the above but is possibly the most common error an interviewer can make and lawyers are, sadly, among the worst offenders in my experience! It goes something like this: you ask your question and your candidate replies. They are talking, and during their recollection you look and sound like you want to comment, by, for example, leaning forward and opening your mouth to speak. Your candidate picks up on your non-verbal behaviour. The result? They stop speaking immediately and take the lead from you. You have probably just stopped some key factual recall from emerging, that memory they had may just have vanished, never to return in your interview. To avoid this, always try to wait for a convenient pause and then come in with your question or comment.

Additionally, interviewers add lots of word-spacers while their candidate is talking - these are 'erms', 'ah has', 'oks', 'yes, right' and all manner of other noises that may be perfectly reasonable and appropriate in everyday business and social interaction but not when it comes to a candidate interview and you are asking them to recall a time when they did 'X'. These interventions simply distract the candidate, they stop talking and look for your next question. Again, we have interrupted the mental recall process our candidate is engaged in and this has a significantly negative effect by reducing the amount of factual recall.

Avoid an unhelpful questioning style

Leading questions

From observing thousands of lawyers conducting interviews on our training programmes, and from research by Geiselman and Fisher who did the main body of research in Cognitive Interviewing, this is a real problem in interviews. A leading question, as I'm sure you know, is when you suggest an answer in your question, or introduce content that hasn't been offered first by your candidate.  For example: 'Were you frustrated and angry about not getting the outcome you expected?' Immediately you set the perception in their mind that they must have been upset and angry and were not happy.

Leading questions are problematic for all sorts of reasons but you can expect criticism from tribunals and in other legal proceedings if the information you gain is largely the result of asking leading questions - framing the wording of each primary question before your interview can help. You contaminate the content your candidate offers and can often lead to a sense of disconnect between their real memory and recall.

Multi-headed questions.

These occur when you ask more than one question within the question like this: 'So, what exactly did he say? Something about the contract? That he was unhappy? What about that?' Setting aside the leading nature of the questioning for a moment, if you do get an answer, to which question does the answer relate? Multi-headed questions also confuse the candidate.

Language

Here's another consideration for you: the language that you use. Have you considered this carefully and thought about how often you may slip into using jargon or legalistic words and phrases that a candidate (especially if your candidate is from a non-legal background) may simply not understand or misunderstand? There is no substitute for using plain, simple, and clear language that your candidate will find easy to follow; they will soon pick up your firm's shorthand language if they are successful on the job.

In seeking to build rapport by tailoring your language and style to suit your candidate be careful not to appear patronising or superior - coming across in this manner will certainly affect your ability to build rapport and create an open channel of positive and effective communication.

Inferences

The language you use is important in other ways too, not least your choice of words, because you can easily infer one thing, when another may prove to be the case; it's very easy to influence what your candidate remembers and great care needs to be taken in your choice of words.

Avoid distractions

Candidates have limited mental resources for concentration; they can be easily distracted from the task of remembering what happened. For this reason we need to try to avoid any unnecessary distractions that the points raised above cover, such as asking leading questions, interrupting your candidate or adding too many word-spacers.

Detecting lies and deceit

This is an enormous subject and here are some things to look out for - but remember, these are not absolute:

Non-verbal behaviour

'The complicated relationship between non-verbal behaviour and deception makes it very difficult or even impossible to draw firm conclusions about deception solely on the basis of someone's non-verbal behaviour'? 1

Verbal behaviour

Truth tellers tend to:

• Quickly correct mistakes.
• Offer additional information to support their story.
• Positively claim not to know everything.

Liars tend to:

• Make more negative statements and fewer self-references.
• Give answers that are shorter, more indirect and sound less plausible.
• Be unable to give specific detail – the ‘why factor’/‘I know this because’. For example, ‘You are asking me about Tuesday? Yes, yes it was Tuesday, because that’s the day I take my daughter to nursery…’

Often answers are superficial containing a number of shorter sentences containing words/phrases like: I would have; I could have; I probably; I should have; I always; I usually… and so on. This last point is also indicative of those candidates who are 'constructing' a reply rather than remembering and this may not be an indication of deception, simply someone who may be guessing, assuming or trying to be helpful. None of which serves any very useful purpose and can be very counter-productive.

Geoff Coughlin is Founding Director of Emphasis on Skills Ltd (www.emphasisonskills.com)

References

• 1. ldert Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit - Pitfalls and Opportunities, Second Ed, 2008