Reading Committees by Their Rules

You can learn a lot about a selection committee by the kinds of instructions they give you for their presentation.

In his latest vlog post, Dean shares the thinking he goes through the moment his team receives presentation instructions, to create a head start for determining what kinds of people are behind the decision, so that the team can get into the heads of their decision-makers and make sure they are speaking in the way those decision-makers listen for.

To learn more about how we help you get into the heads of your Selection Committees, check out our Shortlist Interview Coaching page here.

Hey everybody. I don’t know about you, but I get a pretty good insight on the decision makers and how they make their decisions by how they give me instructions. So, I’m talking about short list interviews, oral presentations, project pitches where several teams are vying for a project and you get instructions upon making the short list on how the presentation’s going to be. What I want to suggest is there’s an opportunity to really think about what these instructions say about the deciders and what they’re going to decide by. So, I’m going to give you a couple examples. I’m on two projects right now. One is really loose and open-ended. They said, you know, you’ve got this time. We really want it conversational. And that’s all they really gave us. Set us free. The other one was really buttoned down. gave us specific times for self-introductions and team uh approach and different things and Q&A. So these are implying some different kinds of decision makers. If you look at those instructions, no matter what you get, you’re going to get insights on a bunch of different personality possibilities. But out of those two, for example, the the one that’s loose and open-ended, these are probably relator types. They’re people people. They want a more social experience. They probably need more compassion and appreciation and they want to see your team synergy. They probably want to experience collaboration with you and get a sense of being integrated with you. Active listening is really a key on the other group. They’re about precision. They’re about did you follow instructions? They’re about evidence and accuracy and process information. they’re not so much about the touchyfey of the other team. So, those are just quick ideas and they’re not the only way that you go about figuring out your decision makers and how they tick. But, this is a an underutilized approach. People instruct based on what they care about. And if it’s buttoned down, you’ve got a more precisionoriented selection committee. If they’re open-ended, they’re more about collaboration and the human experience. So think about what instructions you get and run it through the team’s processor so that you can have a better understanding of who is making the decision.

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