Toolboxes and Mindsets
Earlier this week, my peas and Japanese cucumbers had reached the stage where they needed trellising so I pulled out the fancy trellis a gardener’s catalogue had convinced me was going to be the most amazing thing. To my dismay, but hardly to my surprise, it would take me a full year to untangle the bright green plastic mess and it seemed not sturdy enough to support anything had I succeeded in untangling and stringing it up. I’m not annoyed at the catalogue; I’m annoyed at myself for failing to think like a gardener and instead thinking like someone who collects gardening tools and gadgets.
I’d fallen prey to the “toolbox approach”, the thing I’ve most adamantly pushed back on the past ten or more years in the realms of investigating and interviewing. Being a great interviewer is not about collecting a set of tools, it is about honing your awareness and developing an interviewer’s mindset. With this, you approach an interview expecting nothing and confident you can handle anything because you are prepared internally, rather than approaching it from a defensive position. A defensive interviewer believes that if things don’t go well, you can pull out another tool and see if that works, and that sooner or later some tool will work.
A friend of mine has a t-shirt with a picture of a hammer and the wording “This is not a drill”. Probably the best t-shirt ever. And in the minds of some interviewers, all tools appear the same, or as having the same purpose, of trying to convince someone to talk to you. When you develop an interviewer mindset, you are interpersonally adaptive and confident, and it’s more likely people will talk. When you develop a toolbox mindset, you signal to the interview a lack of competence and of confidence, and it becomes less likely they will talk, especially if you mistakenly use the hammer in the place of a more appropriate tool.
More importantly, a holistic approach is geared to an information gathering approach while a toolbox approach is geared toward a more accusatorial and confrontational approach to interviewing. There is now a decade of solid research showing that the toolbox approach (associated with use of themes, rationalization, projection and minimization, as well as leading questions) results in less information, and less accurate information, plus the potential for false confessions. An excellent researcher, Brent Snook, discusses the problems of trying to combine multiple styles, i.e. gathering even more tools in the proverbial toolbox, in an outstanding recent paper (Snook, B. et al. (2020)) addressing the downsides of applying such a cobbled approach to interviewing.
This also relates to Carol Dweck’s excellent research on mindsets, where she delineates the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. With a growth mindset, we see ourselves as having the ability to improve, consistent with the idea that we can cultivate an interviewer mindset. With a fixed mindset, we feel we are limited or constrained by our natural abilities and therefore must look outside ourselves, to tools and toolboxes, to improve. One of her most interesting findings is that people are terrible at estimating their abilities and that almost all the variability in this comes from people with fixed mindsets. As anyone who has heard me talk knows, I believe strongly that self-awareness is the key to an interviewer’s mindset, and changing our mindset is the key to developing that self-awareness.
To be clear, I’m not saying in any way that we shouldn’t explore and shouldn’t learn new things. What I am saying is that we should do so with an eye toward developing a mindset of excellence rather than a limited mindset relying on external aids that quite often do not work. In most any pursuit, we use tools, but that tool should be an extension of you, of your mindset and intention, not something you throw into the mix just to see if it works.
By the way, the solution to my gardening dilemma was to start thinking again like a gardener. I had just taken down a chicken wire fence around my asparagus, since I’d put in a fence around a much larger area that encompassed them, and that chicken wire was easily repurposed as trellising, creatinga far better solution than the fancy tool on which I’d wasted fifteen dollars.
