Our Expert for this quarter's newsletter is Astrid Nilsen, Senior Talent Manager and HR Business Partner, Praxair Spain and Portugal. Astrid is passionate about supporting PWN's work and has kindly shared this article that she recently wrote. Thanks Astrid!
"One of my best friends, like me, works in HR and we like discussing our difficulties and successes. Once she was complaining about a manager with whom she was managing a recruiting process.
The final pool included a female and a male candidate in which the female had the background and experience, but the male wasn’t quite the fit. Curiously, the male candidate was chosen by the manager. Upset, she called him. “Everything he said was ridiculous, like she has a too good academic record”.
I suggested my friend to listen to what he was not willing to tell her. She raised her eyebrows looking for further explanation.
During my coaching certification I realized how little time we spend listening. Before being a coach I used to listen with the aim of answering, not to understand. This is a very common mistake identified by Stephen Covey. It took me a long year to refine my 'listening' technique. I had to impose certain rules on myself: never to interrupt; not to think about the answer before a question is even made; and, not to look for answer or give advice that nobody asked for. Easy, right?
I felt that I had mastered the technique (which should always set off alarm bells!!). Listening is one of the most powerful, easiest and underestimated tools for our interactions – even though sometimes we need to go beyond.
In this case the manager (a man, in his late forties) clearly had some barriers that were preventing him from hiring a woman in his team, but he did not want to share them with my friend. When she tried to discuss the issue with him, he only raised nonsense arguments. My friend spent an entire hour discussing how her excellent academic background was no inconvenience, but he did not seem to care at all about her profile. No matter how much my friend tried to listen and understand him, they would never reach a common ground.
The area director pushed the decision and chose the female candidate. Before joining the team, my friend decided to give it another try with the manager from the recruitment process, and listen to what he was not willing to tell – she did not want the candidate to fail due to lack of support.
After a long conversation in which the academic record, background and all rational arguments were forgotten, she was able to pin point the manager's fear into one sentence: He said, "I have never had a woman in my team". With that “confession” she began to unpack the situation with a completely different approach. Now she could sense his fear and forgot how upset she was about the whole situation. They were then able to talk in a new trust environment and she found out that he used to travel a lot with his team members and did not feel comfortable with the idea of spending a whole week, almost 24 hours a day, with a woman: breakfast, driving in the car, lunch, visiting the city, having dinner.
At that point they were able to openly discuss how he could approach this new challenge, and together, they defined an onboarding plan for the incoming recruit. He wrote down the first visits they would make together and the kind of conversations they could have, like the customers she had already worked for in the past. He also recalled the several times he had worked with a woman though they did not report to him. These easy exercises made him feel pretty more comfortable and after getting beyond these barriers he was able to identify the value that the new person would bring to the team. Visualizing situations is a powerful tool to help face situations that you are uncertain of.
Listening only to what is said and rationally focusing the debate on what people dare to discuss is not always the answer. Sometimes, we need to identify if something is being hidden from the conversation and how we can surface what remains 'unsaid'. It is a matter of being alert, catching a word said by chance, tracing a feeling and trusting our gut to dig further in what the other person is not willing to tell us. It is a matter of listening to what is not being said.
Author: Astrid Nilsen, Senior Talent Manager and HR Business Partner, Praxair Spain and Portugal Editor: Rebecca Fountain, Head of Marketing and Communications, PWN Global Date: April 2018
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