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9.4. Rules for preparing and holding meetings
Holding meetings is an integral part of the project manager's work. The
speed and accuracy at the very start depend on how well it is organized.
Unfortunately, it often happens that even the most wonderful projects are
destroyed by the participants' lack of understanding of why they are at the
meeting, what is expected of them, and the lack of control and responsibility
after the meeting is held.
To avoid chewing the rug, the project manager should remember three
components:
1. Rules for preparing and holding meetings.
2. Agenda.
3. Minutes – meeting notes after the meeting.
How to determine how necessary it is to hold a meeting? Below are the
signs for checking the situation and determining the need for a meeting for the
team.
One should plan a meeting if:
1. There is a clear goal.
Each meeting should have a clear mission or goal, otherwise there is no
point in gathering the team. What needs to be achieved? Do you need to solve
a problem? Plan a schedule? Discuss difficulties? Brainstorm for an idea? Make
sure you have a clear idea of what the meeting is about before you put it on the
calendar.
2. Create a meeting agenda.
Once you have the objective, don’t keep it a secret – let the rest of the
team know what you want to discuss and what you want to achieve. First, plan
the agenda, then choose a time for the meeting. Is the agenda ready? Then
schedule the meeting.
3. Know exactly who to invite to the meeting.
There is nothing worse than sitting in a meeting that has nothing to do
with you. This is another reason why a pre-planned meeting agenda is useful:
knowing what you want to discuss gives you a good idea of who to invite. So,
you have the objective, the agenda, and the invite list, and the meeting is
necessary. How can you make sure it runs smoothly and productively?
The following rules are set for the process itself:
No distractions or digressions from the topic.
If random topics and discussions arise during the meeting that have
nothing to do with the purpose of the meeting, then:
– stop this discussion before the whole team gets stuck in it;
– do not engage in the discussion, instead tell the team that you have made
a note of this issue in order to return to it at some point.
This method is called «parking», because extraneous topics are put aside
for a while while the meeting is being conducted according to the agenda.
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No gadgets in the meeting.
For a meeting to be productive, everyone must be focused and engaged in
the work. This is impossible if all participants are completely absorbed in their
gadgets. If those present do not need these devices for the discussion or other
planned activities, it is necessary to put the devices aside.
Strictly defined discussion time for each issue and the appointment of a
person responsible for keeping minutes.
Above all, it is extremely important to start and end the meeting on time.
This not only shows respect for the working hours of the participants, but also
makes the most of every minute of the available time.
Setting time slots in the meeting agenda certainly helps, but it is equally
important to keep track of time and stick to the plan. Sometimes a person is
assigned to remind the meeting when the allotted time is about to expire.
Agenda
Agenda is the desired plan for the meeting, a list of tasks to be discussed
and decided upon.
As mentioned above, the agenda is very important for a successful team
meeting. It is quite simple to create. In its simplest form, it is a short description
that includes the following information:
date and time of the meeting;
purpose of the meeting;
invited participants;
topics to be discussed;
persons to lead the discussion of each topic;
time allocated for the discussion of each topic.
That is all. Having all this information and sharing it with the
participants before the meeting will help to properly structure the meeting (not
to mention the time allocation).
It is also important to send out background documents to the participants
in advance. Provide the meeting agenda and other background materials (e.g.
creative briefs, charts, presentations, diagrams, reports, etc.) to all participants at
least one business day before the scheduled meeting.
This way, everyone will have time to review and work through the main
topics of the meeting, and they will be able to come to the meeting with great
questions and suggestions.
Minutes – notes after the meeting
After the meeting, sum up the meeting and take minutes so that all
participants remember the important points. One can also assign a responsible
person who will write down the topics discussed, planned actions, and decisions
made during the meeting. Distribute the minutes to the participants in printed or
electronic form.
The meeting should end on a positive note. For example, thank the
participants for their productive work and great ideas. This will help the team
understand that their participation in the discussion was not in vain.
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9.5. Basic methods of evaluating
candidates when forming a project team
One can conduct a competency-based interview.
When is it used
– What is mean by competency? How does the concept of competency
relate to the concept of skills?
Skills are what a candidate can do, actions brought to automatism. And
competency is a model of behavior characteristic of a particular person in certain
circumstances. Competency assessment is an assessment of effective or
ineffective behavior. Moreover, effectiveness and ineffectiveness do not mean
good and bad, correct or incorrect behavior, but appropriate, suitable for specific
working conditions, or inappropriate in these conditions. The same quality can
be appropriate and inappropriate in different situations. For example,
somewhere a tendency to conduct tough negotiations is needed, and somewhere
this is unacceptable. Depending on this, a tendency to tough negotiations
somewhere will be considered a strength, an advantage, and somewhere
a disadvantage.
– What is a competency-based interview?
Such an interview is conducted to understand whether the candidate has
the competencies that are critical to the position they are applying for, whether
they are their strengths or areas for development. If the critical competencies
are not developed, then this candidate is most likely not suitable for the work
tasks that the position requires, or the special conditions in which they will
have to work.
In short and academic terms, a competency-based interview is a structured
interview, the purpose of which is to determine the level of development of
certain competencies in a candidate by studying specific examples from their
previous work practice.
– Why do we call such an interview structured?
Because when collecting information and analyzing it, we do not act
intuitively, but adhere to a certain structure, a model. This allows us, firstly, to
be sure that we will accurately collect the information necessary for the
assessment, and not just have a heart-to-heart talk with the candidate. Secondly,
following a certain pattern when collecting and analyzing data, we can then
compare the information received from different candidates, despite the fact that
each of them will have their own examples.
– How does competency-based interviews differ from other interview
methods, such as biographical interviews and projective interviews?
During competency-based interviews, we examine the candidate’s past
experience, specific examples of their behavior in situations from their work
practice. These examples help us understand how they made decisions, how they
planned their actions in certain circumstances, why they acted this way and not
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another. We are guided by the assumption that in a new similar situation,
a person will act in approximately the same way as they acted in a similar
situation.
In contrast to this assessment method, a projective interview asks the
candidate to imagine a particular situation and hypothetically model their
behavior in it. However, without having been in a similar situation in reality,
a person may be sincerely mistaken about how they would act. Therefore, in
competency-based interviews, we examine real behavioral models, not
assumptions. This type of interview does not use projective questions such as
«What would you do if…?», «What would you do in such and such a situation?»
and so on.
In this case, the subject of the study is not any biographical experience of
the candidate, but only cases from his work practice.
– In what situations is a competency-based interview an
inappropriate assessment method and is it better to use another one?
For example, this method is not applicable when hiring those who have
dropped out of professional activity for a long time (more than a year) (due to
maternity leave, a long break between jobs). In this situation, the person simply
will not have suitable examples for assessment.
In addition, some competencies are more effectively assessed by other
methods. For example, such a competency as analytical thinking. How it would
be tested in an interview: «Could you please give an example of a work situation
when you had to make a difficult decision». And the candidate tells what
situation they had and what decision they made. They are asked how exactly
they came to this decision, what they relied on. But it is quite difficult and timeconsuming to bring the thinking process to the surface, and even retrospectively.
In this case, it is easier and more visual to ask the candidate to solve a test case.
At the same time, there are competencies that are not assessed in any
other way except through such an interview. For example, the competence
«Self-development» – how interested a person is in developing, learning new
things, improving their professional level. This cannot be measured in an
assessment, in questionnaires it can only be measured indirectly, but an
interview would be the ideal way.
Step 1: Selecting key competencies
– How can a recruiter understand which competencies need to be
researched for a particular position for which they are selecting
a candidate?
To do this, one needs to understand which behavior patterns are critical
for working with a particular functionality in certain conditions. For example, it
is known that an employee in this position will receive tasks from two managers
at once. That is, a suitable candidate needs to be able to quickly navigate, switch
between tasks depending on the priorities of importance and urgency,
independently determine these priorities and maintain a high work pace. And
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most importantly, they need to be prepared for the fact that this is a normal
situation for this position, and not a temporary phenomenon. There are people
who are capable of this, and there are those who can only work consistently,
without switching to new tasks until they complete the one they are currently
working on – for them, any other situation will be a lot of stress. Therefore, we
are interested in candidates not only for their professional skills, but also for
their proven ability to work in a multitasking environment. This is what we will
evaluate during the interview.
– Whose job is it to figure out what set of competencies is essential for
a specific position – the recruiter or the hiring manager?
This is a joint job for the hiring manager and the recruiter. No one knows
the specifics of the job better than the hiring manager and, accordingly, what
kind of person they need for this job. But the hiring manager cannot always
correctly express this understanding in the format of a description of
competencies, and it is the recruiter’s job to help them.
– It is no secret that the hiring manager often sets the task for the
recruiter something like this: «The previous employee did well. Please find
someone like him/her». How can a recruiter understand what was good
about the previous employee? And where is the place for competencies in
requests of this kind?
First, the recruiter needs to find out what exceptional qualities the
previous employee had, thanks to which he/she was remembered as the most
effective in this position.
More precisely, what was in his/her behavior, reactions, actions, thanks
to which he/she was so valued. You need to ask the manager about this in
detail and ask them to explain not with such abstract concepts as
«responsible», «reliable», «intelligent», but with specific cases.
– Let’s say the customer explains it this way: «He/she worked 24/7,
performed a lot of tasks and did not complain».
Then you need to expand this definition further until a clear understanding
appears. Why did the hypothetical previous employee calmly endure such
a stressful work schedule? Did he/she have a very high internal motivation (was
in love with his/her work), was he/she prone to overtime, or was he/she a person
who was very resistant to stress? And if after him/her three more people worked
in this place, and they could not cope, then you need to ask the manager what
he/she sees as the key differences between the previous employee and his/her
followers and what these three followers had in common with each other that the
previous employee did not have. Ultimately, this will allow you to come to clear
characteristics that both the recruiter and the hiring manager understand in the
same way, using the same terminology. This is the goal.
So, we describe not the person, but their competencies. If a person does
not have the required competence, this does not mean that there is something
wrong with them, it only means that they are not suitable for the specific job that
is supposed to be done.
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– I see this process as a good field for partnerships between recruiters
and hiring managers.
Exactly. During specific projects to assess competencies, different
company specialists and HR managers find a common language and begin to
understand each other. Thanks to the common language, there are far fewer
controversial situations, and clear transparent criteria appear for understanding
what kind of candidate is needed and what is needed to assess candidates.
– What number of competencies is considered optimal for one
position? There is often a desire to make a long list of 12-15 items.
In the competency model, it is optimal to collect 5-6 competencies for one
position, and for research during an interview with a candidate, it is generally
better to take no more than three competencies.
A minimum of 15-20 minutes of conversation is required to study one
competency during an interview. And you also need to make some kind of
introduction, a smooth transition to questions, and summarize the conversation
at the end. That is, 5-6 competencies will require a two-hour interview – it is
rare to be able to allocate so much free time.
It is important to learn to distinguish truly key competencies, without
which it is impossible to do in a specific position, from those that the candidate
«would also be good to have». The criterion is simple: key competencies are
those without which a person will not cope with the main tasks and there will be
no result from his work. If we are talking about such a competency, without
which something will be done worse, slower, but for the main result this is not
too critical, then it is non-key.
Ready-made competency models
– There is often a request for a ready-made «set» of competencies and
indicators for certain positions. Is this possible?
Yes, it is. There are several options. The first and most energy-consuming,
but also the most thorough one is to develop your own competency model for
a specific company (that is, taking into account the specifics of working in this
role in your company). At the very least, it would be worth doing this for those
positions for which the company most often recruits. There are special
technologies for developing competency models, and there are specialists who
do this. But this process, of course, requires resources.
The second option is to use ready-made universal sets of competencies
developed by companies that specialize in this. Ready-made competency models
can be used as a constructor: look at the names of competencies, their indicators
and choose which competencies are needed for a particular position.
Step 2: determining competency indicators
– So, the recruiter and the hiring manager have determined the key
competencies that a suitable candidate should have. Next, the recruiter,
together with the hiring manager, needs to compile a list of behavioral
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indicators for each competency, with the help of which they are identified in
candidates. What are indicators?
An indicator is a behavioral manifestation of a particular competency.
That in which the corresponding quality is expressed. With the help of these
indicators, the recruiter determines the development of the corresponding
competencies in the candidate during the interview.
– How to check candidates for the development of competencies using
indicators?
Based on the indicators, the recruiter compiles a list of questions about the
candidate's experience in order to see how certain indicators were manifested in
their behavior.
Step 3: compiling a list of questions
– How to compose questions for competency-based interviews?
It is important to remember that the purpose of the questions is to collect
detailed information about a specific competency, to examine it from all sides,
taking into account all the indicators.
First, one needs an opening question so that the candidate can recall
a situation in which the competency of interest could be manifested. It is
necessary to help choose an example that would allow one to see the
competency most fully, but at the same time not to suggest such a situation too
clearly.
Let's say one is interested in the competency «Multitasking». Its
indicators:
1) carefully records their tasks so that nothing gets lost;
2) plans their working time;
3) quickly switches between tasks;
4) regularly monitors the progress of work;
5) maintains productivity under time pressure.
In what situations is multitasking best demonstrated?
Of course, in those ones when there are more tasks than usual.
Accordingly, the opening question to the candidate can be: «Have there ever
been situations when additional work, additional tasks beyond those that you
usually had to perform, suddenly arose?» Most likely, the candidate will answer
yes, and then you can ask them to recall in more detail a similar situation in
which they had the most difficulty or which they remember most vividly. This is
the second question.
– And then?
The further scenario of the conversation and specific questions will
depend on the characteristics of the candidate. Some people can immediately
find a suitable example, while others can’t remember anything, and then they
have to clarify the question: «Have you ever had two tasks with the same
deadline at the same time?».
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We take further questions from the indicators – the main thing is to go
through them all. Moreover, some candidates will tell about their example in
such detail and systematically that additional questions will not be needed – the
person will give all the necessary information anyway. And for some, you will
need to ask a lot of clarifying questions.
For example: «How did you choose which task to do first if they have the
same deadline?», «By what principle did you decide to break away from one
task and move on to another at some point?», «Did you somehow record the
tasks so as not to lose anything, not to forget anything, or did you just always
keep them in mind?».
The questions should be such as not to suggest to the candidate what
behavior is desirable. For example, you shouldn’t ask «How did you plan your
working time?» and «How did you record the tasks?» – in this case, the
candidate understands «Aha, they expect me to record and plan».
Step 4: competency-based interview
– What criteria should the situations that the candidate is asked to
recall during the interview meet?
Firstly, examples of certain situations should only be from the candidate’s
work experience, and not from other areas of their life. If you are asking about
examples of planning, then a story about how they planned their vacation or
move to another city is not suitable. We are not assessing the candidate’s
personality – we are assessing only how they act at work. The same person can
behave completely differently in their private and professional life.
Secondly, the example should be recent, no more than six months ago –
a maximum of a year. Competencies are subject to dynamics – both positive and
negative. Therefore, a case that happened 2-3 years ago is hardly indicative:
since then, the competence could have either developed more or weakened. It is
believed that it takes exactly six months to a year to develop a competence, and
without training it disappears.
Thirdly, one needs an example of a situation in which the candidate
was an active participant. If a person says, «We made a decision», «We did
it», «We developed it», you must ask what their personal participation in this
process was.
Fourthly, the situation from the example must be completed. Only in this
case one can understand the result of the actions taken by the candidate.
Important: in this case, it is not the result itself that is assessed, but the
candidate’s actions.
Therefore, one needs to ask not only about positive examples (when
something worked out great), but also about negative ones (when everything
ended unsuccessfully or simply did not go as desired). Negative examples are
very indicative, because when something does not work out, a person has to put
in more effort, look for different options, try again and again, so that
competence unfolds much more vividly. In addition, a negative result is
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experience, it is important what conclusions a person made, what he learned. So
that the candidate is not afraid to talk about negative examples, it is important to
warn them that we are not assessing the result itself, but their actions.
– The higher the position, the more attention is paid to negative
examples. When looking for top managers, they prefer to study negative
examples in great detail, because this is a very valuable experience.
– When asking questions during a competency-based interview, one
needs to adhere to a certain order. What is this order?
Experts usually use special abbreviations for this method – for example,
CARE. Competency-based interviews using the CARE method are one of the
most effective ways to select candidates.
CARE (Content (meaning situations), Action, Role, Effect). First, an
opening question is asked to find a suitable situation, then this situation is
examined in more detail. It is necessary to immediately clarify with the
interlocutor when what they are talking about happened (remembering the time
limit), and ask who else was involved in that situation besides them, what was
their personal role and what was the essence of this situation. The context must
be clear [35].
Next, the study of the candidate's actions begins. The task is to
reconstruct the sequence of actions: how the situation began, what the
candidate did and why they chose this particular course of action, how they
reacted further and why exactly this way. You should ask a lot of questions,
as details are needed.
Then you need to understand what result the candidate's actions led to and
how they evaluate them. In the CARE method, this stage is called role. Suitable
questions: «How do you like the final result?», «If you could change your
actions, what would you do?», «What did you learn in this situation?» Plus, it is
important to find out how this situation was evaluated from the outside, whether
the candidate received feedback from someone, for example, from their
manager.
At this stage, many interesting things come to light. For example, a person
was asked about their greatest achievement, and they tell how they made a triple
sales plan in a week, but further questions show that for them, in fact, this was
an ordinary situation, nothing outstanding. That is, they chose an unremarkable
example, another is needed.
Step 5: evaluation of answers
– Is it worth giving an assessment of competence directly during the
interview?
Absolutely not! During the interview, you need to listen carefully, think
about how to formulate the next question, and take detailed notes on the
candidate's answers.
There is no time to analyze the information at this time, otherwise you can
get distracted and miss something important in the story.
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But there are other ways to evaluate candidates:
Questionnaires
This is the simplest method of evaluating a candidate. A person is asked
prepared questions and the answers are recorded. In the developed versions of
questionnaires, only what is important to know about the candidate is selected.
Testing
This method is similar to questionnaires, since the survey also takes place
according to prepared questions, but now the candidate is asked to choose an
answer from ready-made options. After interpreting the results, testing allows
you to get a quantitative characteristic of the qualifications or qualities of
candidates. To study a candidate from different angles, you can use existing tests
and diagnostics.
Competency matrix
For each position/role, a table is compiled that describes the ideal set of
candidate competencies and the required level of proficiency in them. Then the
actual level of the candidate for each competency is assessed. The difference in
the level of competencies usually forms the basis for the decision to accept the
candidate or is taken into account during personnel changes.
Expert assessment
To assess the candidate, an independent expert is invited, and in
a conversation with the manager and the candidate himself/herself, the
competencies are assessed. The presence of an expert guarantees the objectivity
of the assessment. There may be several experts. During the discussion, possible
work situations or cases are usually discussed.
Business games
Usually this method is included in the interview. It allows you to assess
the candidate's game thinking, risk propensity, motivation, activity, learning
ability. Business games usually simulate work situations. They are conducted in
groups to assess how employees work in a team, solve complex situations, and
what contribution each person makes to the common cause.
Candidate assessment instructions
1. Preparing for the assessment
Define the assessment goals, for example, selecting a technical leader for
a new project or making personnel changes in an existing one. It is necessary to
decide which candidates/participants should be assessed, how long the
assessment procedure will last and what results are expected to be obtained.
2. Formulating criteria
The planned work and tasks for potential candidates are analyzed.
Quantitative and qualitative indicators are determined by which their work will
be assessed. Assessment criteria are formulated based on the analysis results.
3. Selecting assessment methods
It is determined which assessment methods will help identify the level of
compliance of candidates with the established criteria.
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