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Looking for a job is one of the more difficult things in life. And it almost makes things more difficult when well meaning friends turn into advisors. “Don’t take it personally,” they say, particularly in regard to the inevitable rejections that one must tolerate. But being selected, or not, is personal on some level, it’s about you and what you are bringing to the job, team, and organization. And it isn’t pleasant to put yourself on the line to be evaluated and judged, only to get rejected.
Time to turn this situation on its head. What I mean is that usually, in the job search process, the interviewer has all the power, and all the ability to impose judgment on you. You can’t change the role of the interviewer, but you can change your role, and how the interviewing process happens. You do that by knowing two things and doing one thing. What you need to know are your own values, and the priorities of the job. You need to do is make a connection between what is important to the job, and who you are/what you can do.
This means you have to take the time to figure out what your own values are priorities are, and the same for the job, before you walk into the face-to-face interview situation. If you do your homework, then making the connections to what is wanted, and what you offer will be fairly easy, and seem natural.
Does this guarantee success in your job search? No, it doesn’t. There aren’t any guarantees. Most importantly though, you will not have to go though this process often, and if you are rejected you will feel a lot less pain.
 Storytelling is a powerful vehicle for persuasion. We work with a large civil engineering company, where engineers, estimators and business managers rotate from the field into an employee development advocate role. Their job is to identify development needs in their business unit. Some of these people like to say that they have come into the role with mud still on their boots.
Coming from positions where they are accustomed to having the authority to get the work done, it is not the easiest thing to step into the advocate role, where they have a title but no positional authority. Their span of responsibility is all the employees in their business unit. They don’t always have the automatic support of local management, and when economic times are challenging, development may not be at the top of a local manager’s list.
This week, we conducted a storytelling workshop. The goal was to develop success stories targeted to the stakeholders who make the decisions to direct resources to employee development. The most important thing was for each employee development leader to identify a compelling story and use a peer-coaching model to get encouragement, feedback and useful suggestions.
Some people didn’t know that the amazing thing they had created or witnessed back at work was a “story” they could and should share. We are all creative, but sometimes we don’t recognize a nugget of gold sitting right at our feet, the very nugget that will make our stakeholders’ eyes bulge! “You bet we want that!”
Ideas must be actionable. Storytelling is all about actions: when we can see it, hear it, taste it, smell it, touch it, it’s ours. Stories have a paradoxical reality: I may be telling it, but you are imagining it using elements of your reality. The more exact a picture I paint of my reality, the more clearly you can see the connection to your own–down to the color of the mud on your boots.
Being in a group process like a storytelling workshop gives us access to collective ‘juice’ that we can use to supercharge our own creative energies. As a group, we give each storyteller honest encouragement. We let the teller know where we connect the most, where we get snagged, what we like and want more of. We help brainstorm ideas if a teller asks for help through a stuck place.
Through facilitation and peer coaching, each advocate found a great success story, and got to test and develop it for prime time. What’s that wafting up? The sweet smell of success!
 Deliberating is all well and good, but there comes a time when jumping into the next phase of life is simply what comes next. It isn’t a choice really, jumping is simply the only option.
With this post, we jump into a new site, and we offer more clarity about what we do, and for whom.
Kairios is a Greek word meaning “being in the right place” and “at the right time.” It captures the essence of the dyanamic action, the commitment of the jump into a new path of development.
Three areas will command most of our attention, Creativity, Leadership, and Values, so we have dedicated three seperate pages to those topics, and will be providing resources for you there as well as commentary in these posts.
Off we go!
Photo by Abraham Hyatt, used with permission.
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Looking for Work With Values Looking For Work? In Your Job Search, Knowing Your Values—And Theirs—Can Give You An Edge Download the PDF
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