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Published Articles:

• Your Organizational DNA is Dictating Your Achievements
• 7 Ways to Change Other People with Zero Resistance
• 7 Ways to Quadruple Your Team's Productivity
• Are We Shying Away From Retention?
• The 5 basics of KindExcellence
• Can You Learn to Have Better Management Intuition?
• 7 Things Great Interviewers Do Without Knowing

By: Reut Schwartz-Hebron

Very early in my career I was a young Lieutenant Commander serving as a consultant to the equivalent of three Rear Admirals and one Vice Admiral. Three of them were three ranks superior to my rank and one was five ranks superior to my rank. The area I was in charge of was leadership which was of course something all four of them could have given me lesson in. I had nothing but my education and a burning desire to see the truth to offer them.

In the military you learn fast or you are eaten alive, especially if you are a petite 5 feet tall woman of a lower rank.

Luckily for me I have been practicing a rare tool without knowing it nearly all my life.

One of the teams under one of the rear admirals was practicing routine using new equipment. To the amazement of everyone involved using this new equipment led to lower performances than the results that were achieved in the past with the old equipment.

The Vice Admiral called me in and asked that I look into it to see where the leadership perspective has failed.

"Yes, sir."

So off I went, researched, interviewed, listened to everything from formal staff meetings to the stuff soldiers wrote on the walls in the bathroom (don't ask me how I got that information...).

My conclusion was that there was nothing wrong aside for the unhealthy expectation of the Vice Admiral, communicated and carried down to the soldiers by the Rear Admirals that things need to be perfect the first time around. They all expected the results to be higher right away because the equipment was only ever so slightly different. Since the equipment was better the results should have been better.

Since they assumed this process of improvement will be effortless they invested very little time in training.

They simply relayed to the soldiers how the equipment differed, allowed them to test it and get a feel for it, explained night applications and day time applications and that was that.

Notice how assumptions we make affect our decisions and our behavior.

As I was getting prepared to report this to the Vice Admiral I realized he would most likely dismiss my conclusions.

He was convinced something was wrong, which meant he expected getting a report about something he can fix and he was not the type to be "accused" of being impatient or not well planned.

Lacking an ingenious plan to somehow by pass what was about to happen I stepped into his office, saluted and sat down in front of him not sure how this session was going to go.

What followed was a conversation that went very much like this:

-- VA: "well, what did you find?"

-- RSH: "sir, I think..."

-- VA (interrupting me): "I talked to the leading team today and I’m certain we can address this swiftly, whatever it is."

-- RSH: "Well, sir, that's just the point, we need to talk about that. You see..."

-- VA (interrupting me): "Are you saying you don't know what went on there? I really expected to have an answer by now."

-- RSH: "I know what the cause is. It's important that we don’t rush into solving..."

-- VA: "There is no time. We have to address it now."

At this point a light bulb lit in the back of my head saying: "what he is doing now, here in the conversation with me is the exact same thing he is doing with this case. It's a pattern!"

I guess I was either oblivious to our rank differences (never dealt very well with authority I'm afraid), young and enthusiastic or just a bit brain numb because the next thing I heard coming out of my mouth was:

"Sir, if you want to get to the bottom of this you'll have to let me complete my sentences without jumping to conclusions."

I was a consultant after all...

He just sat back, smiled and kept silent until I finished speaking.

Instead of just talking to him about my conclusions I presented him with his pattern comparing the findings I made to his thinking at that very meeting. He was quickly making judgment calls before exploring situations fully. It was easy to identify as the results of the same assumptions were leading to different dysfunctional results.

Think about it this way:

At the heart of every action you take as an individual or as a business are core values and assumptions. If you are operating on the assumption that "things need to be resolved as quickly as possible" because you have learned that this is critical in combat (in this case it saves lives) it will lead you to behave in a certain way.

If you don't take the time to differentiate when your assumptions and values work for you and when they work against you you’ll quickly end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Those core assumptions and values can be understood as your operational codex, the set of principles that dictate your decisions and behavior.

I like to compare the operational codex—the line of basic assumptions we have about the world that directs our decisions, to the body's DNA.

A DNA is a sequence of commands our body peruses. It is a code telling the body what to do and when to do it. If you were to look into a specific sub system in the body you would notice that only certain parts of the DNA are active in that particular body site. Furthermore, at times certain commands contradict with other commands at a local site which results in the body obeying the "superior" command.

Human behaviors (and organizations, as sub groups of human behavior) are based on decisions that are activated by a similar mechanism.

A DNA command can be: "grow brown hair here." A basic assumption can be: "people are basically kind and they don't mean to hurt me." Or "Each time someone makes a negative comment about me it proves I am stupid."

The problem begins when the orders we live by are leading to undesired results.

A manager that thinks marketing his or her work to his or her superiors is "kissing ass and demeaning" is likely to avoid highlighting his or her achievements which may lead to very slow promotion if any.

An organization that holds the belief that employees are irresponsible and can not be facilitated to be more accountable and motivated will run into very specific problems.

"While making decisions quickly is clearly a must in combat" I said to the Vice Admiral, "it is not necessary in training and may even prove dysfunctional."

What I was able to see, the equivalence between the case I was investigating and the reactions of the Vice Admiral during the meeting opened a window for him to evaluate how he addresses challenges.

He wasn't provided with advice he got a look at how he thinks.

The secret in finding your organizational DNA is in the fact that your "basic assumptions" run across different situations. If we can understand the "hard wiring" of people and organizations, we can predict and prevent upcoming challenges and lead the person or the system to better achievements.

By: Reut Schwartz-Hebron

Tom is trying to figure out why his employees don't think for themselves. It seems like his staff would rather ask someone else for answers instead of putting in even the slightest effort to find the answer themselves.

This has been troubling Tom especially because it seems like trying to look for answers before asking is such a small effort and yet despite his best attempts to get the people on his team to change nothing has improved.

Is it that some people just can't think for themselves?

To Tom life has always been about questioning and expecting the most of himself. When everyone else were memorizing and getting good grades for rehearsing giving the answer that the teacher wanted to hear, Tom was busy examining the claims and the assumptions of the models. He's never accepted the fact that someone else "knows" the value of his efforts better than him and he was always in the habit of checking in with himself to see what he thinks is right rather than accept the voice of authority.

As a manager people who did not have the need to do better were a complete enigma to him and he had no idea how to get them to change.

He saw what needed changing—that was easy because after all he had practiced questioning and analyzing situations his whole life. So he hoped to

help others by highlighting the areas they could improve on. That proved of very little benefit. Despite the fact that his team heard him and expressed genuine willingness to change no behavioral improvement was made.

Is it that people can't change when it comes to their ability to think?

The answer to both of the above questions is "NO". All people call think for themselves and people can improve their thinking abilities.

Managers can present employees with a platform for change that leads to great improvements. Tom was simply going about it the wrong way.

Changing other people, unlike changing a code or a system is tricky because the only way people are going to change is if they want to change.

To be even more specific the heart of the challenge is that getting people to want to change requires two opposite things:

•On the one hand it requires a kind approach, supportive, encouraging and empathetic.

•On the other hand it requires challenging, presenting employees with their weaknesses, highlighting challenges and expecting excellence.

When you provide kind support people tend to get too comfortable and have no incentive to change. When you are presenting people with constructive criticism kindness just gets in the way.

What can we do to overcome this challenge?

Here are seven ways to by pass this "entanglement" and get other people to want to change without resistance:

•Make sure it's worth your time and effort-- getting people to change is a time and effort consuming process. If turnover is very high due to the type of business you are in or if the change you are hoping for won't make a significant difference in your bottom line I strongly suggest you don’t bother. Make peace with the fact that this is the best of all poor options and let it go.

•Choose who you intend to invest in— not all employees are "behavioral change material." Some are not the right fit to perform the position in the first place, others don't care to invest of themselves. In my days as an HR director my team knew that I would work with anyone but people in those two categories. If someone could not perform at the required level I took the responsibility for a bad hire and we parted as friends. In the cases employees were not making an effort to improve they found I had no tolerance for that whatsoever.

•Follow just one rule—people are more responsive and more likely to notice and address things they feel competent in. Your goal is to make those you chose to invest in feel competent about what they are doing or about to do. People don't just need to feel competent, they need to be able to perform at a high level which requires skills, but the best skills in the world without the confidence that one is capable to perform the task successfully will not yield desired results.

•Overcome initial failures with faith—there will be an in between period, before employees meet your standards, that will constantly disappoint you. How you respond to those initial tests is of crucial importance. I tell managers I train that they should consider this a test of leadership as their employees are putting their trustworthiness on the line wondering if their manager truly believes in them or if this is just a cheep manipulation to get them to cooperate. Your employees are just waiting for you to discourage them. They can't wait to tell you: "see, I told you so." It is up to you to prove them wrong by providing support and complete faith in their ability to succeed when they didn't perform at the level you expected.

So far there's a lot of support and kindness but very little results orientation and uncompromised excellence. The following three techniques are designed to address the growth side of the equation but you should know that if the first steps are not done with authenticity and genuine care for the individual employee the last three steps will lead to frustration at best.

•Meet with your employees periodically and provide skills—if you are meeting with them once a week keep those meetings regardless of whether you have feedback for that week or not. How frequently you meet is less important and it will depend on the intensity of the projects etc. but since these are training sessions rather than feedback or review sessions they should be continuous providing value for the employees growth on an ongoing basis.

•Provide the indirect skills-- the core skills that are relevant to the challenges at hand. The skills are seemingly unrelated to the challenge; they are core skills that will lead to the desired result as a secondary ripple effect. If you are frustrated with the fact that employees are not responsive enough for example, don't give instruction ("David, next time before you come to ask me a question try to see if you can find the answer to the question yourself first..."). The best way to go about it is to ask yourself what your employee is missing in terms of skills and supply him or her with those skills. In this case I would choose generalizing a skill from one area to another to be the topic of the periodical training session. I would discuss the origins of innovation and how the brain is like a muscle that needs training. If an employee is unaware of how they communicate on the phone, to take a different example, I would talk to them about the psychological process of customer service for a client and about the principles of losing an existing satisfied customer. Do note that this isn't manipulation in disguise; it is a genuine effort to expose the employee to strategic principles and thinking skills.

•Give it time and reward small successes—people don't change quickly which means that you need to give them time to "digest" change even after they fully understood what is expected, the rational and how to go about it. Don't be surprised by the fact that you'll need to address the same challenge from two or three directions before it sinks in. The only way to speed this process up is by conditioning the employee to notice small positive improvements. Tom may try to notice when an employee is making an effort to find and answer before coming over to ask him and drop a flower or a bar or chocolate on that employee's desk to highlight the achievement.

Preserving the "want" to improve is like maintaining a fire when you are lost somewhere and you used your last match. You don't want to let that fire die. But life must go on, productivity needs to stay high and you need to see results. People can be taught to use better thinking models and highlighting dysfunctions can be combined with a kind approach.

By: Reut Schwartz-Hebron

Productivity is all about how you think. Your ability to use analytical thinking and synthesis thinking interchangeably, focus, problem solve and apply changes from the core, strategize and innovate are far more significant when it comes to productivity than any other factor.

Here are some instant benefits of improving your thinking skills:

• The ability to asses where you are and what still needs to be completed in order to accomplish your goal on an ongoing basis
• Notice opportunities and threats and respond to them on time
• Solve problems at their core instead of wasting time and money in addressing symptoms
• Innovate, develop business strategies to increase your exposure and improve your ability to compete in your niche market
• Accomplish more with work less
• Reduce emotional stress

Increasing your personal productivity by learning how to think in different situations is the first step of the three stages that make up KindExcellence, a new management model that combines high standards of productivity and growth with a kind management style.

Once managers master the first stage they then should turn to train their staff in using expert thinking skills. The increased productivity and high performance standards then allow for the third stage. As employees acquire thinking patterns that lead them to understand decision making processes, priorities, and how to make these work towards accomplishing business goals; there is less need for supervision and correction allowing managers time to plan growth in a proactive rather than reactive way.

1. It's all about how you think: take control of the thinking skills you apply to different challenges. Analysis, for instance, which is a thinking pattern that takes place in the conscious mind, is a thinking process that is best used for linear challenges while complex and dynamic challenges require synthesis, a subconscious form of thinking. You can increase your productivity if you know how to identify which challenge calls for which thinking skill and how to activate the different thinking skills at will.

2. Practice seeing things as they truly are: our greatest vulnerability in confronting decisions comes from our biased views of reality and from the limitations we have as humans that prevent us from seeing the whole picture. Learn how to be in a receptive mode so you can notice more, learn how to minimize your limitations and discover how to build the support you need in your team.

3. Gain emotional balance and move aside irrelevant thoughts: emotional imbalance will get in your way when you need to see things or make important decisions and so will the ocean of thoughts you have running around in your mind constantly. Exercise balancing your emotional gauge and freeing your mind of irrelevant thoughts before you make decisions.

4. Learn how to use core thinking skills: learning how to focus and track thinking patterns leads to mastery in time management, interviewing, problem solving and innovation. You want to invest time in learning the principles behind the specified management skills so that you can improve a cluster of abilities all at once. If you learn how to give feedback all you've gained is how to give feedback, if you learn how to be receptive, listen, process, and communicated from a balanced and open place?then you’ve learned how to give feedback but you’ve also learned the basics of creative thinking, interviewing and more.

5. Train your team to use the thinking skills you mastered: devote time for training and communicating about thinking patterns. Train your team by highlighting decision making moments and providing them with as many learning opportunities as possible. Back the content with the understanding of your role and your contribution to their learning process.

6. Build a "want": the most critical aspects of increasing your team's productivity, things like innovation, commitment, and the willingness to improve are out of your reach if you have not sustained your employees? desire to give of themselves and improve. Learn how to combine kindness with excellence to harness these unique gems.

7. Make time to save time: by avoiding investment in growth you are building a vicious cycle. Understand that sometimes setting an hour a day for training means replacing an endless stream of time wasting minutes. If you waste 5 minutes a day it may seem irrational to devote 3 hours for training, but it is only irrational if you only have to waste 5 minutes a day for 36 days. With any day over 36 days you will be losing more time by choosing the 5 minutes a day option.

When it comes to productivity the single most influential misconception of small business owners is that employees will never care about the business as much as the owners do and that productivity is limited because there is little they can do as managers to change things. "I feel so frustrated about managing most of my employees." The CEO of a small biotech institute told me "I don't understand why with some employees I don't need to explain anything while with others it's a constant frustration because it seems like they don't really care."

Management isn't just coordinating and correcting, it's about giving skills, motivating and leading to excellent individual and team performances. Take the steps in the right order: increase employee autonomy by leading your team to excellence and then plug in kindness to sustain intrinsic motivation and commitment. The results will surprise you.

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A lot of turnover can be prevented

A few weeks back I met with an irony that triggered many questions in my mind.

The irony wore the image of 37-year-old Amanda (not her real name), an IT recruiter who had decided to leave the recruiting company she had worked at for the last nine years.

Amanda, who worked for one of the biggest IT recruiting companies in San Diego, stayed through many of the company's turbulences. She finally decided to leave not for a cut in her salary or her benefits, but because she felt there was very little humanity left in how she was treated. Remember the fires that ravaged San Diego a few months ago? Amanda says her bosses, who dined at her table more than once and knew she lived right in the middle of the area touched by fire, never even called to see whether her house was spared, nor to ask about her well-being.

An all-about-business approach isn't new. It's just that it makes no sense, unless of course you hope to lose a certain employee or if you are completely oblivious to the costs of recruiting. It's ironic that a company that is at the forefront of understanding turnover costs is so careless about its employee retention.

Why are we more likely to waste money on recruiting when we could prevent many cases of voluntary turnover?

If you have ever scheduled to meet with the people at the helm in order to change the direction of the ship, if you've ever given this important process the time it requires to discuss strategy instead of just every-day maintenance, then you probably know some variation of the following answers:

"I don't know what you mean—our retention rates are fairly average for our industry." "What you are talking about is changing how our managers work with their teams, and you know as well as I do that it's near impossible." "We don’t have time for applying this change..." These are just cop-outs and worse yet, they make no sense. If we are average, why don't we get better? If we need to change, then we better start today, and not having time is a direct result of focusing on recruiting instead of retention. After all, retention has the potential of becoming the best investment we've made in years.

Local vs. global optimization. Many company managers are highly focused on gaining a local benefit without stopping to explore the consequences their actions would have on the whole system. Pushing an employee to work harder in the present is a good example of this tendency; an overworked employee will produce more locally but is likely to have a higher burnout rate. Ignoring training needs is another good example where a desire to save time and money in the present ends up costing 10 times more in the future. You can bet that if an organization is using this thinking pattern when it addresses workload and training, it will use the same deduction when it comes to recruiting and retention.

Missing out on the power of kindness. Yes, in the end, it's all about money, not people. But making it all about people is good for reducing turnover and reducing turnover looks good on financial sheets. Lack of retention skills. Retention is all about management skills: training, communicating expectations, exposing expert thinking patterns, and teaching them to novices, eliminating the dysfunctional aspects of feedback and review, and more. When we don't have these skills, retention efforts become hollow. This leads to a disappointment from the results of retention efforts, followed by a desire to avoid retention.

It's harder to think about strategy; it's easier to focus on doing. It is easier to recruit than to address retention, because it requires a smaller effort. It's true that recruiting costs and efforts are larger if we look at the accumulative effect. In the short run, figuring out a hiring process is much easier than figuring out a cultural change. Take a leadership role in facilitating a change process, including the following:

Build a path of influence. Identify how and why changes are made in the organization you serve and then track that path to insert change. If changes are top-down, your strategy should be top-down. If ideas come from different places in the organization, get a buy-in from several influential executives before you address the issue at the top.

Analysis: find the core. Spend time with each influential executive and analyze the reasoning for why things are done the way they are done. A question like, "Why are we not investing more in retention, instead of investing in recruiting, when we know it would save us a lot of money?" is a great place to begin. If you hear, "We have an average retention rate for our industry," then encourage further discussion. Start with, “Why are we only average? And why is it enough?"

Synthesis: help executives see the big picture. Once you've exposed the core reasons for avoiding retention, address them by exploring them in the context of the whole system (i.e., the different forces and dynamics, income, and expenses that make the organization what it is). Finding the core cause for shying away from retention isn't enough. If change is to happen, it requires replacing a dysfunctional thinking pattern with a more productive one. If skills are missing, make sure you provide them at the time you are proposing they are not in place. If executives think locally, provide them with concrete numbers and figures as to how much recruiting costs and how redirecting that money to retention would save money in the long run. Without an understanding of the whole system and without an alternative strategy or a solution in place, identifying the core of the challenge and highlighting it to decision-makers will make very little difference.

By identifying the thinking pattern, surfacing the real reasons for avoiding the investment in retention, and providing an alternative strategy, you will have solved half the challenge. From there it’s all about repetition and patience as the forces of real change kick in.

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I started painting recently. I never painted before, and all of a sudden I'm finding myself exploring colors and techniques on large canvases. Something about moving to San Diego really helped me connect with that additional aspect of myself.

Moving to San Diego from Israel via Berkeley, this is the first time I feel safer. Interesting, isn't it? Feeling safe allows us to do more, explore more, and be more. It's true for external conditions but even more so to emotional conditions—how we are treated and how we treat ourselves affects how much we can produce emotionally and intellectually.

Do we feel more creative, innovative, alert to possibilities and threats when we feel safe or is it easier for us to be creative under distress? Can we build trust, resolve conflicts, and work as a team when we feel respected, or is it better when we feel we are not treated as equals?

What would happen if we were kinder to our employees?

Kindness is currently perceived as the weakest strategy in business. For most managers trusting others or treating them as equals means not making deadlines, being stepped on or being taken advantage of. We know that kinder leadership leads to better productivity simply because when people feel safe, appreciated and happy they care to give more of themselves, but something seems to be getting in the way.

Isn't it true that if we could remove the dysfunctional aspects of a kinder management style we would have the perfect platform for business success? Sure it is.

So here is where our challenge lays: how do we remove the dysfunctional by products of kindness to enjoy the rewarding (both emotionally and financially) fruits it bares?

The KindExcellence management approach focuses on answering this exact question.

It turns out that when kindness stands alone it is easy to manipulate it, but when it is combined with a strong set of skills, it turns into the most effective management approach. This means that kindness needs the support of a system, a way to by pass dysfunctions without contradicting the values that underline kindness.

Here are a few highlights of why and how KindExcellence works:

1. The dysfunctions have nothing to do with kindness – once you'll understand that mediocrity and not making dead lines has nothing to do with kindness and everything to do with communicating expectations, planning, training etc. you'll be able to quadruple your team's productivity.

2. The skills you acquired intuitively can be taught-- managers assume that since they had to acquire skills like prioritizing, time management, strategic thinking, and other complex thinking skills intuitively or over many years it means that employees will have to acquire these skills themselves. It's the either you have it or you don't approach. In reality managers need to learn how to turn expert thinking skills to tools they can teach to novices. In KindExcellence language this process of teaching expert skills to novices is called "Real Knowledge".

3. You need to know what to teach-- stop talking about tasks and start talking about thinking skills. Meet regularly with your employees and when tasks where not met go into the mechanism that got in the way and then provide thinking skills. Be sure to provide skills instead of advice.

4. Communicate your expectations and know your boundaries-- if you can't articulate your expectations and boundaries how do you expect others to follow?

5. Work on prevention instead of correction-- devote time to training, set time to talk about expectations before anything happens, not after. Giving feedback right after something happened is good conditioning, it's much better than waiting. But it is far less effective than setting clear expectations, providing training and reinforcing success.

When managers take responsibility for their role as managers, as opposed to coordinators or doers, once they work to provide their team with the tools required for excellence, kindness is the natural choice. It's then that the combination of KindExcellence becomes a double prize.

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Although getting an MBA gives professionals a better understanding of business, it doesn’t automatically make you a good manager. Read this firsthand scenario and learn how to develop better managers, faster.

Meet Ben. He's worked for your company before and you're hoping he'll rejoin the company after he gets his MBA. Lucky for you he's received his MBA and he's back working for you again. Now that he's a team manager he has a great advantage because he knows how things work, but he still needs to figure out how to make decisions and how to motivate people. How can you teach him to improve in this area?

Management intuition is acquired over time through a loop of assumptions and feedback. The more opportunities you have to make and asses assumptions and the more reliable your feedback is, the faster you'll gain intuition. The basic recipe is: create more practice opportunities and provide reliable feedback.

Create More Practice Opportunities:

- Ben needs to use his intuition each time he has to deal with complex dynamic systems. This is true every time he needs to figure out how to address a client, give feedback to an employee, or solve a multi dimensional problem. Each such incident is a learning opportunity that is hidden in the moment Ben has a hunch or a gut feeling.

- Hunches and gut feelings are subconscious and we can access them. Luckily for Ben, you know that subconscious reactions trigger a physical discomfort. It may be a twist in his stomach or a rush of excitement leading to accelerated heart beat. The nature of the signal is secondary. Teach Ben to notice these physical reactions and treat them as practice opportunities.

- Make an agreement with Ben. He'll come and talk to you each time he recognizes a hunch is in progress and you'll help him shorten his learning curve in return.

- Ben is noticing his subconscious drawing a conclusion. It's his conclusion that has led to the physical reactions. Your job is to help him identify the conclusion, the thought that triggered the physical reaction and asses it’s validity.

- Exploring basic assumptions is best addressed through questioning the reason behind the reason. Managers often describe the moment they hit the right nail as a moment of joy similar to the feeling we get when we solve a puzzle. Keep asking questions until Ben feels you've hit gold.

- Finally, feedback should depend on facts. If Ben's conclusion doesn't match with yours, ask yourself which factual insight you have that he hasn't. Remember, you are helping him develop his own intuition, not gifting him with yours.

Unlike learning how to interview or solve problems in workshops, practicing management intuition is an ongoing, on the job training process. It is not provided by an outside expert, but by the manager. More importantly when you know how to accelerate your ability to gain intuition it applies to all areas of management, not just to specific cases within specific skills.

These three principles are at the heart of KindExcellence, a new management model that combines a kind management style with the thinking skills that support it to provide excellent business results.

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Techniques recruiters sometimes use subconsciously

After years of interviewing and hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities to practice, you are an expert when it comes to sensing who is sitting right in front of you. You are so good at it that sometimes you surprise yourself with how quickly you pick up on things about candidates inside and outside of an interview session.

That's intuition and, if it's built on a feedback loop, it's one of the best tools at your disposal when you need to identify traits and uncover delicate and important factors such as authenticity and flexibility.

The difficult part is that you can't share this type of knowledge with new recruiters. Intuition and other automatic and subconscious thinking patterns (yes, intuition is a thinking pattern) often seem out of reach, and we assume the only way for people to learn them is to go through a learning process similar to the one we had to go through ourselves.

There are certain things we can’t trace and, hence, we can't teach. We can’t trace the values we assign certain behaviors. When you notice a certain behavior during an interview and you instantly have a value assigned to that behavior (say you notice the candidate drumming his or her fingers on the table and you instantly know it is a sign of resistance to authority) the value-assigning part is out of our reach. You don't know why you interpret a certain behavior in a specific way; if someone asked you to explain most of these conclusions, you probably wouldn't know what to tell him. But, what you are actually doing is a lot more than assigning value to a specific behavior. Your mind is noticing gesture, tone of voice, and combining those and other clues to produce a conclusion.

We can't teach new recruiters which values to assign. Though there are many theories that try, the result is a long list of combinations which, even if we put validity aside, are too numerous to remember and apply. But we can teach recruiters where to look for signs and how to practice combining them. Though experience and feedback loops are indispensable, knowing where to look cuts the learning curve dramatically.

Here are seven techniques you are probably using without knowing:

Make the Most out of the Resume. Expert interviewers prepare well. They read and re-read a candidates' resumes, treating these documents like a detective would a crime scene: Anything can be a clue, but nothing is valid until it is supported by concrete evidence. They look at the resumes for anything that could be even slightly off, and they assign meaning to the length of the sentences, the richness of the language, the use of space on the page, repeated words or themes, and much more. Expert recruiters build the most unsympathetic theories as they read through a resume, but they stay clear of coming to any conclusions. Use Introspection as a Mirroring Technique. Introspection is often used by experts to identify areas that need attention. By assessing their own reaction to the candidate’s behavior, interviewers can pinpoint manipulations of different kinds. If, for instance, a candidate is triggering a protective response in the interviewer, the interviewer (alerted by his or her own emotional response) can track back the behavior or response that triggered the reaction and assign it meaning.

Peruse Emotional Triggers. We are most authentic, exposing our basic assumptions and values, when we are emotional. Any reaction that is off balance, and that includes an excess of positive or negative response (you are just as emotionally vulnerable when your team wins as when your team loses), falls into this category. Experienced interviewers notice emotional responses and follow their paths with additional questions that intensify emotions to asses the candidate's evasive values, attitudes, and basic assumptions.

Collect Contradictions. Anything that might seem like a contradiction that comes up through context or content is a great place to dig. When candidates have seemingly contradicting areas of interest or have invested time in contradicting efforts, expert interviewers pick up on that and ask for interpretations. The same principle applies to content, when things that have been said earlier could be interpreted as being contradictory to things that are being said now. It's not so much the explanation that interests experts, but the way in which the response is presented. The response is a great telling sign about abilities like handling criticism, working with authority, accepting ambiguity, and much more.

Collate Repetitions. Certain behaviors mean very little by themselves, but put together with other behaviors, when a pattern is created, they are very indicative of a personal of professional trait. Let's look back at the example of drumming on the table. That behavior, if interpreted by itself, could mean many things. It could, in fact, mean the exact opposite of a defiant candidate and indicate insecurity and shyness. How did you know it was one and not the other? You looked at one behavior and created a pattern.

Look for Core Reasons. Direct answers are often just the beginning of a long discovery trail. An effective interview feels more like a conversation to the candidate because the interviewer is focusing and stretching the understanding of the candidate's basic assumptions through a certain example. Most soft skills can be located in pretty much any discussion, and as the interviewer asks core questions like why, the answers become more revealing.

Detach Yourself of Your Own Emotional Limitations. Like therapists or anthropologists, interviewers must know how to leave their own imbalances and limitations outside the interviewing room. To interview well means to have control of the emotional responses you are trying to elicit. I know recruiters and managers who build up tension and as soon as they feel they made the candidate uncomfortable, they back away and try to soften the blow. That, of course, requires your new interviewers to be aware of their own limitations, but they'll master this knowledge a lot faster if they know what to look for.

All of these techniques are expert skills that can easily be taught to a novice. All you need to do is provide practice, coupled with a feedback loop. If you can do that, mastery will come about faster than you could ever imagine.

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