Jiri’s Notepad

This book review is a part of the series on architects’ soft skills.

Every person thinks, motivates themselves, makes decisions and cares about different things. The premise on which Words that Change Minds is based is that the words you use reflect all these various mental characteristics and give a significant pointer to your expected behaviour. On its own, this is probably not ground breaking, but the capability to decode signals each of us are sending out through our words and responding to them appropriately can be very useful in both personal and professional life. At work, skills like this are useful for several job roles. I personally found them particularly useful in people selection.

When hiring or selecting someone for a project, I normally use three criteria: First come Joel Spolsky’s 1. Smart, 2. Gets things done; to which I add a third one: 3. Suits the job and the environment. This may actually mean several things depending on the job and circumstances - from avoiding ‘dangerous maniacs’ (zealot aggressively promoting their favourite type of solution whatever the problem is), ensuring the person you are hiring fits into an existing team, to intentionally hiring a contrarian to pick up on mistakes and bringing diversity of views. To do this, I normally try to run the candidate through some of the questions from this book after checking the his or her technical competency (which for me BTW includes not only technology but also problem solving, decision making skills, delivery lifecycle experience and few others).

But the book is more than just a questionnaire. Apart from questions, it provides rather detailed overview and description of several behavioural and attitude patterns that can make a difference at work. Arguably, there are more thorough methods to do this - Myers-Briggs or Belbin team roles come to my mind - but Lab Profile, on which the book is based, is much more focused, avoiding general personality traits that that have little use in work context. The beauty of the profile then is that you can use it relatively quickly during a conversation without making it sound too much like an HR interrogation.

Using the book you can find out things about the candidates such as :

• Is the interviewee proactive or reactive?
• To what extent he or she is more likes to use own approach versus follow existing procedures?
• Is she or he more a big-picture thinker or oriented on the detail?
• Are they paying attention to non-verbal communication?
• Does the interviewee prefer sole or shared responsibility for the work?
• Is he or she likely to conform to the existing cultural norms?

If you are interested in how other people think about the world you will love this book. Even if you are not, it still deserves your attention for making you think about different behaviours needed for various architecture jobs and last but not least for the useful interview questions.