Conventional wisdom has it wrong if the job you go after is a bad match for your skills, your innate strengths, and your style or personality preferences. As many of you can attest, you can do a good job matching your skill sets to the required need, only to find later that you have a serious personality mismatch to that of your boss and/or the culture in which you will be working.
If you want to save yourself time and aggravation you’ll find out what you’re getting into, before you get into it. To do that, you’ll need to start with an honest self-assessment. Once you know your strengths, skills, and style, you can determine which situations fit and which don’t.
Before you start making lists, let’s sort out the differences between these three essential elements of job satisfaction:
A skill is a learned physical task. You can be taught a skill. If you take time, energy, and focus to consistently practice, you can become “skilled” or competent at performing the task. Yet skills alone, even highly developed skills, aren’t enough to succeed in a job.
You also need talent. Talent can’t be taught. Talent is inherent; it comes naturally. And talent alone isn’t enough to get you where you need to be. It takes study, drive, determination, and yes, practice, to turn talent into strength. Strengths, skills, what else does it take?
Style. You can think of style as an expression of your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. As behavior, style distinguishes one individual from another.
What has skill, strength, and style to do with finding the right “fit” with a company? Everything. You want to work where your innate strengths make a difference and you’re valued for having made an ongoing contribution. You want to work where you can learn, grow, and develop your skills. And you want to work where you’re comfortable, where your values, perspectives, and attitudes mesh with those who lead and manage the company.
How can you know where “there” is? Companies don’t advertise their idiosyncrasies, they advertise their products and services. When companies publicize jobs and interview applicants, they describe needs and opportunities, they don’t describe the boss’s quirks and preferences. Interviewers assume applicants know if they can meet and exceed the company’s expectations and if the company is the right one for them.
Therefore, it’s up to you to find out what makes the company tick. Are they watch- dogs? Watch- makers? or clock- watchers? You’ll know what’s important to them if you know where they invest their time and money. R&D? Quality? Customer Service? Distribution? Sales? Marketing? Are they a company known for their streamlined efficiency? Creativity and product diversity? Order, and organization? Rules and regulation?
Is their management style top down, bottom up, participative, non- existent/inconsistent? What do they reward, instill, ignore, replace?
Ask questions if you want to get answers. Ask the interviewer to describe where the company is going and what they need to do to get there; ask who they want to have designing the course, mapping the direction, driving the train, and maintaining the engines.
Ask interviewers to describe the characteristics of employees who succeed, and those who fail. Ask questions about the greatest obstacles the company is facing, in the long and short term, and their commitment, in time, finances, and personnel, to accomplish their objectives in overcoming those challenges.
Ask about the work they want you to do, the achievements they expect from you, the resources they’ll provide you, and how they’ll measure success from you. If you have the courage to ask questions, you’ll know where you stand. You might have the right skill sets, and the wrong style; the right style and the wrong strengths; the right strengths, and the wrong skills.
If it’s a fit, go for it with all you’ve got. If it’s not, keep looking.
