Abhijit Bhattacharya

Interviews are all about confidence. Let's not be mistaken that it is about the confidence of the candidate, it is rather about how much confidence the interviewer is experiencing in that moment about the candidate as a potential employee. It is true that confidence begets confidence, so displaying confidence may be helpful. However, among the different shades of confidence, the one often seen in display in interviews is the confidence generating from competence. But the amount of confidence the candidate brings about things unknown to them actually makes or breaks the interview. That shade of confidence generates from Bandura's concept of self-efficacy, which could also be loosely called as self-belief.

Questions in interviews are often not what they seem and may not be taken on face value all the time. If the question is about the long-term career plan, we must reflect what is the question underneath that question. Perhaps it is about trying to figure out alignment between the organization and the individual, or maybe an attempt to assess longevity, so on and so forth. Thus, something which is rare, could be displayed in such scenarios - for the interviewee to ask clarifying questions, such as: - What about my long term career plan interests you so that I can be more specific with my response? - How long is long-term so that I can tailor my response accordingly? - Which aspects will be particularly helpful so that I can cover those?

Rational, logic based, black & white thinking often finds a poor cousin in a dynamic and inter-relational thinking where there are many shades of grey. This dichotomy is sometimes visible in tech leaders where they find people to be complex systems where input and output show no relation a lot of times. Moreover, like many industries, a lot of tech leaders are made responsible for people without sufficient developmental opportunities around that topic, aggravating the challenges. Helping tech leaders with raising awareness about this and embracing the value of dichotomy of their thinking processes is quite helpful in a lot of scenarios. The value is in helping them see they don't need to sacrifice one for the other but can embrace both.

Context is the most crucial element when it comes to coaching. It is the first aspect that coaches need to pay attention to. The context of every industry is different but the one that comes up for tech more often than not is their continual need to enhance their subject matter expertise along with their socio-behavioral skills as a leader. This becomes both an opportunity and a challenge which sometimes get intertwined with each other. Apart from that the tech industry seems to be more susceptible to change as compared with other industries, which requires leaders to display a lot of adaptability and resilience. Despite that, every individual and organization is unique, hence the context is nuanced and understanding that is crucial.

Contrary to popular belief, action plans with every action mapped out till the end are impractical for big vision. It is due to the fact that although the vision is clear and compelling, the path to it is hazy and non-linear calling for more experimentation than decisive action. One action, and the learning from it, informs the next action in such uncertain and ambiguous situations. A mindset of curiosity and observation, rather than pre-determined action, could prove to be extremely useful in such circumstances.

Although it may seem like a sequential process, assessing the current situation doesn't always come after visioning. Contrarily, the two are inseparable in the process of thinking as the human brain processes information in relativity, irrespective of whether that's useful. Additionally, cultural context plays a huge role here. For 'high context' cultures in the East, assessing the current reality may carry more weightage and the expectation of the coachees could be that once that's done well, the vision will emerge from it. It may work the other way round in 'low context' cultures in the West where setting lofty goals and following through on them with action plans might be a more preferred way.