I’ve been a supervisor long enough to make lots of mistakes, and hopefully to learn from them. While I still make mistakes, they happen less often and aren’t as serious as they used to be.
My skill in hiring staff has unquestionably improved over the years for one simple reason: when I realized I had hired the wrong person, I would go back to the interview questions I asked them to see what I should have asked instead. I thought of skills the employee lacked, and came up with a question that they would not have been able to answer well given their limitations. Over the years, I moved from the generic questions that you can find on LinkedIn and similar sites to questions that focused on the real world situations the employee might face.
My favorite memory of asking better questions came from a young woman who wanted to work in a homeless shelter. I asked, “As you are doing your rounds, you notice that water is coming from under the laundry room door. When you go into the room, you see one of the residents passed out by the washing machine. Just then someone yells that two other residents are fighting in the lobby. Suddenly you hear a fire alarm going off in one of the rooms. At the same time, another resident starts complaining to you that there wasn’t enough meat in the pasta that was served at dinner. What do you do?” Her response included making her eyes as big as possible, breathing through her mouth for a few seconds, and finally asking, “Does that really happen here?” I didn’t hire her.
I wish we could use the same approach during elections, although it isn’t possible because the dynamics are so different. Politicians need to convince enough people that they can do the job to get elected, and vague answers are often the best. That strategy simply won’t work when you have to convince a single person to give you a specific job.
Even though voters can’t force a politician to give specific answers, we can look at the individual’s skills and the specific challenges we are facing right now to see if there is a good fit. Someone who always wants lower taxes, or who always campaigns for more regulation, might have been a good choice last election, but that doesn’t mean they should automatically get a vote this time around. If they want to use the same solutions without considering whether the problems have changed, they simply won’t be effective. Anyone who thinks the answer is always two, regardless of whether the questions is “What’s 1+1?” or “What’s the square root of 1,089?” or “What is the capital of Tanzania?” is going to be wrong more often than they are right.
But that means that voters have to be savvy enough to learn from the past. We may believe strongly in a certain platform, but if we hold to that point of view regardless of the specific situations we face, we are simply incapable of grappling with the real, everyday issues that our community faces. We must be willing to adapt our responses and our votes to the situation, rather than blindly following a philosophy that we think will answer every situation.
by Marti Maltby, Director Peace House Community – A Place to Belong
This article originally appeared in “The Alley,” the newspaper for the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.