How do you uncover a person’s true character in a job interview? When people know they’re being evaluated, they of course put on their best behavior and play nice. But are they really? You can ask them what they’re like, but will they tell the truth?

Here’s a fun way to uncover an applicant’s character that I found in a comment thread over on reddit.com. It involves a serious game of Jenga:

Where I work, we do our best to weed out the unhappy and cynical employees before they even get hired. Coworkers who are constantly cynical and unhappy are absolutely terrible for morale, and we do whatever we can to avoid it both before and after hiring.

After each candidate goes through his/her well-rehearsed and pre-meditated interviews with HR and management, the entire engineering team (small company) comes into the room, closes the door, and starts a game of Jenga like it’s no big deal. Meanwhile, we strike up a casual conversation with the candidate and insist s/he play with us.

Without fail, the candidates true colors are almost immediately revealed. Candidate scoffs at the idea of playing a game in an interview? Obviously too uptight for our group and not capable of handling rapidly changing situations. Focusing on Jenga also takes the candidate’s mind off of all of the pre-meditated answers and pages of ‘interview tips’ articles that we’ve all read at one point or another. The trick is to treat the game of Jenga like it’s serious business so the candidate follows suit and forgets about the formalities of the interview and whatever persona s/he is trying to craft for the interviewers. If the person can discuss intense technical topics without breaking a sweat while playing Jenga, then s/he likely knows the subject matter pretty well.

Works every time. We end up with engineers who get along, think on their feet, are laid back, and known their stuff.

I like it. It reminds me of this great story from Hal Rosenbluth’s book The Customer Comes Second:

CEO Hal Rosenbluth was once about to hire an executive with all the right skills, the right personality and the perfect CV. His interviews went swimmingly and he’d said all the right things, but something about him still made Rosenbluth nervous, though he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.

His solution was brilliant: He invited the applicant to a company softball game, and here he showed his true colors. He was competitive to the point of being manic. He abused and yelled at both the opponents and his own team. He cursed the referees and kicked up dirt like a major league player.

And he did not get the job.

I absolutely agree that no workplace should tolerate jerks and the best time to weed them out is before they’re ever hired. Playing games is just one way to make people forget themselves enough to show who they really are.

Your take

What do you think? Does your workplace do something similar? Have you tried something like this in a job interview?

Related posts

• The No Asshole Rule.
• How do you hire happy managers?
• Top 5 reasons why most team building events are a waste of time.

Holy crap – one of the videos from our conference last year is featured on the front page of ted.com. And featured very prominently! Which means that it has now been viewed over 50,000 100,000 times!

And it’s no wonder – the presentation in question was one of the highlights of our 2009 conference on happiness at work: Dr. Srikumar S. Rao’s wonderfully inspiring and funny presentation.

It very satisfying for me to know that something we helped create has now inspired so many people in the TED community and around the world. Also, it’s a professional ambition of mine to speak at TED – and this way, I almost already have – by proxy :o)

You can watch Srikumar Rao’s entire speech here (18 minutes):

Dr. Rao is the man behind the pioneering course Creativity and Personal Mastery. This is the only business school course that has its own alumni association and it has been extensively covered in the media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the London Times, the Independent, Time, the Financial Times, Fortune, the Guardian, Business Week and dozens of other publications.

Most of us spend most of the work day sitting down. We sit at our desks, we sit in meetings, we sit down at lunch and we sit down for seminars, phone calls, orientations and just about anything else that goes on during a regular work week.

Which is why this excellent NY Times article by Zack Canepari is so important. It opens with these provocative words:

Your chair is your enemy.

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

We all knew that sitting down all day is bad for you, but I at least thought that you could offset this with plenty of exercise outside of work. I was wrong.

The article goes on to list two reasons why sitting down is so bad for your health. First, it’s extremely passive which means your body burns very few calories while you sit. Just standing up activates your whole system to a much larger degree and burns more energy. As the article says:

Part of the problem with sitting a lot is that you don’t use as much energy as those who spend more time on their feet. This makes it easier to gain weight, and makes you more prone to the health problems that fatness often brings.

But it doesn’t stop there. Apparently:

…when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.
…
Actively contracting muscles produce a whole suite of substances that have a beneficial effect on how the body uses and stores sugars and fats.

There’s science to back this up:

A study of people who sit for many hours found that those who took frequent small breaks — standing up to stretch or walk down the corridor — had smaller waists and better profiles for sugar and fat metabolism than those who did their sitting in long, uninterrupted chunks.

Go read the whole article – it’s a great read.

To all of this, I’d add that in my experience being physically inactive also dulls my mind. If you sit down passively all day, this makes it harder to be creative, energetic and motivated.

So what’s the solution?

Given the problem, it’s obvious that solution can’t be all about exercising before and after your work day. This wouldn’t address the fact that you’d still be sitting still for long periods of time. The solution has to be about integrating movement into the work day.

Here are three things you can do about this:
1: Take a lunch walk
Make it a tradition to take a short walk with some co-workers every day after lunch. Not only is this a chance to get moving, it can also be a nice way to chat with your co-workers and refresh workplace relationships.

2: Get up and move regularly
Make it a rule to never sit down more than 30 minutes at a time. Then you must get up to stretch, go smoke, get coffee, go chat to someone in the next office, whatever.

Set a timer to remind you if that’s what it takes. There’s even software you can install on your PC to remind you to get away from the PC :o)

3: Work standing up some of the time
There are many things you can do at work, even if your butt isn’t firmly planted in your chair. You can have stand-up meetings which have the added advantage that they’re a lot shorter! You can do your phone calls standing up, which has the advantage that your voice sounds clearer and more energetic. You can even work on your computer standing up if you have a desk that raises or can find a high table.

Bonus tip
I really, really like the Specialized Lunch Ride:

Your take

How much of your work day is spent in a chair? Have you thought about how this affects you mentally and physically? What do you do to get out of your chair?

Please write a comment – I’d love to hear your take.

Related posts

• The science of touch
• Top 10 signs you’re unhappy at work
• Monday Tip: Get Out!

P.S.
I wrote this post standing up :o)

This dog lives across the street from our office:

He is regularly found at his post, surveying his domain which is (i’d guess) the whole street. I especially like how his elbow is up on the banister. It’s suave yet domineering!

Last week I wrote about the value of touch in the workplace. Basically, I’m for handshakes, high fives, pats on the shoulder and even hugs in the workplace as one way of creating and maintaining good workplace relationships and there’s science to indicate the importance and value of touches.

Gaby from Germany wrote this comment on the post:

I once worked for a bank in Germany (well these are two locations in which you would not normally expect “personal affection” ;-)).

The team was large, about 40 people worked in one open space office. It surprised me a lot that every morning, whoever arrived, walked through the whole office and greeted everybody with a handshake and some personal words. It did not matter if the team members came, the bosses from higher up or anybody from another department. It was known everywhere that here you greet everybody personally.

For the first week, I found that very strange and a bit intimidating. Also, it cost a lot of time all in all. Yet afterwards, I really enjoyed it. It gave everybody the chance to get to know the colleagues a bit better, to hear what they are off to or to realize that somebody is not in or just returned from a trip or vacation. There was no need to e-mail weekly lists on who is out when. We just knew it.

Btw, when I moved on to another job, I sort of missed it.

I love it! And in fact, one simple tool we teach people in our speeches and workshops is to greet co-workers with a level-5 good morning. This means a good morning, where you:

• Make eye contact
• Add something specific to that person
• Touch the other person.

How do you greet your co-workers? How do you like to be greeted when you come in in the morning?

Like just about anyone else, my favorite café here in Copenhagen is tired of hearing about the financial crisis.

And this is how they’ve reacted:

That shows guts, initiative, playfulness and a commitment to fun. I love it!

It doesn’t stop at the posters and postcards (which I apparently inspired), the owner does many things to make this a happy workplace. Here’s one: As an employee on your birthday, you can either get a gift from the café or you can throw a party and the café will pay for it – provided you invite all your co-workers.

Which is just one more reason why I love this place. That and the pancakes :o) In fact, I’m writing this at The Laundromat Café and I also wrote large parts of my first book here.