Spheres of Control, Influence, Concern

Imagine that you are going for an interview. This interview could be for a job that you want or for a promotion in a job that you already are in or for an academic position let’s say a phd position. You are on tenterhooks. You are increasingly stressed out. You know that you are qualified. You still have some doubts about how you’ll perform in the interview. The whole process consumes you during your waking and sleeping hours. How do you approach the stress? What do you do? What do you not do? In times like these there are tools available to help you cope. Let’s look at one such tool today.

You can prepare and manage some aspects related to the interview: For instance, you can prepare for it by:

• Studying the company history (faculty interviewing you in a PhD situation) and role; data are often available in the public domain and the job advertisement.
• You can outline and develop answers to the interview questions you anticipate. One way to do this is to put yourself in the shoes of the panel and coming up with questions.
• You could dress appropriately; appearances do matter in many cases.
• You could plan to arrive well on time or log in well on time. You could have contingency plans for ensuring that there is no hitch in this. Carry all necessary documents that may be needed.

During the interview you can present your best side by:

• Exhibiting confidence in your answers and posture.
• Ensuring that you clearly communicate that you have thought of why you think you are suitable for the role.
• Coming up with concrete examples, pithily explained (remember the practice we spoke of?) that show how you are qualified.
• Asking insightful questions when invited to, as you are most likely going to be at the end of the interview. There is nothing worse than saying “I don’t really have any questions”.

Through the process you will be worried about things that may affect the decision to hire. Aspects like:

• The competition that you might be facing for the role.
• Budget availability for the role in the medium term.
• Internal politics in the company; whether this process is a sham and an internal candidate has already been earmarked for the role. This happens more often than you can imagine.
• The future of the division in the company or the company itself.

There are some unknown aspects that will also cross your mind. Things like:

• Preferences or biases of the interviewing panel.
• Strange, even weird questions that are often asked in interviews.

Then there are issues that you might have heard about with respect to the company or university. Issues like:

• Rumours of a hostile takeover.
• Personal opinions of former, disgruntled employees who had been fired from their jobs.

All of these may play in your mind, but all of these are not equally important. The amount of attention that you need to pay them depends on aspects like whether they are relevant and whether you can do something about them. To continue with the example we started with:

• The aspects in green above are matters that are more or less in your CONTROL. I do not wish to get into a discussion of whether we truly have control over anything and whether free-will exists. It doesn’t but that is another issue. I like the way Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister looked at free-will. He said “Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.” You can do a lot with most or all of them.
• The aspects in red above, are matters that you don’t have much control over, but you definitely can INFLUENCE. You can create a positive impression about yourself in the minds of the interview panel. You may not be able to compel them to hire you, but you can influence their decision. The sphere of influence is an underrated and often misunderstood area. Most people think they have little influence but that’s because they do not understand how power works and the fact that they too have power. Exhibiting confidence for instance, triggers something positive about you in the mind of your interlocutors and subtly makes them look favourably at you. That’s influence. Asking good questions makes them feel that you are keen, thoughtful, and interested in the job. That is influencing too. You cannot control what they will do but you have nudged them into a positive frame of mind about you.
• The aspects in purple above are matters that are of CONCERN to you but you can neither control nor influence them. They are important, but it may be infructuous to spend much energy in thinking about them.
• The aspects in blue above are the UNKNOWNS. Remember Donald Rumsfeld who spoke about Unknown unknowns? He was roundly mocked then. He did have a point though.
• The aspects in pink are largely IRRELEVANT to you and your preparations for the interview.

In order to do well in the interview, you need to be able to separate out the thoughts swirling around your head into different categories. The framework I have used here is called Spheres (or circles if you want to think in 2 dimensions) of Control, Influence, and Concern. There are two other outer spheres of Unknowns and Irrelevance which you could club into one sphere of ‘everything else’.

What lies in each of these spheres is not the same for every person. It depends on the person – background, skills, knowledge, attitude etc. What is important to know is that one can classify issues using this frame and then decide how much resources to throw at addressing them. This is important. Spending time on ruminating over matters of concern AT THE COST OF spending time in dealing with matters in one’s sphere of control can be disastrous at best, infructuous at worse.

To conclude:

• Areas you have control over, you work at. Focus on. Prepare for (in the example above)
• Areas you can influence, you manage. You put in the time and effort. You don’t control the outcomes, but you do control what you can do.
• Areas you are concerned about, are something you acknowledge but not dwell / brood over.
• Areas that are unknown are ones you accept and make peace with. There will always be something you don’t know.
• Areas of irrelevance you merely ignore cos they do not matter.

Makarand

This post is part of a series where I attempt to demystify jargon that we use in the development world. You will get to see a list of topics I have identified here. The hyperlinks, where available, take you to the posts on the topic.