One of the core management functions for any organization is selection: how do we find productive people that fit the culture, the paradigm, the zeitgeist of the organization? A key skill in the selection process is conducting the behavioral interview, especially in a self-managed ecosystem where every affected stakeholder should have a say in who joins his or her team.
A résumé can only convey so much information—and psychometric and aptitude testing can only reveal so much. A thorough and rigorous behavioral interview is crucial to understanding a candidate’s degree of fit with, and prospective contribution to, an organization.
The new book by James W. Pennebaker, chair of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, entitled The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us*, suggests an avenue of analysis that could prove to be quite revealing. Is the candidate a narcissist, or a team player? Are they humble and conscientious, or gunning for glory? It turns out that the pronouns we choose to employ, and the frequency thereof, are pretty darn significant.
When Drew Brees, the New Orleans Saints quarterback, was approaching the record for most passing yards in a single season (just broken), he was asked about it by a sportswriter. His response? “I’m aware that we’re close [italics added].” Perhaps a very revealing statement by a major sports figure highly regarded for his generosity.
Professor Pennebaker developed a computer program that distinguished between content words and function words (words that serve as connectors to describe the grammatical relationships between other words in a sentence). He set his program loose on some 400,000 pieces of text, and found about 150 common function words—which were incredibly revealing about a person’s state of mind.
Pennebaker says that function words really reveal the state of a person’s emotions, in addition to a lot of other stuff—like social status and personality. As he noted in a Harvard Business Review post**:
"It’s almost impossible to hear the differences naturally, which is why we use transcripts and computer analysis. Take a person who’s depressed. 'I' might make up 6.5% of his words, versus 4% for a nondepressed person. That’s a huge difference statistically, but our ears can’t pick it up. But hypothetically, if I were to listen to an interview, I might consider how the candidate talks about their coworkers at their last job. Do they refer to them as 'we' or 'they'? That gives you a sense of their relationship to the group. And if you want someone who’s really decisive in a position, a person who says 'It’s hot' rather than 'I think it’s hot' may be a better fit."
*Bloomsbury Press; 1St Edition edition (August 30, 2011)
**https://hbr.org/2011/12/your-use-of-pronouns-reveals-your-personality/ar/1
