Why Do You Do What You Do?

At some point in your work life, you wind up on the opposite side of an interview table with someone in a business suit and tie or interview outfit. As someone who spent more time on the interviewee side of the table than the interviewing side of the table, I'm sometimes surprised by questions that are asked that don't actually allow you to tell the person with the notepad anything of substance about you.

Questions like, "What kind of animal would you be?" and "What's your favorite color and why?" are subsets of the primary interview question, which is "Who are you and why do you want to come work with us?" The problem is, a lot of interview questions (and here’s a list of the most common)  dance around the purpose of an interview, whether it’s for a direct hire or finding out if a new vendor is right for your project.

God forbid you run into the currently popular "oddball" questions, like:

"A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?"

(My answer: "I'm a penguin that was finally able to verbalize English so you stupid hominids would quit messing up the atmosphere and melting our polar ice caps. Now take this stupid hat off me so I can go back home to the ice shelf. Someone thought it would be a clever metaphor for global warming. If I could clap, I would, but I'll settle for you people NOT melting my entire living environment, thank you so much.")

The problem from an interviewing point of view is that the question doesn't actually DO anything. It's a distraction from the real purpose of the interview, which is to find out if the person is a good fit. Nothing I can say in response to that question, from the verbose (see above) to the short and direct ("Global climate change isn't a myth, you jerks. Could I have some fish?") is going to impress upon the questioner the absolute value of an interview.

The point of an interview is to get knowledge, and in a professional job interview, it's to find out if both sides actually want to work with someone.

Which made me ask the question: isn’t there an easier way to encapsulate the entire interview process into a single phrase? And could we leave out all the superfluous stuff that people think a "good" interview needs to have to keep the applicant on their toes?

Come on. You know the answer is going to be yes.

About four years ago I saw an art project at a festival that asked people to write on a whiteboard their answer to a simple question, and took their photograph with them holding their answer. (Here’s a link to the project, but please note that some images on this site may be NSFW, and all content is copyright protected.)

When I looked through the images of every individual holding their answer to the question, I realized that these questions really were just subsets of the biggest question of all, and that you could distill the essence of all interview questions to one question, with variations of the essential Six W Questions (Who/What/When/Why/Where/HoW" applied.

And that question is: Why Do You Do What You Do? (Or WDYDWYD for short.)

Its variants and vague definitions are:

Why do you do what you do? (The Ultimate Reason WHY you do what you do every day.)

What do you do? (Your skills, your abilities, your talents, your career qualifications).

How do you do what you do? (Existing workflow process)

Who do you like to do it with? (best workplace partnerships)

When do you like to do it? (best workflow process for you)

Where do you like to do it? (best working environment)

Why Do You Do What You Do and its variations, if asked right, will both fill your entire interview session AND give you the best possible picture of the person sitting across the table from you. As an added bonus, asking that question of yourself gives you an extremely clear insight into your own motivations and your own reasons for getting to do That Thing You Do every single day.

My own gut reaction to this question (and subsequent realization of its universal applicability to all of my personal and professional interactions) was “It’s way too simple. WAY too simple. If I’m asking people questions, I have to get exact answers. I have to have precision question-and-answer, and I have to mark down exactly what they say to grade them on what they’re saying according to my preconception of what I need to know about them. I have to show that I know what I’m talking about, and I have to give them the opportunity to think about what I’m saying and be impressed by it. I can’t distill everything into the first thing I learned in Journalism 101! That’s too simple! Noooooo!”

This internal diatribe was accompanied by some hair-pulling, some dark muttering at myself, and finally, by a dawning comprehension that my bald-noggined, seemingly pedantic high school journalism teacher/mentor might have actually been on to something. Further exploration confirmed what I’d already suspected: the sixteen-year old me was an idiot who really should have paid a lot more attention to the world around him. 

In short, my reaction (and perhaps your own) was wrong.

It really IS that simple. But as my best friend, the twenty-year Army officer says, “The simple things are always easy. The easy way is always hard. The hard way is always mined.”

So how do you keep it simple?

Focus.

If you don’t keep focus on the ultimate question, you’ll be lost at sea without a paddle in any interview process. The ultimate purpose of an interview, regardless of what the interview or conversation is for, is  to find out if the person on the other side of the table is someone you want to spend most of your waking hours with.

We are by nature social animals that want to work and live with similar social animals. Like attracts like, and how we find that out is patterned exclusively on that simple question – why do you exist, and what makes you tick? WDYDWYD is the single core question that allows us to empathize with other human beings.

The fact that WDYDWYD can apply to job interviews on both sides of the table, family counseling, dating, friendships, neighborhood associations, and nonprofit organizations and volunteer work isn’t the point. WDYDWYD is the question everyone wants to know when they meet someone new, and so it’s incredibly relevant when you are conducting an interview, regardless of what side of the table you’re sitting on. And its variants can be just as useful.

How You Do What You Do

The most fun I've had in an interview was a How Do You Do What You Do question. One of my interviewers handed me a drawing of a new invention, and saying, "Let's play a game. I'm the inventor of this new device, and I want to put together the documentation for this device so I can sell it to people. So you're the writer and your job is to get out of me what you need to put down so you can fulfill the documentation requirements."

We went through the standard "what is it, what does it do, is there anything else that could do this, is it similar" etc., etc. It happened to be a woodworking tool from the 1900s that was used to make very specific joinery cuts - and this was a software development company, but I asked to steal the method for interviewing processes in the future - not just because it's an effective way to find out more about the person, BUT it's a lot of fun to do - especially if you're a knowledge nerd like me.

The "Show Me How You Document" question only works if you have a longer period of time to conduct the interview instead of a single hour, because the exercise can take up to 30 minutes or more. However, if you do have the time, it's worth sliding a piece of paper or drawing over and asking, "This is our new product. How would you go about documenting this product?"

The reason: if you're asking a technical writer the standard "how do you do [insert technical skill here] you're not asking about their writing process, their learning process, or their curve of learning new materials and technology. You're asking them the generic 'Are you a good technical writer' questions, to which most (if not all people in any given interview session) are going to find some way of saying "YES!"

Those qualifications are easy to slap down on a piece of paper. To extend the metaphor, someone might have all the woodworking tools invented since the dawn of time and know, in theory, how to use them. However, if they aren’t capable of cutting a straight, level line across a piece of wood, they’re not going to be much of a carpenter.

The reason I loved the “Show Me How” question was that it gave practicality to the interview question without interrogating either of us.

If you give your interviewee a short, easy piece of information to work on with you, you allow them to shape a narrative that tells you how they learn, organize, communicate, question, and develop new ideas. It tells you more about their workflow process, and gives them the space to ask questions. As a result, you get a very clear idea of how they function in a learning curve and interact with both the technology and the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). Also, whether they take direction well; if someone doesn't play the game with you and gives "this ain't worth my time" body language and answers, they probably aren't going to be easy to work with in an environment.

 Every time I've given a presentation, I've included some form of this question precisely because it not only helps teach the audience the gaps, but also gives the audience the realization that being part of a workplace, or a community, or relationship, or any other human interaction involves, being a part of a greater whole rather than someone who just slaps content down, stuffs it into a box, and says “Here. I’m done. Don’t expect anything more from me; you get what you get and you’ll like it.”

To put it another way, when someone focuses exclusively on the smallest component of how their own worklife is impacted by the outside world, they aren’t likely to care what happens down the line from them. They focus on their own immediate needs; rather than the needs of their workmates, clients, friends, family - everyone else comes second. 

For some industries and jobs, that’s a good thing – but those roles are few and far between, and mostly involve repetitive jobs that don’t involve a great deal of mental legwork. Even so, collaboration is valued, and essential for how we function as human beings.

In any of our relationships, be they work or personal, any myopia of vision translates to communication breakdown and a toxic environment where asking for collaboration, or assistance, or even a helping hand means you’ll be waiting for a long train that don’t come. The people who do their bit and go home aren't the people you want to be with - they're the people that might have something you need, but you'll do your very best to find what you need by going somewhere else.

To these people even the IDEA of WDYDWYD is scary. And things that are scary are, of course, BAD. What do they do with things that are bad? They do whatever possible to avoid them, and stay in their comfort zone – even if it means being completely unaware of the negative effects they have on the world around them.

There Are No Stupid Questions. Only Stupid People. 

For me, the nightmare scenario is when the questionee says “That’s a stupid question.”

That’s when I back away, and stop asking any questions outside of the immediately relevant ones (do you have qualification [X]. Do you have degree [Y], etc.). It’s not that their question, their perspective, or even their “That’s stupid” comments are invalid. Sure, it's a stupid question. But so is "What color is your parachute?" and "Who moved my cheese?" and "Why am I in a basket, and why is it getting warmer?"

It’s that the short response to my question equates, in my head to: “I want money, so that’s why I work. Duh. I just want to do a job and make money.”

Well, obviously you want some kind of tangible benefit, or else you wouldn't have applied for the job. But that's not really the point of the question. Just because something is outside of your personal experience or value zone doesn't mean it's necessarily "stupid" - it's just something you're not familiar with, so picking up a rock (metaphorically) and bashing it over the head preemptively is easier than figuring out what it actually means.

The problem here is that I view my worklife and my career as a choice that I love and enjoy. The people who just do it for the money, or the benefits, or the ancillary benefits aren’t giving that same passion to their work. If I just want a job to make money, I could just go sign up to sell Made In China stuff at a Big Box Store and bring home a paycheck.

But what I want is a career, and I want to work with people who put their passions before themselves being comfortable.

  (Don't click this link unless you want to listen to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. On second thought, click the link anyway. Then go buy their album. I'm not biased, I swear.)

I don’t want to work in an environment filled with people only in it for the money. Those people aren’t working to be a part of something other than their own little fiefdom of control. All too often, when those people find themselves in a position where they feel untouchable, they’ll simply remove themselves entirely from the worklife reality and become a dead weight to the team. And they don't either understand why people are driven to change, or see more than just the immediate world around them. That's change, and to them change is BAD.

Any change or improvement is viewed as a dire threat to their fiefdom of control, and in some cases, that person actively fights against anything new or different. In other words, they act like cavemen confronted with anything that might change their way of life, or any perceived threat to their survival.

 

It’s a worst case scenario, of course, but ultimately when I ask the question, I ask because to me, the people who work solely to obtain a paycheck are not interesting. I want to work with people who are up to collaborate instead of someone who demands things fit around their own niche preferences. And while sometimes I can find the way forward with them and get to a place where we can work together, it can feel like trying to work with them continuously reverts to "I have a bigger stick than you do. Stay back! Because I said so! You'll do it my way or I'll...I'll...well, you better just do it MY WAY!"

Unfortunately for them, that rarely works longer than toddlerhood, and with a smart toddler, not even that long.

The people who work for their passions, and have a reason why they show up outside of a paycheck ARE people I want to work with. They're the people who accept their passion and their drive - and they found something even more awesome - there's people who will PAY THEM to pursue what they'd be doing anyway, regardless if someone handed them money to do it.

What every interview question ever asked comes down to is the same one I want to ask everyone I meet on a personal or professional basis.

“Why do you have the best job in the world?", or "Why do you have the best life in the world?"

 I ask not because I want to know why it’s the best for THEM, or the best perks, the best salary, the best city to live in. Those are all personal preferences imbued by their environment, upbringing, personality, and skills. I ask because I want to know what gets them up in the morning and sends them out the door to go to work.

And all you have to do is ask that one simple (but infinitely complex) question:

Why do you do what you do?

All you have to do is ask that question, and you'll get every answer you ever need.

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