Thank you for the thank you.

Someone at work gave me a thank you gift yesterday morning. Another team that my boss manages is going through consultation and Wednesday was interview day for the top jobs. One of the candidates came to see me last week and asked if I could help her with some interview preparation as she’d never applied for a post this high up before. Interestingly, the post is higher banding than what I’m on.

Anyway, I spent over an hour with her last week talking about the sorts of questions she might be asked and I said that she would need to pay particular attention to management skills rather than purely technical knowledge. A role on that level is more about strategy and managing other people rather than doing the graft work and knowing all the ins and outs. Its a little bit more of understanding office politics and dealing with very senior management, liaison and so on. Stuff I have done and do do in my current role anyway, I’m just on a lower pay band, but let’s not go there.

So, having spent some time with this person, we’d talked about the sorts of questions she might be asked, and the questions she should ask back. The interview happened but she didn’t get the job.

Apparently she’d spent all night worrying about it that she’d hardly slept, she had been worrying about the minutiae of detailed technical things instead of the strategic level things, so she didn’t perform well on the day. Of course they’d asked her some technical questions but wanted to know more about her and her ability to think laterally and outside of their own current structure. Precisely some of these things we’d been over. She was disappointed but mainly with herself as she knew that she had not performed her best because she hadn’t slept. She also said that her heart wasn’t really in it because it would take her away from what she knows and felt that she applied because she was expected to.

She was profusely thankful for the time that I’d spent with her and had bought me a gift by way of thanks. I did say that I wasn’t sure I deserved it as she didn’t get the job, but she said that she was appreciative of my support nonetheless.

Thank you for thanking me 😁