How to Show Off Your Leadership Skills as a Job Applicant

When it comes to job searching and career advice, one word gets thrown around a lot: culture. Experts are constantly telling people to find a company with a culture that aligns with their values, to bring it up in interviews and to treat it like a major factor in career decisions. But what does that actually mean? The latest episode of Get Hired with Andrew Seaman cuts through the buzzwords and digs into what company culture and cultural fit really are — and why they matter more than you might think.

Shane Hatton, author of Let's Talk Culture, spent more than a decade working where communication, leadership and culture intersect by helping organizations build teams that thrive. Shane and LinkedIn Editor Andrew Seaman discussed what culture really means in the workplace and how you can figure out if a company’s environment is right for you.

A transcript of the episode is below. You can listen to the conversation above or on your favorite podcast platform by clicking here.

TRANSCRIPT: How to Show Off Your Leadership Skills as a Job Applicant

Andrew Seaman: People who offer advice about job searches and careers talk a lot about company culture, me included. We tell you to find an employer with a company culture that resonates with you. We tell you to ask about company culture in interviews, blah, blah, blah. But what the heck does it even mean? Well, today, we're getting clear on what company culture and cultural fit really mean, and why they're vitally important to your job search and overall career success. Stay tuned.

From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's editor-at-large for jobs and career development, bringing you conversations with experts who, like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

Joining me in the studio today is team culture expert Shane Hatton. Over the past decade, Shane's worked at the intersection of communication, leadership, and culture, teaching organizations how to build the strongest possible teams. His most recent book, Let's Talk Culture, is a how-to guide for leaders who want to design their workplace's culture from the ground up. Shane and I sat down to discuss what people really mean when they refer to culture at work, and how to get a sense for a company's vibe when you're applying for a job. Here's Shane.

Shane Hatton: When I started my business about 10 years ago, I started training people how to position themselves as a leader, how to communicate as a leader. And then, just around COVID, there was a conversation around culture that was taking place, and everyone was saying, "Our culture's really important. Culture's really important to us." And then I started asking the question, "Well, what is culture, and why does it matter?" And people that I talked to couldn't give me good answer to that. So I went on a bit of a journey to start exploring what culture looks like in organizations. Now, I kind of sit at this intersection between communication, culture, and leadership, and looking at how leaders can position themselves as a leader in their organization, lead cultures that people want to be a part of. That's essentially what I do now.

Andrew: And also, I think that is an important point because there's always the advice, like ask about the culture and ask about this. And culture is one of those words that get thrown around because what ends up happening is they'll talk about culture, but what it means is like, "Are you like us?" And that can be super problematic, actually, for organizations when they just have the same people that look like carbon copies of each other, who went to the same universities, and all of that. So it is like a weird trap sometimes, I think.

Shane: Big time. There was this study done in 2009, where they looked at groups of sorority and fraternity students, and they put them into groups and gave them this murder mystery exercise. And then, about halfway through, some of the groups were introduced to an outsider, so someone who was not part of their sorority or fraternity. And then, at the end, they asked them, "What was it like?"

Andrew: Did they murder them?

Shane: Well, this is the thing. Right. They asked, at the end, "What was the experience like?" And everyone who had an outsider introduced said that it felt harder, more stressful, more frustrated because of the outsider that was introduced, and yet the likelihood that they would succeed and get to the correct answer doubled, from 30% to 60%. So, I guess from that experience, we learned that similarities or familiarity makes us more comfortable, but it's the differences that make us better. So when we're hiring people, we want to get people into our organization, the challenge is we want to be around people that are like us because it makes us feel comfortable. But the things that actually make our organizations better are bringing people who are not like us in any way.

Andrew: And I guess what I hope to talk about is how people can pitch themselves as leaders a little bit when they're job searching. But I want to take a step back, actually, and talk about the culture question because... Where do you stand on asking about that in a way that it's useful, and what should people be looking for?

Shane: So when people say culture, more often than not, what they're referring to is a set of behavioral norms in organizations. So if they say, "What's the culture like in your business?" what they really want to know is how do people behave. But culture is so much more multidimensional to that. And one of the things I learned when I was doing the research for Let's Talk Culture was that if you look at the academic definitions of culture, there was something like 54 different definitions of culture. But if you were to look at the themes that existed within those definitions, they all had four things in common.

The first was that anytime you talk about culture, it refers to a collective group of people, meaning that it's not an individual, it's always a group. The second is that referred to things which were unseen, things like your values, your beliefs, your meanings and assumptions. There were the observable qualities, so things that you could touch and feel, policies, procedures, and it was always something that was learned by being around other people. So when you understand that those are the dimensions that make up culture, you can see all the levers in which you can use to create culture, but also to start to identify culture.

So more often than not, to try and identify culture, you ask questions about behaviors, because behaviors will give you an insight or a window into things you can't see, like the values and the beliefs of the organization. And they will determine and tell you whether or not you can belong, which, ultimately, if you think about an organization you want to join, you want to join an organization where you can belong. And so, the reason why we're asking culture questions is not because, "Do I want this to be a fun organization or not a fun organization?" It's asking the question about culture to determine, "Can I actually belong?"

Andrew: Yeah. And I think also a lot of times, when people, they interview for roles. And sometimes you'll have someone who's relatively new to the organization who's interviewing you. But then you'll have someone who's maybe a director or something that's been there for a while, they were promoted into their roles. And a lot of times, they're the ones that I look at most closely because it gives you an idea of who thrives in that environment.

Shane: Yes.

Andrew: Whereas, if you have someone who's like, "Oh, I was hired last year to form this team," or whatever, they may have some idea in the culture, but probably the more PR-y answer.

Shane: Yeah. I think the distinction you're drawing there is, in one conversation, you're looking for stories, and in the other one, you're looking for observations. So if you're new to an organization, it's like... I had this one experience when I was working at a job. We were renovating a building, and my manager came in at the time. He's like, "Hey, you need to repaint those doors because they're an off color for our brand." And he said, "You need to do it now and not wait because if you come in too often, you're going to forget that that's a different color."

And two years later, those doors were still a different color, and it blends into the environment around you. And someone who comes in with fresh eyes goes, "Hey, that's a completely different color to the rest of everything else." So when you've got someone who's new to the organization, what I would be looking for are their observations. So what have you noticed? What have you seen as someone who is external coming in? What's the brown door that should have been a black door? And how have you noticed things?

Whereas someone who's been around the organization for a lot longer, the challenge for them is that they can't unsee it because they're so immersed in it all the time. So you have to draw it out of them, and I would be asking them for stories. So tell me about a time when your teams failed. What did that look like for you? How did you respond? How did your team respond? How did your manager respond? Think about the last message that you heard from the senior leader of your organization. When did you last hear from them? What did they talk about? What was important to them? And ask them to share stories. And then, you have a bit more of a job to read between the lines of those stories and go, "Well, what were the behaviors? How could we articulate maybe what their values are that maybe give us an insight to the culture?"

Andrew: And for people out there who, maybe, they discount the power of culture, and they'll say, "Okay, you know what? I get that this is not my cup of tea. These people are super buddy-buddy. I'm not like that typically in a job, but it's a huge paycheck." Is that enough to outweigh that, or are you going in, basically, with the recipe of you're going to be miserable here?

Shane: Short term, absolutely, paycheck's going to win out. I mean, if you are taking a job based on the pay, and you are not getting paid well, and you start getting paid very well, your life will significantly change as a consequence of that. And so, naturally, your life's going to get easier. You can pay your bills a little bit easier. You don't have some of the financial stress. Short term, it's going to pay off. Long term, every single person that I've spoken to, that's been around an organization for a long time, that has a great paycheck, ultimately says, "I would give all of that to work in a place that I love being a part of," and they talk about culture.

Andrew: Because eventually, your lifestyle becomes normalized, and you're like-

Shane: Exactly.

Andrew: Okay, great. I do have this bump in salary and I do have this paycheck, but every day I go to work, and I hate everything.

Shane: There's nothing worse than getting paid very well, and you can live extravagantly on a weekend, and then Sunday night, you dread Monday morning. So much of our life is spent at work. Why wouldn't we want to be in an environment that we feel wholly aligned to?

Andrew: Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. And then something else that I wanted to talk to is the idea of selling yourself as a leader. Because I think most people now, if they're going to be interviewing, they're probably going to have to sell themselves as someone who... Even if you're not going to be a manager, you're going to be some sort of leader who can handle projects, that can handle difficult tasks, but you don't want to come off overly confident. You don't want to come off as a threat, or someone who wants to have a promotion in three months, and things like that. So what do you think is the magic recipe there?

Shane: I mean, I think people, we generally struggle to sell ourselves from the start, just the people that I talk to when it comes to positioning themselves as a person, let alone as a leader. There's a tension that you want to walk between. How do I let this person know that I've got leadership skills, without trying to tell them, "Hey, I'm a leader"? It's like saying, "Hey, you should trust me." If I have to tell you that you should trust me, there's probably something there at the start.

I think the key to this is how you position yourself. So I always look at four things that you can do to position yourself really well. And I think if you were to imagine this sitting on a quadrant model, there are things that you can take responsibility for, and there are things that are others' perspectives. There are things that are observable, and there are things that are more descriptive. I'll give you an example.

So I think the things that you see that nobody else sees I often use the word character because I think... You could use authenticity, integrity. And really, this is about what are your strengths? What are your values? Who are you as an individual? And that's something you can really dig deep on. Because when you know your values, when you show up into an interview, being able to communicate, "This is what's important to me. This is what sets me up to win. These are what my strengths are. This is when I'm at my best," demonstrates that you've done self work and deep work, which essentially is what leaders are doing all the time. They're developing themselves.

Andrew: Yeah.

Shane: The second part is what's the things that you say about yourself? And this, for me, is about your narrative. And I love the quote by Patty McCord, and she says, "If people aren't informed by you, there's a good chance they'll be misinformed by somebody else." And so, I always ask, "What's the narrative you want to lead in the conversation?"

A good example is I was working with a CFO once, and he said, "Well, I want to be known as someone who is decisive." And I said, "Amazing. Are you a decisive leader?" He said, "No, not at all." I was like, "Okay, we've got a tension here to manage." And I said, "Why would people say that you're not decisive?" He said, "Because I take a lot of time to think through decisions." I said, "Well, why do you do that?" He said, "Because I want to be thorough." And I said, "Well, maybe the important thing is not to be trying to position yourself as someone who's decisive. Maybe you need to position yourself as someone who's thorough."

So I think if you're showing up into an interview, having thought through the narrative that you want to lead. So if they say, "Well, tell us about a time that you were decisive," you can say, "Well, I would say, for me as a leader, I'm someone who's actually very thorough, and that's how I come to the best decisions." And so, again, being able to lead your narrative in a really important way.

Andrew: We'll be right back with Shane Hatton.

Andrew: And we're back with team culture expert Shane Hatton.

Something I'm curious about too is, you have leaders who are obviously... They have a certain essence about them. There are people that you meet, and I don't know if you've had this experience, where I basically think, "You could do nothing but be a CEO. You are not going to be... You might be a senior vice president somewhere, but you were born to be a CEO or a leader." And I think sometimes people, they get caught up in that. They get executive coaches that are like, "Oh, you need to do this. You need to dress this way." How do you feel about that? Because I think a lot of times people, they almost do it to the point of it seems to be defeatist, whereas almost like they blend into the crowd, or it comes off inauthentic because they're not really... You can have a great CEO who does not fit the mold of other CEOs.

Shane: Yeah.

Andrew: So when you go into interviews and things like that, how much do you think you should be yourself, but also play a role?

Shane: It comes back to the CFO. Do I show up? And because I think a leadership characteristic is someone who's decisive, and therefore I should be a decisive person, and therefore I'll answer as a decisive person, but it's actually not who I am. The danger of that is that you can project a version of yourself for a period of time. Eventually, people will see who you really are. There's nothing worse than selling yourself as this characteristic in an interview, and then getting the job, and then realizing that everything that they hired you for is nothing that you can live out in some sense of longevity.

Andrew: Yeah.

Shane: It's similar to when I was coaching keynote speakers, and they said, "Should I be funny?" And the question I would ask them is, "Are you funny?" And if they say no, I said, "Well, don't try to be funny." And more often than not, by not trying to be funny, they end up being quite funny because they're leaning into their strengths and who they are. I mean, I love Gallup's work on this. They wrote a whole book on identifying what were the characteristics that made the best leaders in the world. And the thing they realized was there was no common themes. They all approached the task in very different ways. And so, I would say if you have a choice between being somebody that you're not, projecting someone that you're not, or intentionally being who you are, every day, hands down, be who you already are.

Andrew: And how do you suggest people figure that out? Because I assume, especially when you deal with executives, a lot of times they probably feel trapped because they have climbed the ladder, and they worry if they rock the boat too much, they're going to have to take some steps back, or things like that. So when you work with leaders and executives, do you do any pre-work about, like, "Okay, is this really what you want to do?"

Shane: Yeah.

Andrew: It sounds like you do give them the realization of, like you said, that one CFO who said, "I want to be decisive, unfortunately, I'm not decisive."

Shane: Yeah, yeah. I think there's some, in the sense that I think one of the best things you can do is, first and foremost, understand what your values are, which I know, it sounds like a really old, cliche conversation. But I do workshops all over the world, and I ask people, "How many people here know their values?" And so few hands go up, that it reminds me that this is actually a really crucial component of understanding ourselves really well. So what are the things that you value? What are your expectations of life and of work?

And then, the second thing is, what are your strengths? Because one of the things I like about a strengths-based approach to development is that your strengths don't tell you what you can and can't do. They don't say, "Well, if you're a strategic person, if your strengths are in strategy, then you can do strategy, and other people can't." It just means your strengths show you how you do things in the best way possible.

So I find that, me personally, discipline is a challenge. I'm a much more of a go with the flow kind of person. But does it mean I can't be disciplined? Of course not. I can do discipline. Well, how do I make up for what I would say is a lack of that discipline? Well, I do it in another way. So I find that I have a high sense of responsibility. So if I find someone that I make a commitment to, I'm going to follow through on that commitment. And so what I would see as potentially a lack of discipline is made up for with the compensation of a high sense of responsibility.

So the high sense of responsibility enables me to follow through on my commitments, where maybe my discipline was lacking. As opposed to another person, they put a discipline, they put a plan in place, and once the plan's in place, they're ready to go. So when you understand what you do best every day, you know how to contribute that. And so, it doesn't mean that you have to change your job or you have to take a step back. It just means maybe you change how you approach your job or how you approach your task that's in front of you.

Andrew: And then the other side of this that I wanted to ask about was when you are interviewing. And maybe this goes back to that culture question that we began with, but how do you evaluate the leaders you come into contact to be like, "Oh, I could follow you"? Because I know I report into people who are really fantastic, and they're really good at delegating and leading and making difficult decisions, but I don't know if I intentionally chose that. So if you're a job seeker, what do you look for in people?

Shane: That's so hard, because some of the people that you come into contact with, you really only get to know them over time. So there is actually sometimes no way to know whether this person is someone that you want to follow over the long term out of sometimes a 30-minute conversation. So there is a level of risk involved, I think, sometimes in saying yes, but I think there is also some things you can intentionally do. And I always tell people, "Rather than asking the direct question, ask the story question." So, rather than saying, "Hey, would you say you're a very trustworthy leader?" and they're going to say, "Of course, I'm a trustworthy leader." I mean, what are they going to say? No, I'm not very trustworthy?

Andrew: It depends. I don't know.

Shane: No, it depends on the scenario?

Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

Shane: But if I was to ask you, "Can you tell me about a time when you were absent, and you needed to be absent, and you let somebody else be in charge for a period of time? What was that like? How did it feel for you? How did the team respond to that?" As you listen to that, knowing in the back of your head you're working out whether this person is a trusting leader, you can listen to the story and hear some of those characteristics be present. Or maybe one of those things that you learn in that few days in the setup for this conversation, you say, "You know what's really important to me? Feeling empowered and not micromanaged in my job, or being safe to fail in a role is really important to me."

So I wouldn't say, "Hey, is it safe to fail here?" I would say, "Hey, can you tell me about a time, here, for someone on your team, where they let you down? What was that like for you?" And you want to hear their response. How did they respond to failure, or how did they discipline someone on the team? Or you might ask, "I want to be able to have hard conversations and difficult conversations." And so you say, "If I did something wrong on your team, how would you let me know that I did something wrong? What would that process look like?" And I'm listening and shooting my ear for the stories that come out of that rather than asking the direct questions.

Andrew: Yeah. And I think that's a really good idea because, first of all, they probably don't have a set response to those questions. But on top of that, I think really good leaders show their abilities during those difficult times.

Shane: Yes.

Andrew: And before we go, is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with, or anything that maybe we didn't touch on that you want to get across?

Shane: Look, we've covered a lot of ground. I would say, for a lot of people who are going through the process of looking for work, I understand how sometimes really demoralizing it can be to put yourself out there, to feel like you put the best version of yourself forward, and then to not get that role. And so, it's maybe not a tip, but just a bit of encouragement for them to continue to dig deep and find whatever those foundations are for you, identify your values, your strengths, identify the stories that help demonstrate your experience and your expertise, and your essence, and to get back up there and put yourself out there again, because I think you have a contribution to make to the world, and I think it's a really valuable one.

Andrew: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Shane: It's a privilege. Thank you.

Andrew: That was Shane Hatton, team culture expert and author of Let's Talk Culture: The Conversations You Need to Create the Team You Want.

Before you go, we want to hear from you. Get Hired launched an audience survey to help us understand what you want to hear on the show. You can find a link to the short survey in the show notes for this episode. I'd love it if you could fill it out.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Grace Rubin and Emily Reeves. Assaf Gidron engineered our show. Tim Boland mixed our show. We get additional support from Alexandra Kuznietsova and Ali McPherson. Sarah Storm is our senior producer. Dave Pond is head of production and creative operations. Maya Pope-Chappel is director of content and audience development. Courtney Coupe is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.