Overqualified, at last!

If we have been working on our careers awhile, we may have joined the "overqualified" club. While being overqualified can be frustrating, in that jobs we think should be a slam dunk to land are somehow quite elusive, it can be quite an enviable place to be, once we put certain team aspects into perspective.

For the first 10 years of our career, we achieve various levels of success in climbing the corporate leader. Some make it to lead or principal, others to senior manager, others to director, still others to an executive level. In that 10 years, we develop expertise. It is fairly simple to think that expertise is valuable in and of itself, but thinking so is when over qualification can become a minus.

Remember the kid in school who always knew the answer, "oooh-oooh-oooh!" with hand waving desperately to catch the teacher's attention? We in the overqualified club can learn a lot from such kids. Good teachers don't respond to the demonstrations - their goal is to make sure the whole class learns, so they spread the questions around. Other good students don't always appreciate the know-it-alls because they don't learn as much if someone just hands them the answer. And not-so-good kids don't really appreciate know-it-alls because they make them look, well...

Usually, when a hiring manager turns someone down for over qualification, it resolves to one of the following:

• The candidate did not convince the hiring manager that they would fit in the team. Much like a good teacher, the hiring manager has to make sure the team will function well together. Hiring a Hero, without a specific short term expectation, is generally bad for team morale and productivity. Unless the candidate shows great skills for mentoring and leadership, over-qualification can lead to ego issues, unbalanced team dynamics, and erratic team productivity.
• The candidate threatened the status quo. We may not like to admit this, but most managers will not hire someone who the manager thinks could do the manager's job better than the manager, or too much better than the best people on the team. This isn't really a weakness on the manager's part. It still ties back to team dynamics, with more consideration for risk factors. Sure, it is easy to blame self preservation, but that really isn't the most important aspect of this phenomenon. In short, the organization has already chosen the hiring manager as a leader, and in most cases is expecting that manager to hire the people that will best ensure the team's success under the manager's guidance. For the manager to hire someone who will upset the team dynamic is simply bad management.
• The candidate didn't demonstrate an ability to align to the manager's vision and mission. For any given problem that involves people, there are many different approaches to solve it. Team dynamics again suggests that the team as a whole determines the correct solution to a specific problem, where correct is "the solution this team, working together, can produce on budget and on schedule." Hiring someone well qualified but with a different approach can introduce a "better" technical approach, but the team may not be able to shift to the new approach without significant cost, risk, or time delay.
• The job may not have been real. Let's face it, innovation sometimes thrives when we have a great source of fresh ideas, and people who have built what we need and are willing to describe what they have achieved, and how, to gain a position, are a great source for innovative ideas at low cost. There are management teams which post bogus positions, knowing that the candidates who apply will provide great ideas, and knowing that all the candidates interviewed will be rejected as over qualified, or the position will morph into a more junior position, filled internally (once we have a plan on how to put the ideas into our process using the existing team).
• The hiring manager cannot see the candidate as being challenged by the position. Most hiring managers are still on their first trip up the corporate ladder. They expect everyone wants their next job to be "better" than their last, with more responsibility and more pay. The concept of a lateral move - same responsibility and same pay has to be explained, is usually only accepted when there is significantly greater career path potential in the new position. Seeing a person step down a level or two in responsibility or pay grade is usually frowned upon. Who would hire a VP to go and be a line supervisor? There are hiring managers out there who will, but they present a small percentage of the positions out there.

So, how do we get a decent job if we are overqualified, besides looking for a job where we are less qualified, that is, more challenged? I like to think of the really smart kids in school who learned to NOT be know-it-alls. The ones I have known to make this transition focused on helping the teacher, and helping the class learn better, and used their knowledge to move the class agenda forward, rather than make themselves look smart.

• First, we should know what we want in our new job, and why we want it. If we just want any job, or we only want the job because of the pay or the benefits - without really caring about the job - hiring managers will "hear" our insincerity, and instinctively look for a reason to not hire us. Notice how many job applications ask candidates to creatively describe why we want a job, or why we would be a good fit. Major point: if we don't really want the job, but would only see it as a step to the job we do want, over-qualification is an easy valid reason to reject us, without risk of litigation or making us feel unqualified.
• Second, we need to focus on our (hopefully) new boss. From the moment we read the job description through our first year of working with our new team, we should be working on promoting the hiring manager's vision and mission. Sometimes this means accepting the team's current approach over what has worked for us in the past. It is easy to criticize ("seagull attack") the current team, manager and efforts, especially if we come from a place of having successfully delivered what the new team is still trying to figure out, but we can't afford to give into temptation. One very successful strategy is to understand and focus on the fact that, yes, we did this successfully before, but this is an opportunity to see if there is another way to do this, maybe even a better way. If we can't align to the manager's vision and mission, we should move on to the next opportunity, not expect somehow to change the manager's approach.
• Third, we need tact. The first time my boss told me I had no tact I really didn't understand what she meant. At the time, I disagreed with her, because I didn't say something to belittle or embarrass others on the team. It wasn't until years later that I understood what she was really trying to tell me. Once again, the classroom analogy comes into play. Notice that teachers do provide information (lecture), but students learn when they answer questions. Sometimes, when we want a team to learn something, we have to realize that a lecture may not be the most effective approach. People can be set in their ways, committed to an approach, heads down so much they can't step back a little and objectively assess if they are making good, adequate, or poor progress toward goals. Tact isn't necessary to lecture. Tact is finding the right way to teach a team something that they will accept and grow from, rather than just blurting out either facts or personal experience. Successful leadership these days will use techniques like asking questions instead of producing edicts, rephrasing such questions to achieve the required change in mental approach to a challenge. What my boss meant was that my direct approach to fixing the problem didn't allow the team to learn why my approach was better, and didn't let the team own the knowledge or the solution. It also precluded me from considering that there might be a better way than what I was proposing. Tact is not only asking questions, but being open to the answers leading me away from where I thought the answer should go.
• Finally, we need to manage perception. We can be perceived as know-it-alls, or we can be perceived as team players who are also go-to mates who help the whole team succeed. Management science is moving away from 20th century transactional management, where employees compete for position and bonuses, toward more transformation management, where team and organization success is more important than individual qualifications and success. Expecting all management teams to value our Hero qualities is as unreasonable as expecting our 15 year old tech achievements to be relevant in our global economy. Focusing on what is important to management will help us avoid disqualification for over qualification, and for now, team player humility and passion align best with most managers's vision and mission for productivity and efficiency.