Michael Jordan's Weblog

Our department has an RFP on the street for commercial real estate brokerage services and I recently participated in the interview process for the short list of bidders. It was pretty interesting (I'll write more about that after the contract gets signed next month).

As a student of management practices, I couldn't help but notice the difference between how the regional director in Asia and the one in Europe approached preparation for the interviews.

In Asia, the director (who is soon to be replaced by his second-in-command) was a bit more...organized (?) in getting his team prepared. The team met in advance of the interview sessions and created a pretty comprehensive list of what issues they wanted to explore with the bidders: coverage model, communications, company culture, &c. This list was presented to the bidders at the beginning of the interviews and, rather than presentation followed by Q&A, the three hours was spent in dialog between what the bidders wanted to say and what was on the list.

In Europe, the director also got his team together before the interviews and led a roundtable discussion of questions and issues to probe with the bidders. But my impression was that his goal was to prime the pump -- their pump -- so that they would come into the interviews with their own ideas and questions. He made a point that they should be familiar with the written RFP and bids (something that didn't really come up in Asia). And, during the interviews, the dialog was more organic than it had been in Asia. This director also made a point of going to each of his staff around the table (twice!) to make sure they got all their questions answered. (Stylistically, I just wouldn't have the patience for this -- I expect my team to speak up on their own accord. Maybe things are just different in Europe.)

I found both styles to be effective in eliciting information from the bidders, although the Europe interviews took much longer because the round-table came at the end of the schedule and the staff members' questions extended the interview period.

I'm assuming both styles were good indicators of how each director runs his group.