Author: Brittany Crockett

Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to the Content Machine Podcast. This week, I’m joined by one of our own, Alex Russell. Alex, thanks for joining us.

Alex Russell
Thanks for bringing me on. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kevin Adelsberger
That’s great. I’m glad that you’re excited about it. You’re going to talk about all about video interviews, which is a big part of what you do. Yeah. We lost him folks.

Alex Russell
Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
This week, Alex, you’re going to talk to us about how to interview someone for videos, right?

Alex Russell
That’s right.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. Can you tell us about your first interview that you did on Video?

Alex Russell
Yeah. I say I have a rich history. I’m in my late 20s, but I remember my very first interview in a very embarrassing way. Yes, can I help you? Okay, go ahead. Okay, I’ll start right there.

Kevin Adelsberger
This is going to be. Okay.

Alex Russell
Sounds like he’s making fun of me. It’s okay. People can’t take me seriously, so this is my fault. You should have had someone else interview me. Now that you’re about to interview me, I’m just…

Kevin Adelsberger
I need all the tips I could get. Yeah. Tell us about your first interview.

Alex Russell
My first interview was right at the beginning of high school for me. With the accessibility of video and being able to edit, shoot video rising as I was going through high school, I, believe it or not, was part of what they called APUSH, which is Accelerated… I don’t know what it’s called. Ap History, that’s what it was. I had to do a book review about George Washington, and actually by Ron Chernow. Yeah, I didn’t read all of it because it was long. It is very long. I skimmed it, but don’t tell my history teacher. Anyway, we had an option of writing an essay or producing a video as a form of book review, a book assignment to, so that we read the book, what we learned. That was my first dip into it. A lot of cutaways, a lot of talking to myself. I was very proud of myself. I did a very, some would say, a very nuanced special effect.

Kevin Adelsberger
How did you score on the paper? How did you score on the video?

Alex Russell
The video itself, I did really well, yeah. That was-It was encouragement. -it was encouraging for me to be able to do that. But also, I think just that experience of making, because even to date, that was one of my earlier videos that I actually set down to produce. I have wrote a basic script, which most of the interviews I do today aren’t scripted, but, you know. It was the first really structured video that I did. And so it just happened to be an interview with myself, which is totally normal.

Kevin Adelsberger
That’s high school. What about college? Did you do any interviews during college?

Alex Russell
Sure, yeah. I just had some experiences in college where I was able to conduct a few interviews for classes that we did, where we would… It was an assignment at the time, but I was able to conduct interview that if you look at, which I won’t reveal the footage of the high school one because it’s really embarrassing because I’m an awake. But you have it? Yeah, I do have it.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is it at your parents’ house?

Alex Russell
No, it’s on YouTube. I’m sure somebody can find it if they work hard enough.

Kevin Adelsberger
First person to find it. I will give you a $5 Starbucks card. Leave that in the edit, Eric.

Alex Russell
That would be a lot of work for $5 at Starbucks. But you also get to view it, and some would say that’s worth more than anything. In college, a level of experience, I was able to produce this interview with… It was a local artist at the time. For the first time, I was incorporating some significant B-roll, which is just supplementary footage to help push the narrative forward, give some visual examples of what the interviewee is talking about. And so, gained experience from that all the way up to I had a multi-year long internship with a local church media team where we would conduct a lot of testimony videos that they would do within the church setting. And so, which is probably where I learned the most because I was able to, in that setting, this wasn’t like… In student settings, it’s very forgiving if you mess up. The person you’re working with, for example, was also a student, so in some ways it felt very easy-breezy. But for the first time at the church, I was dealing with stories that had a lot of meaning. Not that the interview I did with the artist didn’t, but this one had implications that more impacted people’s lives and serious and heavy. Very personal, yeah. I think that’s where I actually learned a lot about how impactful an interview can be because like I said, both of those prior interviews, although they were fun and they were great for experience, they didn’t really provide me… They didn’t really have that, and some of that was on my part being so novice in it, but it didn’t have that impact that I realized later that interviews can have.

Kevin Adelsberger
Alex, what’s like the first thing that you tell an interviewee when they come into the room?

Alex Russell
What I tell them? I usually, after they get settled, try to make sure there is as comfortable as they can be when they’re in front of the camera. But there’s this… Before I start any interview, there is an anecdote that I commonly go back to, which is, if I were to ask you, this is it, by the way. I’m not continuing what I’m saying. This is the actual, so tune in, this is it. If I were to ask you what color the sky is, and you just said blue, which is a great answer. It could be true. However, what I tell the interviewee is within the editing process, although that answer is true and the answer is good, it sounds very confusing without all the context of what I asked question-wise. So all the people watching the video are going to know is that you said the word blue, which could be anything. It could be- Color of a dog. -color of a dog. It could be the color of your favorite candy.

Kevin Adelsberger
-color of your clues.

Alex Russell
-color of your clues. Yeah. I don’t think we can bring up blues clues. But anyway, yeah, there’s so many blue objects in the world, like who knew that I was talking about this guy. This exercise of, if I ask you what cover this guy is, it’s an opportunity to teach the interviewee how, when they answer a question that’s being asked. It teaches them that adding some context or repeating the question a little bit to add context to their answer can be really helpful when conducting the edit can be really helpful when putting together the edit. It creates that context that without it, can just make it where the answer is not as usable because, like I said, without the context of knowing that I asked what color the sky is, the answer blue doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead, maybe they could say, This guy is blue, when they answer or providing some of that context.

Kevin Adelsberger
That could make an entire interview be very different for editing purposes. It could go from a useless interview to a very useful interview.

Alex Russell
Right. Because without it, you could totally lose that answer. You totally just have no use for it. And especially when people are starting to answer a question, sometimes they say some really good stuff at the beginning. It’s just such a great sadness whenever that answer is just not- Usable later. -useable without that context. Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
It’s hard to hear that in the moment, too, because you might think you got this awesome answer because you heard the context and then you go watch it out of context. You’re like, Oh, I can’t do anything with this. Right.

Alex Russell
Which is great for comedy, but not great for —

Kevin Adelsberger
Not great for editing videos. What are some do and do nots of interviews?

Alex Russell
One of the do’s that I stick to pretty commonly is how I try to make sure the guest is as comfortable as possible, encouraging them, really, because you have to realize most people in their lives, sometimes even some might do it just semi-regularly, but often times this might be their first time on camera, first time doing interview. And so, naturally, you’re going to be, if you were the one being interviewed, you’re going to be pretty uncomfortable. You’re going to be under the lights, and that pressure is really going to start getting to your head. One of the things I encourage them with is, thankfully, they don’t have to look at the camera when it comes to interview. They look at me. Oftentimes, that creates a more natural conversation feel.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, because they feel like they’re talking to you and not talking to a camera.

Alex Russell
Right. Which talking to the camera can be very whole black hole experience of Am I actually talking to somebody? How do I look? It can be very disorienting. It also keeps the eye contact from being directly into the lens, which when you watch a video that someone’s… When you’re watching a video where someone has been looking directly in the lens, you’ll get this effect where they’re almost talking directly toward you, which is great for some videos, but for a lot of interviews, you want to be like, I’m catching this interview from a bystander perspective. Got you. Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
Then do you go in with a script for interviews?

Alex Russell
In the hopes of being more of an authentic experience, the interviews themselves are not too scripted to a T. Usually, there’s outlines to add some direction. Sometimes I’ll even share that with the interviewee just to give them some comfort of where we’re going, how many questions they’re going to be, because once you start, sometimes they could be like, How long is this going to be like? I don’t want to be here for another hour. They can keep up with the direction of the interview. There’s generally a rough outline, but as far as a full script goes, it’s very bare bones because we want it to, again, that conversational aspect of the interview. We don’t want it to control the narrative at all. We don’t want to make it so that the person feels like they have to say certain thing and being willing to follow the interviewee if it’s appropriate, if it’s not too much of a tangent, because then there’s so much you can prepare for an interview. But if the interviewee surprises you, you might end up in a more unique perspective that you just even-

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, you wouldn’t even know I was there.

Alex Russell
Yeah, not at all. That’s something that’s always important to do, is just be ready to be loosey, goosey, creative. Don’t get too strict on it.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, you can go off book. Are you saying if you see a path that’s maybe off the question you’d planned because they’ve said something, that could be a great opportunity to get another piece of insight that you hadn’t planned on.

Alex Russell
Yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is there anything we should avoid when we’re doing interviews?

Alex Russell
Yes.

Kevin Adelsberger
Great. Well, that’s been the Content Machine Podcast. Is there anything we shouldn’t do when we’re recording an interview?

Alex Russell
Absolutely, yeah. There’s numerous things. Some things that come to mind, though, is to, I mentioned earlier, definitely don’t want to manipulate someone’s answer, but don’t be afraid if someone needs help finding out what they want to say. I think there’s some fear of that layer like you’re talking with them a little bit off to the side of an interview of like you’re working through a question that you just asked them and they just seem so lost, which happens because again, there’s that pressure and you want to make them feel comfortable. And so sometimes some people need some of that direction where, of course, you want to preface it with, I don’t want to force you to say this, but see if you can figure out what direction they might be trying to go in to encourage them to be like, Okay, you can go that direction. Go down that avenue of answering the question that way, if that’s what’s true to them. I think because so much, if you’re just throwing questions at them and they’re just like, I have no idea, it’s not very helpful to just keep their own questions and then just already in an uncomfortable situation, they’re feeling like, Oh, I can’t answer these. I need a lifeline. So being that lifeline is something that you want to make sure you’re not straying away from, even as the interviewer. My other don’t is something that it’s a personal problem for me. I have the tendency to, especially when I meet a new person, even something as small as a waiter or waitress, I want to create this small talk atmosphere that makes them feel like, Okay, I can talk here. We’re having a casual conversation. But don’t ask them too many questions that are off topic, right? There’s some time at the beginning to do that as they’re walking in, you’re having small talk. But while it’s good to be creative and take, not tangents, but follow their direction as they’re talking, right? You don’t want to end up somewhere where you’re talking about something totally different, even for the sake of being a conversationalist or just being a nice and cheery person of wanting to have a conversation with them, don’t let that. There’s some professionalism there where it’s important to make sure that the interview is not becoming so casual that you miss the point of the whole interview. That’s something that you have to really reel it in sometimes, even if your natural tendency is to not —

Kevin Adelsberger
Just keep talking.

Alex Russell
Yeah, keep talking.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, let’s say you get that really good interview. What’s the value of one of those really good interviews?

Alex Russell
The impact of a good conducted interview has the result of offering this unique perspective, whether it’s for you could be interviewing for a company, for their website, maybe it’s for a program that they’ve started. Maybe they’re just talking about what it’s like to work for this company or this nonprofit in a way that you can’t really get across personally as a bullet list of facts of like, We treat our coworkers like this. We have this percentage. Those are great for understanding purposes, but to hear it come from a person directly from them, from their experience means so much because we, as people, we relate to that. We relate to experience.

All work brings dignity because we are made to work. But there are levels to the goodness of work, and good work makes you more human. These three categories: purpose, possibility, and prosperity form a Venn diagram or concentric circles, and that diagram will move based on what’s most important to you. And what’s important may change over time too. Work-life balance may be more important when there’s small children in your home. And you may go through a season when creativity is more important to your flourishing. And hopefully, this framework will give you some tools to evaluate where you are and what you’re searching for. For now, we have come to the last episode in the series. The last category of our three P’s of good work is prosperity. And prosperity comes with three elements: compensation, reward, and nurture. Let’s start with compensation, everybody’s favorite part about work. Compensation is the cash and benefits you receive for working at a job. While this is probably everyone’s most important factor in deciding work, I would urge you to be careful about overvaluing it in your search for good work. Some people, money is their goal. Others, enjoying work is their goal.

Others, missional work is their goal. But regardless, you must be compensated. The next thing up is reward. Reward is the non-monetary compensation for working somewhere. This could come in a few ways, one of which is perks. Maybe your boss buys coffee or the company owns a Lakehouse they let employees use. Or at one of my early jobs, I managed an event space and one of my favorite parts was getting to take home leftovers from the events. This was a perk for sure. But then the second part of the reward is maybe the job is fun, cool, or brings status. It is fun working at a marketing firm and it would be cool to work for a Major League franchise. And there’s status associated with working for Congress, and that status can even set you up for future employment based on your status and experience as part of your work. Rewards can look a few different ways, but you will not see them on a balance sheet. Finally, the last element of this category, nurture. Simply put, do you have a company and people at that company that care about you as a person? Are you in an environment where you are nurtured and treated like a person, or are you treated like a machine?

With the amount of time we spend at work, having friends at work, a boss who knows your name and treats you well, and a culture that is nurturing, are keys to having good work. Why settle for less? At Adelsberger Marketing, it is literally part of our mission to value our team. And while we’re not perfect in all of these elements, it’s my goal to make our company the best place to work in West Tennessee. Hopefully, this tool, the three P’s of good work, has been helpful to you as you think about whether you have good work or not. If you have any feedback on the three categories, I would love to hear it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast and we’re going to continue to produce thought provoking podcasts to help you be a better leader and marketer. Please subscribe.

This is the second episode in our series about the three P’s of good work. The second P is possibility. Having possibility in your work is a key to good work. One of the things I like about Frameworks, like the three P’s of good work, is that it gives you a tool to think about a subject. A framework helps you, with the insight of others, to think about a subject in a structured way, which can help illuminate that subject in a way that is a bit more divorced from personal experience. The second thing a framework does is it can give you language to discuss something. Having the words to describe something that can be difficult to describe can give you the tools you need to communicate about it and think about it. Our team has a shared vocabulary that allows us to communicate clearly about design, but we have to approach that conversation very differently when we work with a client who is not knowledgeable about design. Even if you disagree with the structure of the three P’s, hopefully it will give you some clarity to make a better decision for yourself and your work-life. This is the second episode in our series about the three P’s of good work.

The second P is possibility. Having possibility in your work is a key to good work. And within this category, there are three elements: autonomy, creativity, and advancement. Let’s start with autonomy. Good work involves lots of autonomy. Autonomy is the ability to make decisions about the work. That involves an employer trusting you with a task. Autonomy allows your brain to think and process and gives you the ability to be flexible if problems arise. Autonomy makes work less robotic and more human. Being able to make decisions about how the work gets done, maybe rotating assignments, working at your own pace, solving a problem, or working without close supervision are all forms of autonomy. It is closely related to the next element, creativity. Creativity is the freedom to create within work. This is not just about, quote-unquote, creative work. It’s about all work. The more a job, any job has the freedom to be creative, the better it will be. Obviously, this applies to work in our field, but it also happens in all types of work. For example, we had someone out to run electricity to our pool pump. There were a hundred ways that you could have gone about getting the electricity from one side of the house to the other to set up the pool pump.

The electricians at our home were able to think through it, using creativity to determine what the best path was. There is creativity available in most jobs. And while some people are more predisposed to thinking creatively, I believe anybody can be creative. Some just exercise the muscle more than others. The final element in possibility is advancement. Having the potential to advance and grow and change in your job is something that many people do not think about ahead of time when they go to work somewhere. Some workplaces hire you to do one job and never expect you or encourage you to grow and develop. This is not a sign of good work. A sign of good work would be a job that allows you to grow your skills and develop new ones and potentially give you the room to get promotions and grow responsibilities. As humans, we are ever growing and changing, and work should reflect that. Some organizations are flat and there are not many titles to go around, but that doesn’t mean they can’t allow you to grow your skills and invest in people that way. This wraps up the second of the three elements of good work, possibility, autonomy, creativity, and advancement.

If you have any feedback on these categories, I’d love to hear it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsburgermarketing. Com, and thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the last part of our series.

The average person spends about 18% of their waking life working. That’s a huge amount. And it is likely the single largest block of time you spend doing one thing other than sleeping throughout the course of your life. How can we make the most of that time? What makes good work? While that answer is different for every person, after spending some time thinking about it, I think good work falls into three categories. This podcast is the first in a series of three that are taking a look at the categories of good work and the elements within those. Hopefully, this will give you some language and thought process to help you think about how to evaluate if your work is good. Good work makes us more human. The first category is purpose. Purpose entails things that are bigger than ourselves and more meaningful than compensation. Purpose breaks down into three elements: mission, alignment, and accomplishment. Purpose elements are things that really point to who we are and what we care about as people. Let’s start with mission. When we talk about mission and good work, we are talking about the mission of the organization. Does the mission of the organization and what it supports around its work mean something to you?

This may vary depending on the type of organization. You might work at a nonprofit whose mission deeply aligns with your heart. Or you might work at a manufacturer that is not missional but contributes to charitable causes. Having a missional alignment doesn’t just have to be about a charitable cause too. It might be providing a service to a demographic that you care about or helping support people who have a similar experience as you. A missional element to companies and organizations can help increase the level of good work for someone considerably, sometimes overshadowing the other two categories, possibility and prosperity. The world is trending more and more towards trying to infuse missional elements into workplaces where there wasn’t anything like that in previous generations. So be sure to think critically about any workplace efforts to do so and make sure that they are true to the company and true to the people. The second element is alignment. Does this job align with who you are and what your needs are? We all have different skills and strengths. When you are working in your strengths and gifting, you’re going to be happier at work. When you are forced to work in areas of weakness, you’re going to be frustrated at work.

Now, we all have to be team players, and there will be times where you have to play in an area of weakness to help the team win. But on the average, are you able to play in areas of your strength? Good work aligns with your strengths. Additionally, based on the season of life that you’re in, you might need more work-life balance than not. Does your work accommodate for that? Good work respects your life outside of work. The third element of purpose is accomplishment. It would be frustrating to work and never get to finish something or be a part of a finished product. Part of good work is being able to accomplish things. Whether that be a singular task that is part of a whole or being part of a team that finishes a larger task. Accomplishment is good for the soul. While you may have a small part to play in the whole of a project, are you able to take credit for and see the rest of the project to finish? Accomplishment is part of good work because it helps validate the things that you’re doing. Are you able to feel accomplished at work?

It is a key step to finding purpose in your work. We’ll be back next week with part two of good work. If you have any feedback on our three categories, I would love to hear it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsburgarmarketing. Com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next two parts in our series.

I have mixed feelings about personality tests. My standard answer whenever someone asks me what my enneagram number is is I’m whatever number doesn’t care about enneagram numbers. But at the same time, I know that some personality tests can be really useful. Recently, a client of ours, Chad Wilson at Foundation Bank, mentioned that his team had started to go through the Working Genius Working styles test. And on that recommendation, I took a look and bought the book, and now our whole team has gone through it. And I have a few thoughts. One of the reasons I like this methodology is it’s focused on how you work and work together with other people as opposed to your personality or who you are as a person. I think that distinction is important here. We all have different personalities, and I want the goal of something like this, like a personality test, to be how can we work together to win with the focus being on the work? This feels less psychoanalytical and more practical and professional. Lencioni, the author of this book, breaks the entire work world into six skill sets, which may come off as simplistic, but I think he really does a good job with it.

Those six categories are broken down into the phases of work. This simple breakdown contains the entire work experience really clearly. Those skill sets are wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, and tenacity. And while this is also very simple, it has a lot of depth to it. There are only six options for you to score in. They also remove any percentages. So it’s a very clear layout of what strengths and weaknesses are. Working genius breaks it down into two areas of genius, two areas of competency, and two areas of working frustration. Each person can do any of the six, but where you’re going to be the happiest and most effective is showed on that chart. The book is written in classic Lencioni format. Half of the book is a simplistic allegory in the form of a fictional office situation. The other half is more of a breakdown of the model of working genius. This isn’t a long read, but it helps to show you how the tool can be used in the entire workplace. The book pushes you to an assessment. The assessment is online only and is $25 per test. The online platform is actually really nice.

It is set up for an admin to make group reports and then send it to the entire company, which is what we did for our group. You get to take the test once, so you got to go with what you are given. And so far, our team has taken it and only one or two people have objected to one of their letters, which I think this means they have it dialed in pretty well. It’s a shortish test, taking maybe about 10 minutes. I don’t think Working genius is going to turn our organization upside down, but I will look at it for a tool and for languages and techniques to help me lead my team better. Getting a better idea of how our team members work will be helpful. Working genius provides a team map that helps to show where people fit together in the whole work environment. And so when we are thinking about hiring specific positions or assigning people to tasks, having an idea of how they might work and work together and having language around that will help us execute better. Have you taken a personality test that you’ve enjoyed? I’d love to hear more about it.

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