Michael Reddington

The truth is elusive. Increasingly job candidates are more prepared, interviewers are busier, and technology is impacting the hiring process more than ever before.  Savvy candidates have learned to rely on their interview experience, AI and charisma to rise to the top of candidate pools. Simultaneously, other well-qualified candidates go unnoticed when they aren’t familiar with the current hiring systems and appear to lack powerful personalities.  

When interviewers are tasked with making long-term decisions based on short conversations they often rely on gut feelings, a well-crafted resume, or assessments to solidify their decisions. Each of these have faults, feed into biases, and can reduce the interviewers’ ability to accurately diagnose any candidate’s true potential.

Interviewers are consistently more successful onboarding the best candidates when they rely on a process designed to cut through charisma, resumes and rehearsed answers to uncover the truth about both a candidate’s past and their future potential.

Michael Reddington is a Certified Forensic Interviewer and executive resource. As a Certified Forensic Interviewer Michael spent nearly 20 years establishing relationships, obtaining the truth, and developing commitments in high-stress conversations. He specialized in re-interrogating suspects in cases without evidence which taught him how to quickly build trust, recognize how people feel, and create commitments to telling the truth. As an executive resource he developed the Disciplined Listening Method by integrating current business communication and non-confrontational interrogation research and best practices to teach interviewers how to see what they’ve been missing, obtain information that has been eluding them, and rewrite their future by applying strategic and ethical observation and persuasion techniques.

All session attendees will learn how to facilitate interviews that produce truthful responses and uncover candidates’ true abilities by integrating the core tactics and strategies of the Disciplined Listening Method. At the conclusion of this session all attendees will understand how to uncover hidden value in every interview by:

• Clarifying the skills and attributes top candidates must possess to be successful in any open role
• Implementing a strategic interview process with clear expectations at every step
• Asking questions that penetrate beyond the candidates’ preparation to expose their true experiences
• Identifying candidates who possess the four core attributes of high potential employees
• Recognizing how their candidates feel by accurately evaluating the totality of their communication
• Validating candidate abilities by adding experiential elements to the interview process
• Applying the five foundational persuasion techniques of Certified Forensic Interviewers
• Executing the favored questioning techniques of Certified Forensic Interviewers 

Time is the enemy of empathy. The education, experience, and success that propel leaders into their roles all reduce their ability to listen and empathetically communicate with others. Leaders are more likely to fall into the entitlement trap and expect people to tell them the truth, become impatient and prioritize ending conversations over experiencing conversations, and ask for information in a way that embarrasses and makes their counterparts defensive. 

Leaders consistently achieve better results, reduce missed opportunities and make more informed decisions when they develop the ability to prioritize outcomes over emotions and create the communication experiences their counterparts require to tell the truth and commit to taking new actions.

Anytime leaders ask for updates or ideas they are asking people to share sensitive information, under vulnerable circumstances, in the face of consequences. Which is the exact challenge investigators face in the interrogation room. Perhaps surprisingly, the cognitive process that leads employees to say “I’ll do it” and interrogation subjects to say “I did it” are essentially identical.  

Michael Reddington is a Certified Forensic Interviewer and executive resource. As a Certified Forensic Interviewer Michael spent nearly 20 years establishing relationships, obtaining the truth, and developing commitments in high-stress conversations. He specialized in re-interrogating suspects in cases without evidence which taught him how to quickly build trust, recognize how people feel, and create commitments to telling the truth. As an executive resource he developed the Disciplined Listening Method by integrating current business communication and non-confrontational interrogation research and best practices to teach leaders how to see what they’ve been missing, obtain information that has been eluding them, and rewriting their future by applying strategic and ethical observation and persuasion techniques.

All session attendees will learn how to facilitate conversations that produce truthful responses and commitment to action by integrating the core tactics and strategies of the Disciplined Listening Method. At the conclusion of this session all attendees will understand how to uncover hidden value in every conversation by:

• Leveraging the seven stages of contentious conversations
• Encouraging their counterparts to save face and protect their self-images
• Transitioning control of their conversations to their counterparts
• Building trust over time by providing evidence they listened to their counterparts
• Recognizing how their counterparts feel by accurately evaluating the totality of their communication
• Applying the five foundational persuasion techniques of Certified Forensic Interviewers
• Executing the seven core behaviors of the Disciplined Listening Method

Customers and prospects have all been mirandized.  They know that they have the right to remain silent because anything they say will soon be used against them. Which motivates them to withhold information, listen for reasons to disagree, and focus on protecting their self-interests. These challenges are compounded when business development professionals are so focused on what they want to say that they lose the ability to recognize the opportunities their customers create.

Business development professionals are consistently more successful closing agreements and building relationships when they execute a conversational approach that disarms their customers, entices their customers to listen, encourages their customers to save face, and elicits more truthful information.

Perhaps surprisingly, the cognitive process that leads customers to say “I’ll buy it” and interrogation subjects to say “I did it” are essentially identical. Michael Reddington is a Certified Forensic Interviewer and executive resource. As a Certified Forensic Interviewer Michael spent nearly 20 years establishing relationships, obtaining the truth, and developing commitments in high-stress conversations. He specialized in re-interrogating suspects in cases without evidence which taught him how to quickly build trust, recognize how people feel, and create commitments to telling the truth.  

As an executive resource he developed the Disciplined Listening Method by integrating current business communication and non-confrontational interrogation research and best practices to teach business development professionals how to secure more business and build stronger relationships by applying strategic and ethical observation and persuasion techniques.

All session attendees will learn how to drive new business and maximize every customer conversation by integrating the core tactics and strategies of the Disciplined Listening Method. At the conclusion of this session all attendees will understand how to uncover hidden value in every customer conversation by:

• Capitalizing on their perceived weaknesses to develop persuasive communication strategies
• Enticing their customers to listen with influential introductions
• Following the three-step process required to connect with customers
• Creating credibility and curiosity throughout their customer interactions
• Obtaining more truthful information by asking fewer, strategically valuable questions
• Recognizing how their customers are feeling by accurately evaluating the totality of their communication
• Applying the five foundational persuasion techniques of Certified Forensic Interviewers
• Executing the seven core behaviors of the Disciplined Listening Method