Hire for Culture Fit—Not Diversity Quotas
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
This iconic Peter Drucker quote should tell us all we need to know about the importance of hiring team members that fit in your company. If culture is that important, surely a company leader would want to hire people who reinforce a desirable culture, right?
I learned from experience that hiring people with the wrong cultural orientation doesn’t work–for them or for the company.
In one example, I hired a promising young woman from HSBC bank for our Delivery team. It soon became apparent that she couldn’t get up to pace or adapt to diverse demands of her role at Widerfunnel. She couldn’t transition from the staid, bureaucratic culture of the bank to thrive in our nimble, entrepreneurial environment. She was simply a better cultural fit to have a highly specialized, differentiated role as part of a very large organization. She was better off moving back into the headquarters of a larger company.
A contrasting example comes from a woman who joined us from one of the big four consulting firms. She raved about how light and free it felt at our company because our culture worked so much better for her than at the firm. She described to me how political, cutthroat, secretive, and thanklessly demanding her experience had been there. She described our culture as exactly the opposite, and I agree with her! And now, several years later, she has become one of our star team members, contributing to our ever-evolving culture in a positive way. What should be obvious here is that the consulting firm culture works for many people. It just didn’t work for her and many like her. Yet, she thrives within our culture.
Scott Galloway gave another example recently when he said, “the culture of Morgan Stanley when I started there is, ‘We own your ass, you’ll be emotionally and mentally taxed, physically unfit.. and you’re gonna make more money than your parents did by the time you’re 28.’ Do you want that? Some people want that.” Others clearly don’t.
Scott went on to say, “There’s all sorts of cultures that work. As long as you’re clear. You can articulate not only who would do well at this company, but who it’s not for.”
Zappos underscored the importance of culture fit with their famous $1000 quitting bonus for new employees. This bold decision incentivized employees to leave if they’re not seriously loving the job fit. The strategy made headlines for Zappos about a year before they were acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion.
In 2009, Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings inspired our collective understanding of the importance of culture with his epic Culture Presentation. In those 125 slides, he gives a master class on culture while emphasizing what makes Netflix different, such as their environment of great Freedom and Responsibility.
Today, Netflix recognizes that their culture is not static by continuing with annual culture updates. Sergio Ezama recently published Netflix’s latest update as their culture continues to evolve.
At Widerfunnel, we did the same, with annual reviews of our cultural touchstones, along with our strategic planning rhythm.
Is hiring for culture fit discriminatory?
Unfortunately, the concept of Culture Fit has been shunned in recent years by those who say it’s discriminatory. I’ve had other CEOs push back against my culture fit search, telling me it’s problematic. They say that looking for culture fit implies that you’re looking for people of the same skin colour or gender or socioeconomic class.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Similarly, I attended a DEI training program where I witnessed participants being celebrated for rejecting applicants based on their (white) skin colour. They wanted to fill other skin colour quotas, even if it meant hiring a less qualified candidate. This is clearly the real racial discrimination today and I believe it will harm the organization and its employees.
Hiring for culture fit ensures that a person’s values relate to the organizational ethos. In particular, I’ve seen that a person’s work ethic, openness, humility, integrity, curiosity, and candor need to be aligned for a team to function smoothly. A person’s skin colour has nothing to do with their fit.
I’ll go further and say something that risks raising the ire of the cancelation mob, but I care enough about your business to say it anyway:
Too much diversity can harm the performance of a team.
Now, before you hoist me on a stake and light the torches, I am decidedly not referring to racial, skin tone, or gender diversity here. I’m referring to the dangers of core values and performance attributes diversity. Those need to be synchronized in the team, while skin colour and gender diversity should be valued and celebrated, obviously.
I say “obviously” intentionally here, because it shouldn’t need to be said and should be a non-issue today. As Coleman Hughes eloquently articulates, the practice of Affirmative Action is racist. We should all strive for colour-blind (and gender-blind) hiring rather than diversity quotas, while also striving for culture fit in the factors that matter.
In other words, I believe if we prioritize cultural alignment (in values and work style attributes) and strive to be racially agnostic, we will end up with a beautifully racially diverse team. That’s exactly what happened for me.
My company, Widerfunnel, was never a group with monotone skin colour, gender, or cultural background. Looking around our office and our leadership teams always showed a rainbow of races, genders, sexual orientation, and age ranges throughout. I accomplished this without a diversity program defining quotas or outcomes. I didn’t need diversity rules. I simply hired people who were smart, hard working, honest, and seemed to align with the core values we had established as a team.
What I’m saying is that racial and gender diversity is irrelevant to your company performance, and that it will naturally occur in a company that values competence without discrimination.
The characteristic that matters most—cognitive diversity
The greatest danger in a cohesive culture is groupthink, where social pressure forces team members to agree with one another. This reduces productive disagreement and innovative potential.
In my experience, the danger of groupthink is ever present and must be actively managed through cultural development. I believe that creating a culture that values critical thinking, real conversation, challenging beliefs, and egalitarian ideation allows for diverse ideas to emerge.
Not only that, but a person’s working and thinking style, along with skills and abilities, must be matched with their role.
At Widerfunnel, we continuously assessed and celebrated each other’s diverse skills and strengths. For example, we charted our skills based on individual Strengthsfinder assessments.
Team StrengthsFinder Grid
This was just one of the many profiling tools we used to help our managers and team members support each other to do their best work. In future posts, I’ll dig more into the metrics and profiling you can use for hiring and performance management.
The performance impact of diversity
I’ll summarize my perspective with a chart, for fellow visual thinkers like myself.
My argument is that some characteristics of diversity, such as cognitive and skills are positively correlated with performance, while other characteristics, such as values and work style, are negative. The characteristics that society seems to focus most on today, racial and gender, should be the least interesting because they have no impact on performance
What’s your perspective?
How important is culture fit at your company?
What aspects of culture fit are most important?
How do you hire for culture fit?
