Cultural Enhancers, Not Yes Men or Women

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Adam Bryant, Managing Director at Merryck & Co., conducted a terrific interview recently with Dawn Zier, former CEO of Nutrisystem, a company at which she led a very successful turnaround.   Zier described what she looks for as she builds a management team.  She doesn't want yes men or women, and she doesn't want people who simply fit into the existing culture.  She wants people who bring new ideas, and who enhance the culture.  I love the concept of cultural enhancers, as opposed to the notion of finding people who fit the existing culture.  Here's an excerpt from the interview.  

One thing I always tell my team is that I don’t want “yes” people around me. That’s not helpful to the organization. What I value is a diverse set of opinions. I’ll go around the room and hear different opinions, but pretty quickly you have to come together and decide on what the path is going to be. At that point, we should all be rowing in the same direction.

But I actually don’t like to use the phrase “cultural fit” anymore. I like saying “cultural enhancers,” because you always want to continue to build and enhance the culture. So I spend a lot of time in interviews really trying to assess that. Moving from cultural fit to cultural enhancer is important because each person brings something unique to the table.

Should You Hire for Cultural Fit or Not?

For decades, executives have stressed the importance of hiring for cultural fit.  You often hear discussions about cultural fit among people on recruitment and selection committees, as well as by people working for executive search firms.   Recently, though, Adam Grant of the Wharton School has made an important point about the downside of hiring for cultural fit, and he's received a great deal of attention for his thought-provoking and insightful comments.  Here's what Grant has said, as reported in an interview with Dan Schawbel for Fortune. 

First, stop hiring on cultural fit. That’s a great way to breed groupthink. Emphasizing cultural fit leads you to bring in a bunch of people who think in similar ways to your existing employees. There’s evidence that once a company goes public, those that hire on cultural fit actually grow more slowly because they struggle to innovate and change. It’s wiser to follow the example from the design firm IDEO, and hire on cultural contribution. Instead of looking for people who fit the culture, ask what’s missing from your culture, and select people who can bring that to the table.

Is he right?  I htink he makes a strong argument for avoiding groupthink.  Managers do have a very unfortunate tendency to hire people who look, think, and act much as they do.  To be effective, leaders need to consider hiring people who think differently, who complement and augment their own skills and abilities (rather than replicating the expertise and modes of thinking already on the team).   

Having said that, I think there are some important aspects of "fit" that need to be considered when hiring.  Otherwise, new employees will either face organ rejection at their new firms, or they will have an adverse impact on the organization's effectiveness.  First and foremost, it's very important to make sure that a new hire shares the same values as the organization he or she will be joining.  Second, does the new hire believe in the mission of the enterprise?  Do they feel passionately about the organization's purpose?   They may have different views about the means to achieve those objectives.  That's healthy.   Finally, will the person's leadership approach enable others to succeed?  Hopefully, the hiring organization has leaders in place who have created a safe place where others can speak up, discuss mistakes, express dissent, and ask challenging questions.   New hires have to be able to create a safe climate for their employees as well.  If they a history of acting in ways that discourage others from speaking up, then they won't "fit" and they will have an adverse impact on the organization's effectiveness.  

Are Your New Hires Fitting In?

Joann Lublin reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal about new research regarding cultural fit of new employees. Lublin described the research of Sameer B. Srivastava, Amir Goldberg, and their colleagues. The scholars examined 10.2 million emails among 601 full-time staffers at a technology company written between 2009 and 2014. They hypothesized that language is a key element of culture at an organization. Adopting a similar communication style as your colleagues represents one key element of cultural fit. What did they find? According to Lublin,

"The review of 10.2 million internal messages found that new hires who stuck around and thrived used language styles similar to those of their co-workers. Newcomers with high cultural fit had a greater chance of advancing to managerial positions, the study found. Quitters experienced decreased cultural fit roughly midway through their tenure. But individuals with low cultural fit had a four-times-higher risk of getting fired after three years."

In short, newcomers who thrived at the organization either communicated in a similar fashion as existing employees (implying that the hiring process had screened effectively for cultural fit), or the successful newcomers adapted their communication style so as to fit in at the organization. Those that left or did not succeed at the organization failed to adapt to the way people communicated at the tech company.

Hiring for Cultural Fit

Many companies hire for cultural fit.  They want to find employees who share their organization's values, and whose behavior and mindset align with the way that decisions are made and work gets done in their firm.  A recent Knowledge@Wharton article argues that companies need to be careful, however, when considering a candidate's cultural fit.

Cultural fit clearly plays a key role in organizational effectiveness. Consider the study by Nancy Rothbard, Gina Dokko, and Steffanie Wilk, published in Organizational Science in 2009.   They found that companies must cope with a key downside when hiring people with relevant experience.  Specifically, they noted that many experienced employees come with "cognitive baggage" that can inhibit them from being effective at their new firm.  However, a candidate's flexibility and cultural fit tended to offset the negative impact of cognitive baggage to some extent.

What's the downside of hiring for cultural fit?  Hidden biases may creep into your decision-making process. You may simply look for people who are similar to you in many ways, i.e. same educational background, socio-economic status, hobbies and interests, etc.  In other words, you focus on fit with your personal interests and values, rather than organizational norms and attributes.  Kellogg Professor Lauren Rivera recently wrote an article for the New York Times about how we might bond with candidates over things that don't really matter when it comes to organizational effectiveness: “Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit; sharing a love of teamwork or a passion for pleasing clients was not.”  In other words, people tend to make snap judgments based on who they might like to be friends with rather than who could collaborate with others to drive organizational performance.  

Consider your interviewing process for a moment.   What types of questions are you asking?  How are you assessing candidates?   Is the emphasis on fit with the interviewer's interests and values, or are you truly evaluating cultural fit?  How might you alter your hiring process to emphasize the latter and downplay the former?