A culture fit

As I’ve discussed in my previous blogs, when filling a role, one needs to define the:

• Goal of the role and the associated responsibilities, the comfort level with risk around the goal achievement,
• Exact skill set needed to achieve the goal,
• Experience necessary to prove the skill set and give you the proper confidence around goal achievement and associated risk tolerance. 

When filling the role with an external hire, you also need to make sure there is a culture and personality fit.

While diversity is generally good, and you want to have different types of people with different backgrounds, personalities, and thinking and working styles, certain interactions may turn out to be unworkable, or take a lot of overhead to make work.

I’ve seen the following things go wrong, while providing recruiting support, sales and marketing support, and other kinds of operational support, including help with product management:

• Everyone on the team is very fast: fast thinker, fast talker, quick to decision and quick to act, but one person is extremely slow: ponder slowly, speak slowly and verbosely, take a very long time to decide, and ultimately to act. 
  • This CAN be a good thing, since the slower person can add value by slowing everyone down and making sure the right decisions are made, all alternatives are thought through, etc. But in cases of extreme divergence, the team ends up being very frustrated with the individual, and the individual constantly feels 2 steps behind the rest of the team. If this divergence exists, people need to be aware of it, and manage to it to utilize it for optimal results, but this takes discipline and work!
• Everyone on the team works long hours, and that’s the culture, but a new person comes in who works much shorter hours. 
  • This CAN be a good thing if the person still carries their weight, but just does it more efficiently, perhaps teaching others better approaches, but can be a negative impact and create politics if this individual simply has a different idea of a work-life balance than the other team members. It will generate resentment, and “I work harder than you” politics that can poison a successful culture. Of course, whether or not it’s good to have a culture where everyone works long hours is an entirely different question. 
• Everyone on the team is very action focused and organized around a few key items, but a new person is very theoretical and unfocused.
  • Again, this CAN be a good thing if the theory and new ideas can be melded with the action focus of the rest of the team (or vice versa), but it can also be a very frustrating set of meetings. 
• The team has a “customer first” culture, and goes above and beyond to make sure the customer is taken care of, while a new team member only cares about the bottom line, and thinks all this “customer first” stuff is all good and fine so long as it doesn’t distract you from making the money any which way. 
  • Certainly, there should be a balance between doing the best thing by the customer every time and ultimately having a profitable business, but an extreme divergence on this value is likely to create unhealthy tension.

There are many more examples, and each one can be reversed.

The important thing is to be aware of the cultural and personality characteristics of your company and individual teams and of the new hire, and make sure that whatever the new hire brings will result in a productive situation, and not negative politics and frustration.