Monthly Archives: June 2017

Maybe we got this Culture Fit thing all Wrong! #WorkHuman

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So, I’m sitting on a plane flying back from the WorkHuman conference and I’m going through my notes. Here’s one of the things I wrote down:

“Instead of culture fit, what if we focused on culture contribution…” 

I don’t even remember who said it that sparked me to write it down, but I loved it. I want to say it was Adam Grant, seemed like he was saying a bunch of stuff I liked during his session.

It struck me immediately when it was said. It’s one of those times when you go, “Holy crap, have we missed this all along and no one said anything!”

The problem is, hiring for culture fit is really hard. There are technologies and experts who will tell you they can do it, but it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. When you sit down and interview people, you mostly don’t get culture fit, you get ‘I’m comfortable with this person’ and that turns into you saying, “they’d be a great fit in our culture!”

Hiring for culture contribution actually is a bit easier and probably more effective! I can easily interview someone and ask for concrete examples of the cultural contributions they currently provide at their organization or have provided, and what they’ll provide when they come to my organization. Sure they could lie or exaggerate, but that happens already, so that’s nothing new.

What I like about culture contribution over cultural fit is I can measure cultural contribution! Don’t tell me you fit, show me you fit! There’s millions of ways employees can contribute to culture, so it’s not like we are limiting hires to only those who ‘want’ to be involved.

I don’t know. What do you think?

It was just a note on a scrap of paper, but man it seems really profound. Hit me in the comments if you’re doing anything with cultural contribution in your organization.

How Will You Kill Your Company? #WorkHuman

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At the WorkHuman conference, Adam Grant, author of “Originals: How Non-Conformists Rule the World” gave an informing and entertaining keynote, but one question he asked really stood out for me over everything else.

It was the concept of asking the leaders in your company this one question:

“How will you kill this company?”

Actually, go through the exercise of determining every way you could possibly kill your company. List them out, talk about them, brainstorm, etc. The reality is, it’s easier to do this exercise than it is when you ask, “How will you save this company?”

It’s super powerful, right!?

When we tell people we need you to come up with ways to save, or better, our company, you get massive groupthink and really very little ever comes from all of that work and effort. When you ask them how they could kill it, you’ll be amazed at the ideas and creative ways they can kill your company!

Our reality is if we can think of ways to kill our companies, we now know many of our true competitive pressures that we face. It’s a fascinating leadership exercise that has real value.

You’ll find employees and leaders who never have anything to share all of sudden become very involved in how they personally could kill the company! These are things they fear, but never come out and say, since we would probably view them as doomsayers and such. Now, you set them free to share how they think the company will go bad!

What this exercise does is allow organizations to open up the conversation around getting creative when it comes to how we’ll actually save the company. These ideas need to be just as creative, just as outlandish. Those are the things that save companies, not just continuing down a path of destruction and now wanting to hurt a leader’s feelings that their plan might be crap!

It’s funny, and I bet like me when you read the question you can instantly think of ways you could kill your company. What is way harder is asking yourself the second question and thinking how will I save this company? For some reason, those ideas don’t come as quickly and passionately.

We have to train ourselves and those around us to think differently when it comes to how we’ll save ourselves. It’s easy to kill, it’s really hard to save, or so we think! We fall into the trap of believing our ideas about saving the company will be taken seriously, and our ideas about killing the company are just a joke.

They’re both very serious. Your company can die, just as easy as it can grow and prosper if your leadership team is willing to listen freely without judgment to each other and to your staff. We tend to get sucked into one idea will save the company and all focus and energy only go to that. We put all of our eggs into one basket.

So, how will you kill your company?