Protecting your corporate culture
by Miki Saxon“Can we keep our corporate culture as we grow? If yes, how do we go about it?” These are, if not the most asked then definitely in the top five, questions that I hear.
The short answers are, “Yes” and “Through a lot of hard work and tough hiring decisions.”
Unfortunately, that’s not the answer a lot CEOs want to hear—or do.
But if Google can successfully transplant its Silicon Valley culture to grow from three to 20 international R&D centers in less than three years, you can sustain your culture, too—if you’re willing to do the work.
Kannan Pashupathy, Google’s Director of International Engineering Operations, says, “We actually do a very strong test for culture fit, and that’s something everybody looks at. In addition to your raw smarts and your analytical thinking and your problem solving and your grade-point average, we do a very strong culture-fit test.
Part of that culture-fit test is to look for people who have an open mindset, people who think there is a richness in different cultures, that they can learn from everybody and hierarchy is not important and ideas are. If you’re in the company, you’re already somehow predisposed to thinking or at least aligning yourself in that direction.”
In other words, no matter how good the first three are, Google will pass on a candidate who isn’t, at the least, synergistic with its culture.
Retaining your culture means interviewing far more candidates than it takes to find the first three criteria and the toughness to walk away from sometimes dazzling candidates who, no matter how brilliant and skilled they are, just don’t fit.
So the next time you find yourself in this situation stop and think—is it worth selling your company’s culture down the river just to avoid more interviewing.
It’s your choice, but everyone will end up sleeping in the bed you choose to make.
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