Culture Serves And Protects
by Miki Saxon
Philip Mydlach wrote a great article saying that to create a better environment, where creativity and success can flourish, the management team should be like a fudgsicle—consistent all the way through.
Your management team’s behavior sets the tone for the entire corporation. So it better be consistent, predictable and true to your core values.
Absolutely true, as is the need for clearly communicating those values and not tolerating managers who don’t support them.
But achieving your fudgsicle is easier if you include a preliminary step that Mydlach doesn’t mention.
That step is using your culture as a filter in all your hiring—especially when hiring management and most importantly the executive team.
10 years ago I wrote and article for MSDN about how to use company culture as a screening tool to avoid hiring turkeys of any kind at all levels.
With the sighting of “economic green shoots” this seems a good time to revisit it (with some updating).
Don’t Hire Turkeys!
Use Your Culture as an Attraction, Screening and Retention Tool
to Turkey-Proof Your Company.
Companies don’t create people—people create companies.
All companies have a culture composed of its core values and beliefs, essentially its corporate MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), and it’s why people join the company and why they leave.
Generally, people don’t like bureaucracy, politics, backstabbing, etc., but when business stress goes up, or business heats up, cultural focus is often overwhelmed by other priorities.
In startups, it’s easier to hire people who are culturally compatible, because the founders first hire all their friends, and then their friend’s friends.
After that, when new positions have to be filled the only people available are strangers.
So how do you hire strangers and not lose your culture?
Since your culture is a product of your people, hire only people with matching or synergistic attitudes. The trick is to have a turkey sieve that will automatically screen out most of the misfits and turn on the candidates with the right values and attitudes.
Here is how you do it.
- Your sieve is an accurate description of your real culture.
- It must be hard copy (write it out), fully publicized (everyone needs to know and talk about it), and, most important of all, it must be real.
- Email it to every candidate before their interview and be sure that everyone talks about the culture during the interview and sells the company’s commitment to it.
- Everybody interviewing needs to listen carefully to what the candidate is saying and not saying; don’t expect a candidate to openly admit to behaviors that don’t fit the company MAP, since she may be unaware of them, may assume that your culture is more talk than walk or consider it something that won’t apply to her.
- Red flags must be followed up, not ignored because of skills or charm.
- Consider the various environments in which she’s worked; find out if she agreed with how things were done, and, more importantly, how she would have done them if she had been in control.
- Whether or not the candidate is a manager, you want to learn about her management MAP, approaches to managing and work function methods.
- Probing people to understand what their responses, conscious as well as intuitive, are to a variety of situations reveals how they will act, react, and contribute to your company’s culture and its success.
Finally, it is up to the hiring manager to shield the candidate from external decision pressures, e.g., friends already employed by the company, headhunters, etc.
Above all, it is necessary to give all candidates a face-saving way to withdraw their candidacy and say no to the opportunity. If they don’t have a graceful way of exiting the interview process they may pursue, receive, and accept an offer, even though they know deep down it is not a good decision.
A bad match can do major damage to the company, people’s morale, and even the candidate, so a “no” is actually a good thing.
Remember, the goal is to keep your company culture consistent and flexible as you grow. From the time you start this process, you need to consciously identify what you have, decide what you want it to be, publicize it, and use it as a sieve to be sure that everyone who joins, fits.
Use your cultural sieve uniformly at all levels all the time. If someone sneaks through, which is bound to happen occasionally, admit the error quickly and give her the opportunity to change, but if she persists then she has to go.
Do this and watch retention, creativity, productivity and morale surge ever higher.
Stop doing it at your own risk.
Image credit: daveyll on flickr
