Ducks in a Row: Is Culture Dependent on Hiring?
by Miki Saxon
I read an interview with Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza and several things stood out that would be useful in hiring and juice your corporate culture.
Juice your culture, because, as you grow, your culture will assimilate and mimic the traits of those you hire.
D’Souza was a diplomatic brat whose family moved every two years. The result was an ingrained learning curve and appreciation for those different from himself.
We learned how to love the world. There’s this great richness of diversity, yet people are far more similar than they are different. You’re not as likely to learn that when you grow up in one town, in one environment, in one culture or in one country.
This applies as well to those who change companies, since every company has its own culture and every manager a subculture.
Culture is a reflection of values, so the trick to good hiring is to know what which values in your own culture are truly critical.
It’s not important if previous cultures were similar to yours; what is important is understanding in which cultures the candidate thrived and how they compared to yours. As discussed Friday, skills and performance are not independent of environment.
The lesson I learned is that when you have to evolve that quickly as a person, you need to be aware of two things. One is personal blind spots and the other is personal comfort zones. Those two things can be real gotchas.
Good cultures foster personal growth, which requires personal awareness and a willingness to recognize what needs to change.
Finally, talent and attitude are far more important than current skills.
And you need somebody who’s got just raw smarts and talent and an innate ability to learn. Because the thing about functional expertise is that unless you’re in some very specific area, almost everything that we need to do our job becomes obsolete quickly, and the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter. So do you have the personal agility to continuously renew those skills, to reinvent yourself?
Your team and therefore your culture are stronger when people crave new challenges that not only stretch their current skills, but are outside their comfort zone.
People who aggressively drive to constantly learn, grow and change are only a challenge to management when they aren’t given those opportunities.
When that happens everyone suffers; the individual; the team; the company; and you.
Flickr image credit: ennox_mcdough
