An Excerpt from Hire, Inspire, and Fuel Their Fire
“Shaping your culture is more than half done when you hire your team. ” Jessica Herrin, Founder, Stella & Dot
Okay, you’ve defined what culture means to you, clarified what your ideal culture is, and are telling the world about your culture to give candidates a solid understanding of what it is and whether or not they’ll be a fit.
Now comes the most challenging part—selecting employees who you know are going to help sustain and, better still, strengthen your culture in the long run. As the old hiring adage goes, “When you hire the right person, you can do no wrong. When you hire the wrong person, you can do no right.”
Culture match or culture growth?
A word of caution though—be careful how you define a “culture match” for your workplace. The challenge with this concept is there is a natural human tendency to want to hire people who remind
us of, well, us. I mean, who wouldn’t want another you?
The problem is that you can end up with a team or entire company full of clones—people who, unfortunately for you, all think the same. As the saying goes, “If you have two employees who think alike, one of them is redundant.”
With this in mind, a better approach is to hire people who fit your cultural expectations but also add something new that will help your culture grow and evolve. Indeed, the design company IDEO has gone this very route, replacing the concept of “culture match” with a focus on “culture improvement” when hiring.
Bill Strickland, the CEO and President of the non-profit center Manchester Bidwell Corporation puts it this way, “We hire employees knowing that they aren’t simply buying into our story, they are changing that story a little by adding their own. We encourage that. We insist upon it.”
As Patty McCord, the former human resources manager of Netflix says, “Hire now, for the team you wish to have in the future.”
Michael Kerr is an international hall of fame business speaker, trainer and author of seven books including, The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses are Laughing All the Way to the Bank and Hire, Inspire and Fuel Their Fire.
