"Culture Fit" Is Often Code for "Someone Like Us"

Years ago, while researching a Forbes series on what drives growth, I sat down with Arnold Donald, then president and CEO of Carnival Corporation. I asked him about the phrase every hiring manager uses, culture fit. His answer has stayed with me ever since. He told me:

"As soon as people say things like, well, they don't fit our norm. They don't fit our culture... that's code for we don't really want anybody different."

And the person who doesn't fit, he said, is often exactly the person you need:

"Often that is your disruptor. That's the person challenging the status quo."

That's the part most leaders miss. "Fit" sounds like a neutral judgment about values. In practice it is often a judgment about familiarity. We are comfortable with people whose instincts, habits and ways of working remind us of our own, and we call that comfort fit.

The Box Was Built for Sameness

Every organization has a box. It's made of job descriptions, competency models, interview scorecards and unwritten assumptions about what a leader looks like. The box was designed for a standardized world, where the goal was to find people who could replicate what already worked.

The problem is that the box also filters out what hasn't been tried yet. Arnold put it plainly: if you wait for the perfect candidate, you will keep missing the people who simply haven't had the chance to do the job yet. The box rewards a track record, and a track record only exists for people the box already let in.

When he said that, I asked him the question I've been asking leaders ever since:

"They may not meet the box of criteria, but why can't you change the box?"

The Next Generation Won't Fit

Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, told me the box is about to be tested like never before, because the next generation of leaders refuses to be shaped by it:

"They want them to fall into a nice little square box and fit right into a corporate mode ... They wanna be who they are."

Gisel Ruiz, who spent 26 years at Walmart and retired as chief operating officer of Sam's Club, asked the question every leader should sit with:

"Why would you try to standardize people's points of view or styles or approaches to business challenges? You really want to find a way to empower each of them to be the most authentic self in any type of environment."

She also warned about what happens when young talent models itself on the box instead of on who they are:

"young, talented individuals are trying to model their leaders. Well, you're actually taking away from yourself and what you can bring to the table by doing that"

Who Do You Let In?

The first of the five indicators I use to read an environment is simple: who do you let in? It isn't a headcount question. It asks whether people can bring their individuality through the door and put it to work once they're inside. Letting someone in and then asking them to fit the box is just a slower way of keeping them out.

Arnold Donald's answer was to build for this on purpose. He described deliberately designing teams, bonding and incentives so that people's differences in perspective and approach could actually produce ideas instead of friction. Individuality doesn't pay off by accident. Someone has to design the environment for it.

That is the second practice in my work on Leadership in the Age of Personalization: Individuality, which means shaping the environment. Hiring is only the first decision. Every meeting, review and promotion after it tells people whether the organization wants what makes them unique or only the parts that match the box.

In my conversation with Kelly McCulloch, global chief people officer at Taco Bell, I put it this way:

"I know we have traditionally been put in boxes, but we live in a world now where there are no boxes anymore. And if we're not acting like that, that's when we can't evolve."

Changing the Box Takes Conviction

It's easy to hire for fit. It's safe. Nobody questions it. Changing the box requires a leader to defend a decision that doesn't look like the last one, before the outcome is certain. That's the definition of conviction.

The organizations that learn to change the box get something the others never will: people who redefine what the box should have been all along.

Redirect 1: Look at your last three hires. What did they have in common that the job didn't require? That's your box.

Redirect 2: The next time someone says "not a culture fit," ask them to name the specific behavior that concerns them. If they can't, it's code.

Redirect 3: Rewrite one job description around the contribution you need, not the background you're used to. Then see who applies.

Redirect 4: On Monday, ask the newest person on your team what they would do differently if they didn't have to fit in. Act on one of their answers.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.