Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: hiring

  • Cultural Fit versus Cultural Fit

    There is a remark on hiring I’ve heard quite a few times recently. It’s about sending a rejection message to a candidate. It goes along the lines: “Just don’t tell them that they’re not a good fit for the culture. That’s bullshit. That means nothing.”

    A Bad Fit

    I can’t say that such a remark lands well with me. I do, however, understand where it is coming from. As the industry, we started paying attention to the culture. It’s on our radars. We may have only a vague understanding of what organizational culture is but it is already a part of the discourse. This vagueness of understanding of the concept actually comes handy when there’s no tangible reason to reject a candidate but we still somehow didn’t like them.

    They are a bad cultural fit.

    Whatever that means.

    See, the problem I have with many of these statements is that they’re used as a bludgeon without much thought invested to why “we didn’t like” a candidate. Because of that we often throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    A Good Fit versus Likability

    When hearing about lack of cultural fit I often follow up ask what it means that a candidate wasn’t a good cultural match. The answer, most often, is something like “that’s a person we wouldn’t get on well with”, or “that’s not a person I’d like to hang out with”, or “it’s not my kind of a person”. These boil down to how likable a candidate is for an assessing person.

    The problem is that likability is a terrible way of assessing cultural fit. Not only is it not helpful, but it is also counterproductive.

    If we chose likability as our guiding principle to judge cultural match we would end up with a group of people similar to each other. They’d have similar interests, many shared views and beliefs, etc. We would be building a very homogeneous culture. An echo chamber.

    Sure, there wouldn’t be much conflict in such a group. There wouldn’t be much creative thinking either. There would be premature convergence of the ideas, little scrutiny, few alternative options would be explored.

    If we consider knowledge workers such a team would have appalling performance. Thus my problem with such a shallow understanding of cultural fit.

    Shared Values, Diverse Perspectives

    So what is an alternative? How to define cultural fit in a way that would yield a high performing team? General guidance would be to optimize for representation of different, diverse points of view while creating an environment where people are encouraged to contribute.

    These two ingredients—diversity and enabling environment—balance each other in a way.

    We want diversity to have an option to learn about other, non-obvious ideas. Such ideas won’t come from people similar to ourselves. We thus want to have a range of different people in a team. And when I say “different”, I think of different walks of life, different experiences, different beliefs, different preferences, different characters, etc. This might be translated to maximizing diversity.

    However, diversity for the diversity sake is not the way to go. This is exactly where the second part kicks in. We want to sustain an environment where people share their diverse opinions, and not simply have them. For that to happen we need to have a common base that encourages people to feel comfortable enough to contribute.

    That common base is a set of shared values. I won’t give you a list as I don’t believe there’s the way. There are many ways to build such an enabling environment. There are, of course, usual suspects: respect for people, emotional safety, or autonomy, just to mention few. The important part is that such a set of shared values provides an informal, and typically implicit, contract that makes it safe to contribute.

    Cultural Fit

    With that founding principle, the definition of a cultural fit would be very different. A good match would mean that we share core values but beyond that, a candidate is as different from current team members as possible.

    This means that friction will happen. Conflict too. Not everyone will feel comfortable all the time and not everyone will be getting on well with everyone else.

    This means that when we decide there isn’t a good fit we may come up with a much more tangible explanation why. It is because we don’t share values—e.g. we perceive a candidate as disrespectful—or we don’t sense any aspect in which a candidate would stretch diversity of the team in one of the desired dimensions.

    Note: not all dimensions of diversity are equal. There’s little, if any, value in my experience as a sailor in the context of product development. There’s more value in, say, cognitive studies that someone else went through. That’s why I add a quantifier “in the desired dimension” next to “diversity”.

    Some time ago at Lunar Logic, we rejected a candidate for a software developer role whose focus was purely on their technical skills. There’s nothing wrong in that of course unless this is the only dimension a candidate uses to look at themselves and at others. There was some mismatch in shared values, e.g. little understanding and appreciation for teamwork and collaboration. We didn’t see much diversity that they would add to the mix either—we already have quite a bunch of excellent developers.

    Interestingly, the decision was made despite the fact that we liked the candidate and were getting on well with them. That’s a complete opposite of what a naive approach to cultural fit would suggest us to do.

    We believe that we are better off with that decision. More importantly, we believe that the candidate will be better off too. As long as they find a company where there’s a better overlap in shared values not will they contribute more but will also be appreciated better.

  • Emergent Purpose

    There are those presentations at conferences that stay with us for a long time, even if there seems to be no particular reason for that. And yet they keep coming back for one reason or another. One of such presentations for me was a discussion between Arne Roock and Simon Marcus from Lean Kanban Central Europe years back.

    Even though the topic of the discussion was broader there is one context that keeps coming back to me. Autonomy and alignment. A recurring theme was that we can’t enable autonomy unless we have alignment around a strategy, a goal, or whatever is the thing that orchestrates individual efforts.

    As Peter Senge in his classic The Fifth Discipline puts it:

    To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive.

    It obviously makes sense. I mean, distributing autonomy is all fine but also creates a risk that everyone would pull an organization toward a different direction. Alignment, which goes through understanding of a common goal, helps up to focus on rowing in the same direction.

    At the same time, watching the session back then, I couldn’t help but thinking that we at Lunar Logic hadn’t been doing that. We’d been continuously distributing more and more autonomy to everyone and at the same time there hadn’t been any official strategic purpose set for the organization for quite some time.

    It the spirit of the discussion between Arne and Simon, who I both respect a lot, that should feel wrong. And yet it didn’t.

    I could even remember my earlier discussions with Jabe Bloom. Jabe was pointing how important were techniques he adopted to help people connect their everyday behaviors with strategic goals.

    Nonetheless, I still felt like imposing a strategy onto Lunar Logic would be a bad move.

    It was months later when I came across the concept of emergent purpose. In its spirit it’s all about understanding organizational culture. It starts with an assumption that everyone at an organization has their individual purpose and it is only natural to pursue that individual purpose. It means that, given no other guidance, everyone would work toward achieving their own personal goals. Some people would have goals similar to others. Some would have very distinct aspirations. Some would have much stronger drive to achieve their own goals than other who would be fine going with the tide.

    If we tried to visualize that as forces pulling an organization in different directions it might have looked like this.

    emergent purpose

    As a matter of fact it would also mean that there is an aggregated force pulling the organization in some direction. And that aggregated force is exactly an emergent purpose.

    emergent purpose

    By its design we don’t set an emergent purpose. It’s simply the outcome of individual purposes. It also means that for some people in an organization the emergent purpose may be the exact opposite of what they individually want. That’s all fine.

    Despite the fact that it’s an emergent property of any organization, we have means to influence the emergent purpose. It happens through hiring. When someone leaves an organization their influence on emergent purpose disappears. At the same the organization hires someone new whose expectations may be better aligned with the emergent purpose.

    emergent purpose

    Through such a change the emergent purpose has been amplified.

    There is interesting dynamics in that process. If my own goals are aligned with the purpose of the organization I’m with, it is less likely that I’d leave the organization than if it was otherwise. And corollary to that, my chance of being hired and wanting to join an organization is higher if there is alignment in place.

    In other words emergent purpose tends to sustain and even amplify itself, even with no conscious effort from leaders of an organization.

    The final, and most important bit about the idea of emergent purpose is that every organization has an emergent purpose. It doesn’t matter whether they have an official strategic purpose or not, or how strong it is, or whether there is alignment between a strategy and an emergent purpose. It’s always there, as the only way to get rid of it would be to make people stop having any ambitions, which is an equivalent of not having any people in an organization, I guess.

    That’s exactly where the fun starts. Given that there always is an emergent purpose, we’d be dumb not to listen to it. Now, I don’t say we necessarily need to pursue it actively, yet understanding it is crucial.

    The reason is that whatever strategy we choose there will likely be a gap between that strategy and the emergent purpose. The bigger the gap the more people would get disengaged and likely eventually leave. From that perspective there is a price to pay for any strategy and, simply put, the better we understand the emergent purpose the better we are suited to achieve our strategic goal. Also, in simple economic terms, there may be strategies that simply are too costly to pursue.

    Ideally, you can do what we did at Lunar Logic. We basically turned our emergent purpose to a company strategy. Instead of imposing a strategy on everyone we listened to each other and figured what’s the most desired path we want to pursue for the time being. That’s how we evolved our aspiration from helping to build products for our customers efficiently to helping the customers to succeed with their products. The latter isn’t focused on the building part nearly as much as the former.

    Interestingly enough, out of the potential strategies that we discussed there was one which would make me leave the company eventually. Luckily for me it didn’t end up being our emergent purpose after all.

    Of course I understand that few companies would go as far as we did. Even though I think it is an awesome idea I don’t encourage organizations to make that bold move. Nevertheless, knowing what the gap between aspirations of leaders of a company and everyone else is crucial if we look for any reasonable level of sustainability.

    Finally, emergent purpose is also one of possible answers for autonomy and alignment issue. As long as we understand what an emergent purpose is we can decide to stick with it or just slightly shape it instead of building alignment externally through officially set strategic goals.