Matters of Culture

Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash

One of the hardest things to get our heads around is this idea of culture, and specifically, cultural fit, in terms of people we work with.

We’re well versed in assessing technical capabilities and the “how” we do the work that we do. You need to have these specific qualifications or you need to show those particular process skills, or you need to demonstrate that you’ve delivered on that defined platform in your prior experiences. All defined, all measurable, all tangible. 

But culture? That’s a funny one. How do you show “team player”? “Open mindedness”? A “positive contributor” mindset?

I mean, sure, you can ask a suite of questions across the interview process. You can even have multiple folks from your organization participate in the process so that you get more than one perspective on the individual. That helps to improve the probabilities. It reduces the risks by eliminating the obvious misfits (and there’s a big role for intuition here as well). 

And if you do it consistently enough, thoroughly enough, your organization gets much better at it, and you do indeed reduce the risks.

But you can never entirely eliminate the risks and so, every now and then, you do end up with individuals who said and did the right things in the interview process but, in practicality, just aren’t working out. They may actually be ‘delivering’ - very good technically and in terms of results. 

But they turn out to be cultural misfits which shows through in their behaviors. They’re cynical. They complain. They focus on problems and not opportunities, what isn’t working and not what is. In other words, they don’t come at things with a solution mindset, because for them, the glass is always half empty.  

Then we have a problem. What do we do? Do we keep them because they’re “delivering”? Or do we make the hard decision? Not an easy question to answer. Which is why it’s a funny (OK, not so funny, but more tricky) issue.

It’s tempting to think we can make things work. That we can perhaps work them through their problems. And maybe we actually can - maybe some folks simply aren’t aware, maybe for some folks, the issues are personal and the situation is temporary. That’s worthy of analysis and understanding.  

It’s tempting also to look past the issues: well, the results are good so let’s just focus on that and keep moving forward and hopefully things will resolve themselves. I have my reservations about this approach. 

Perhaps a good indicator is to note how other team members are reacting to these folks. Have they taken note? Are the issues “bleeding” elsewhere into the rest of the team? Are they avoiding these people? If these reactions are consistent and continuous, then it’s time to ask if the situation can really be worked through or ignored or left to solve itself. 

The answer, almost always, is pretty obvious.