"She doesn't fit the corporate culture"
Every now and then we introduce to a client a candidate who meets the functional bar perfectly, but who we have to reject anyway. "She doesn't fit the corporate culture".
But what does that mean?
A corporate culture is a set of beliefs and values shared within a company that defines how the people within that company cope with external adaptation and internal integration (loosely after Edgar Schein of MIT). Roughly translated: How we interact with our stakeholders and with each other.
It seems fair to say that if someone deals with the people around her quite differently from the rest of us, hiring her would bring in the risk of disruption. But before we decide to dismiss our candidate, I should say we first try to understand what it is exactly that we're doing.
There's a lot to be said about cultures and the complex web of elements that make them up. I won't go in to that here. But how is a culture important?
Ineffective company cultures make people do things because they were told to do them. Such companies need elaborate command, control and corrective structures to achieve the things it wants to achieve. An effective culture however, makes people do things, and do them in a certain way, because they believe in them. Because they are the right things to do. If people in a company share such believes, it copes more effectively with 'external adaptation' and 'internal integration'. In other words, it achieves higher levels of alignment, co-operation, communication, engagement, staff retention, cohesiveness, consistency in external representation, and so on.
So, all for dismissing our candidate?
I wouldn't be so fast. Strong cultures, however effective, carry risks. One of them is 'group think'; the state in which people do not challenge each other, for the sake of cohesion. In such organisations, people avoid conflict. And as a result, the status quo may never questioned, people who are different may be excluded and innovative ideas may be trampled.
Another risk is that of 'sacred cows'; tokens or symbols that are not allowed to be touched. These are often found in companies with a charismatic central leader. In these cases, an outsider is often regarded as a threat; a negative influence on the rest of the group.
So before you dismiss a candidate for thew sake of corporate culture, think twice.
It may be very valid argument, particularly if a person displays characteristics that clearly conflict with productive cultural elements. But it may also be harmful to discard people merely out of conservatism, or when the real reason for it is that our own organisation is not adaptive enough to absorb a healthy amount diversity.
Wilfred Karreman
