Culture add over culture fit [flowcon 2018]

CULTURE ADD OVER CULTURE FIT
#ﬂowconFR18 @mattphilip

@mattphilip #ﬂowconFR18
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
— Peter Drucker

CULTURE MANIFESTO (VALUE 1)
We are uncovering better ways of making people awesome by doing it and
helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Culture Add over Culture Fit
While there is value in the items on the right,  
we value the items on the left more.

CULTURE ADD AND CULTURE FIT

UNCERTAINTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe9uWD8JEKk

WE NEED BOTH
Org Goal
Time-
Orientation
Focus Bias
Culture Fit
Preserve
continuity
Present
What we
have
Conﬁrming
Culture Add
Create
change
Future
What we’re
missing
Learning

KAI-ANZEN* (SAFE CHANGE)
Culture
Add
*not a real Japanese word

GOOGLE’S ARISTOTLE PROJECT
Culture
Add

AFFIRMING THE BENEFITS OF CULTURE FIT
•Employees who fit well with their organization, coworkers, and
supervisor had greater job satisfaction, were more likely to
remain with their organization, and showed superior job
performance.
•Turnover due to poor culture fit due can cost an organization between
50-60% of the person’s annual salary.
•Hiring for culture fit doesn’t mean hiring people who are all the
same.
•Necessitates defining and articulating the organization’s culture – its
values, goals, and practices — and integrating it into the hiring
process.

Shifting our focus from ‘culture ﬁt’ to ‘values ﬁt’ helps us hire
people who share our goals, not necessarily our viewpoints or
backgrounds
— Aubrey Blanche, Atlassian

HELPFUL CULTURE-FIT INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
•What type of culture do you thrive in? (Does the response reflect your
organizational culture?)
•What values are you drawn to and what’s your ideal workplace?
•Why do you want to work here?
•How would you describe our culture based on what you’ve seen? Is this
something that works for you?
•What best practices would you bring with you from another organization?
Do you see yourself being able to implement these best practices in our
environment?
•Tell me about a time when you worked with/for an organization where you
felt you were not a strong culture fit. Why was it a bad fit?

WHEN CULTURE FIT GOES
WRONG
14

WHEN CULTURE FIT GOES WRONG
“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of diﬀerent views.”
— Brian Amerige, senior Facebook engineer

WHEN CULTURE FIT GOES WRONG
We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest,
they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company. They do feel silenced.
— Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

Inclusivity isn’t ticking the box on demographic hiring targets. It’s
about creating and sustaining an environment where people
know others and feel known by others.

HOW MODERATES, LIBERTARIANS AND CONSERVATIVES FEEL IN SILICON VALLEY
1. A large majority consider their workplaces liberal or very liberal.
2. Most feel their views are at odds with the cultural norms in their workplaces.
3. Most do not feel comfortable sharing their views on political or cultural issues
with colleagues or only feel comfortable on certain issues.
4. A large majority feel less comfortable sharing their views with colleagues due to
Google’s reaction to the “Diversity Memo.”
5. A signiﬁcant number cannot do their best work because their ideological views
are at odds with their workplace norms.
6. A large majority cannot bring their whole selves to work.
7. Some know someone who did not pursue or left a career in tech because of
perceived conﬂicts in viewpoints.
— Lincoln Network, 2017 Viewpoint Inclusion Survey

Silicon Valley also has an
insidious infection that is
spreading -- a peculiar
form of McCarthyism
masquerading as liberal
open-mindedness.
I'm as socially liberal as
you get, and I ﬁnd it
nauseating how many
topics or dissenting
opinions are simply out-
of-bounds in Silicon
Valley.
— Tim Ferriss

It seems easier to accidentally speak
heresies in San Francisco every
year. Debating a controversial idea,
even if you 95% agree with the
consensus side, seems ill-advised.
This will be very bad for startups in
the Bay Area.
— Sam Altman

CULTURE FIT: CAVEAT EMPTOR
•We run the risk of creating a culture in which everyone is similar.
•Many organizations don’t even have a clear, shared definition of their
culture.
•We don’t know how to measure or define a culture fit.
•Too much similarity can lead to teams that are overconfident, ignore vital
information and make poor (or even unethical) decisions.
•It’s easy to mistake rapport for skill.

ENCOURAGING 
CULTURE ADD
So how do we do it?
22

WHAT YOU BRING TO WORK
What they need you for
What they
hire you for
What you bring

Culture Add is “Yes-Anding” for
recruiting and talent management.

CULTURE FIT WITHOUT CULTURE ADD

WHY YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT CULTURE ADD
•A good way to inject fresh ideas into an otherwise stagnant
environment.
•Though homogenous groups feel more conﬁdent in their performance
and group interactions, socially diverse groups are more successful
in completing their tasks and outperformed more homogeneous groups
because they more carefully process information.
•Reduces free-rider behavior, which is strongly related to whether the
person knows the other people (community)
•Diversity of knowledge and viewpoints massively boosts a team’s
creative output and dramatically increases the quality and kind of ideas
that emerge.

ORGANIZATIONS FOCUSING ON CULTURE ADD
•“Culture complement” (Jeﬀ Vijungco, VP Employee Experience,
Adobe)
•“Cultural add” (Marta Riggins, Director of Employee Experience &
Marketing, Pandora)
•“Cultural contribution” (Diego Rodriguez, IDEO)

THE STRENGTHS INTERVIEW (AND BEYOND)

QUESTIONS FOR CULTURE ADD
•Does this person offer a dimension that our culture might be missing?
(Buffer)
•In what ways might this person challenge our thinking and processes?
(Buffer)
•Will this person bring a viewpoint or context we may be missing? (Buffer)
•What can we learn from this person/What can this person teach us?
(Asynchrony)
•How might this person complement me? (aka, Don’t hire yourself)
(ThoughtWorks/Dan North)
•What’s lacking? (IDEO)
•Where do we want to go? (IDEO)

CREATE BA

PERSONAL JOURNEY MAP

MARKET OF SKILLS ACTIVITY

RETROSPECTIVES + SMALL EXPERIMENTS

PERSONAL-IDENTITY SOCIALIZATION
Photo: Bruce Mars

“PERSONAL BEST”

INTENTIONAL, DYNAMIC RETEAMING

BEING KNOWN IN COMMUNITIES
Village (~150)
Band (~50)
Hunting Party (~15)
Conﬁdants (~5)

AUTONOMY-SUPPORT MEETINGS
•How can I help you realize your goals in the next year?
•By when would you like me to achieve these things for you?
•In what areas have I failed to help you in the past, and how can I improve?
•What kind of things would help you feel more engaged?
•How can I help smooth your path toward mastery of certain skills?
•What does success look like for you, and how can I help you succeed?

Embracing change does not mean abandoning a core of values
and precepts. We must balance our desire for continuity
with our desire to be creative. We must learn how to not
abandon that core, while simultaneously letting go of past ways
of doing things… This requires a new paradigm, a new model of
how organizations work — organizations that operate in a
continual learning mode, creating change.
—Ed Simon, Herman Miller

FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
• Cubiks International Survey on Job and Cultural Fit. July 2013
• Lincoln Network, 2017 Viewpoint Inclusion Survey (http://joinlincoln.org/viewpoint-survey)
• https://open.buffer.com/culture-fit/
• Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion (http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm121130a.pdf)
• https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/guess-who-doesnt-fit-in-at-work.html
• https://www.recode.net/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-employees-conservative-trump-politics
• https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/better_decisions_through_diversity
• Dynamic Reteaming, Heidi Helfand
• Primed to Perform, Doshi and McGregor
• The Concept of "Ba": Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation (http://home.business.utah.edu/actme/7410/Nonaka%201998.pdf)
• Reinventing Employee Onboarding (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/files/2013/03/8884a0d75d.pdf)
• https://hbr.org/2015/07/recruiting-for-cultural-fit
• https://hbr.org/2010/09/kaiser-permanentes-innovation-on-the-front-lines
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-i-hire-its-all-cultural-contribution-fit-diego-rodriguez/
• https://heterodoxacademy.org/
• The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge

@mattphilip
mattphilip@thoughtworks.com
THANK YOU

Culture add over culture fit [flowcon 2018]

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