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Today, most People and Process models across industries align to ‘Culture Fit’. Why?
What is Culture Fit?
Universally practiced amongst big businesses, Culture Fit involves the screening of potential candidates to determine if they are likely to change or assimilate into an organisations existing workplace culture.
The Problem
While claimed to be based on the alignment of values, beliefs, and behaviors between the employee and employer, but due to affinity biases that afflict all individual hiring managers and HR teams, this approach has broadly evolved into nepotism - the desire to hire those who look and act just like us.
The resulting homogenisation is fraught with people risk through rampant oppression and discrimination that leaves firms unable to change and builds towards an infinite liability from bullying, misconduct, fraud, corruption and other unchecked criminal activity that has long overwhelmed the worlds regulators and justice systems.
To secure employment, firms expect workers must either assimilate to this toxic mantra or leave quietly. In the aging, heteronormative white male patriarchal societies that dominate western nations and capitalist economies, Culture Fit is a cover label for corporate-sanctioned racism, ageism, homophobia, sexism and genocide, exponentially dissociating ruling classes from ever changing population demographics.
All problems have consequences
But real life isn't about all that. Fundamentally anti-Human, this approach portrays all those within a firm as good and all those outside as bad. Yet this practice entirely opposes the proven science that all Humans are equal and no trait is good or bad (Human Genome Project, 2001). The results are mutually self-destructive to firm, individual and teams, for example:
Inhibits firms ability to change, grow and succeed
Fuels the oppression of Human differences
Stifles collaboration and curiosity
Impairs effective corporate governance / risk management
Stigmatises the differentiating uniqueness that drives all commercial competitive value
Creates huge unaccounted for future financial liabilities to victims of hatred and oppression that has now zeroed the potential of our largest publicly owned firms globally – great job
The solution
Always go where your skills are rare or where you can learn rare skills.
For a vivid example of the problem, consider for a moment a hypothetical restaurant serving Mexican food that due to management policy only employs Chinese chefs and servers.
Under Culture Fit it will continue to hire more and more Chinese staff. This reduces the authenticity of their product to customers who may choose to take their business elsewhere. Plus it fuels the perception of inequity, exclusion and discrimination that gives rise to legal reputational and people risks.
Complimentary Fit is where we look to match candidates and firms according to unmet deficits in their needs. So in this example, our restaurant would actively seek out new Mexican staff to enrich the authenticity of their proposition and make the establishment more welcoming to a multicultural customer set. Furthermore, it encourages firms to embrace uniqueness ever further such as by hiring staff from other cultures, age groups and genders. The different perspectives, experiences and cultural richness this openness drives helps build fusion restaurants and power brands that evolve new heights of value by blending Human diversity in ways never considered before - real innovation.
Firms adopting Complimentary Fit dynamically mitigate perspective gaps and skills shortages with actively managed uniqueness that goes beyond the arbitrary diversity of their home nation, or lack thereof. From here flows new ideas, adequate challenge, competitive advantage and assured success.
Reality is always better than a nightmare.
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