The theory of evolution doesn’t apply to culture. The culture of your office has to be designed. Without a well-designed and executed culture, that everyone lives, breaths and holds true, all other talent initiatives will be dysfunctional or lost altogether.
The two most important steps in designing your office culture:
The most important step in designing your culture is to be very, very guarded on who you let in the front door. There are several hiring practices that enable us to throw cultural fit out of the hiring process. Being blinded by desperation to fill a position, hyper-focus on skill, misguided focus on will and in some cases credentials are all reasons we excuse ourselves from evaluating how they would fit in the culture.
The second most important step in designing your culture is to be very, very guarded on who you let stay. Some of the ways we become blinded to keeping people is their ability to produce, our personal relationships with them, not believing someone when they show us who they really are and false hope that they will change.
People’s traits, attitudes, and work ethic (or absence of) are highly contagious to the degree that I wonder why they aren’t on the CDC’s list of infectious diseases. The contagion can be positive or negative – you make the choice of which one when you choose to hire or keep someone on to your team.
When the talent aligns with the culture they will produce far superior results than talent who does not. When culture doesn’t matter, all other efforts with regard to talent initiatives will be dysfunctional at best or at worst lost altogether.
Don’t allow your culture to evolve by default, create it by design to truly have strong and stable talent initiatives.
Last updated on March 11th, 2018 at 06:47 pm
