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Defining Your Culture Provides Better Hiring Fits

THURSDAY, MARCH 4TH, 2010

Recently I wrote [When You Know You Need to Make a People Change] about a client who hired and then quickly released a manager.   In an effort to better understand why they’d made a mistake, the owner and one of the managers who participated in the hiring process did an autopsy on the decision to discover what they had missed in the interview process. Their conclusion: this person didn’t fit their company culture. He had management background, however it was with a Fortune 500 company, where structure was important, and speed and agility they surmised took a back seat to following specific policies and procedures. 

They concluded that in the future they should look within to hire for management. Much as Shannan Marty, CEO of Tracer Research Group discovered [Read Chapter 1 of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits]; it was a mistake to hire from larger companies when her company started to grow dramatically. As she indicates in the book, “Eventually a culture clash developed from the regimented hierarchical communication structures they were used to at their mega-corporations.”  
 
The same type of thinking strangled my client’s manager.   The disappointing experience with this manager made them realize they had another core value that was vitally important to their success. Agility. Their people and business respond quickly to customer needs. The new manager had not been able or possibly unwilling to understand and respond this way.
 
Had they recognized the importance of this in the hiring process they may not have proceeded to offer this person the position. Sometimes mistakes are only apparent after the outcome. The path before us looks bright, the reasons supporting our decisions are clear, yet there’s some underlying issue that is not conspicuous at the time of the decision. It’s unfortunate to hire someone and release them. When your business is growing many times all the relevant factors are not obvious. 
 
Repeating mistakes is the dearth of business.   My client is already planning to develop a path for management development, and feels they have a candidate within the business that can ascend to management and occupy this position.  The plan is to identify the path to determine how many steps this candidate still needs to complete in order to have management eligibility.  Taking this action is intended to prevent another hiring mistake from occurring in the future. 
 
Do you believe in synchronicity?   Next blog I provide how one client’s desire took longer than expected to realize. Yet with persistence brought unexpected results.  

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