The wrong way to think about culture fit (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Patricia Hewlin: There were very few people who looked like me and, and very few that I could really speak to in terms of my career development, who I could relate to with respect to being a black woman.

This is Patricia Hewlin. When she first started her career, she was working in the corporate world. And she often felt like a misfit. 

Patricia Hewlin: This was in the 1990s. And so being a black woman in an environment where most of my colleagues are up and coming white guys, I often did not know exactly how to fit in. 

Growing up, she was warned to be careful about expressing herself. 

Patricia Hewlin: My grandparents who lived in the south, they would always say, look, You do your work, you keep your head down that no one is trying to hear about your personal life and experiences. I felt that I needed to look more like my colleagues in terms of how I spoke and the types of things we talked about. I couldn’t change my color! 

So she focused on doing what she could to fit in.

Patricia Hewlin: So I didn't talk a lot about my personal experiences, and I learned more about sports. 

// just having conversations about what happened in the recent basketball game, being able to talk about who won that night // 

She wasn’t a big sports fan. She wasn’t talking about what actually interested her.  And she even changed..her..appearance.

Patricia Hewlin: even with my hair, I wear my hair naturally now. I have locks, very long locks. but back then I straightened my hair. // And a lot of it has to do with the old way of thinking is to be like your boss, look like your boss, and that that was really the message that that has carried on in many ways. 

All of this felt inauthentic. She couldn’t be herself at work. And even though she rose to a leadership position, she eventually walked away altogether.

Pat Hewlin: I chose to move on because it did not align with my approach to work.

Many workplaces pressure people to conform–and risk losing great talent. And at work, we often go to great lengths to fit in–and end up miserable. Organizations are better off – and so are individuals– when we find the right ways to stand out.

SEG A [Why orgs pressure employees to fit in and the value of them standing out]

THEME

I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. 

I study how to make work not suck. In this show, we explore how to unlock the potential in people and workplaces.

Today: culture fit. The problems with conformity–and the value of self-expression.

THEME MUX OUT

Every workplace has a culture - a system of shared values, norms, and practices. There’s an informal code about what kind of self-expression is considered appropriate. 

It includes what to share about your background and personal life, how to dress, what kinds of jokes are acceptable, and what emotions are welcomed and which ones are frowned upon. 

Extensive research shows that when you abide by those cultural norms, you experience greater satisfaction and commitment– and your organization benefits from higher performance, better collaboration, and higher retention rates. So there are clear upsides to alignment.

But if you struggle to decipher and follow the code, you’re at risk. In a massive study of over 10 million emails at a tech company, researchers managed to predict cultural adaptation by measuring… get this… how often people cursed. 

Yep, if you swore a lot more often or a lot less often than your teammates, you were more likely to get fired. It was a sign that you weren’t reading the room. F*** that.

Leaders want to get everyone on the same page. But it turns out that too much uniformity is harmful. And putting a premium on similarity has led to an unhealthy obsession with fit. 

Pat Hewlin: In those days of banking and we were interviewing people, that was the big word, do they fit? 

Today, Patricia Hewlin is an organizational behavior expert at Columbia. She studies what happens when organizations pressure people to fit in.

Pat Hewlin: And when it came down to it, this notion of fit had to do with do I like them and are they similar in some way to me? // Maybe we grew up in the same environment, socioeconomically, maybe it's race, maybe it 's gender, maybe it's sexuality, whatever it is, we're finding something where we can say, we like this person // And so the thought is that if we have more people in the work environment who fit, then we can play nice with each other and we can have fun in getting the work done.

If you inadvertently violate the code and express the wrong thing at the wrong time, people might pull you aside and tell you. You can’t wear that. We don’t say that. You can’t swear here.

And if you’re like many people, you respond by conforming. You dress differently. You adjust your mannerisms. But you’re creating what Pat calls a facade of conformity.

 Pat Hewlin: A facade of conformity is basically a front that we erectin order to give the intention of being in agreement , with the values or the perspectives of a given environment. 

Pat had lived it in her corporate job. She’d created a façade of conformity by talking about sports and even straightening her hair.

Patricia Hewlin: we create these facades in order to signal that, oh, we're okay with it, but internally one is not.

Facades of conformity go far beyond how we look and what we discuss. There are many kinds of masks we wear to hide the fact that we don’t fit in. 

Maybe you’ve feigned enthusiasm about a new company logo even though you think it’s awful. 

Maybe you’ve pretended to enjoy going to the bar with your team even though you’re not a night owl or a party animal. 

Maybe you’ve started watching a show your colleagues love so you can join the conversation even though you hate it. 

Or maybe you’ve pretended that you’re really excited to come to the office six days a week even though you were crushing it from home.

The issue is, that when we conform, we’re often in conflict with our own identities and values. Which can make us feel at odds with ourselves. 

In her research, Pat finds that people are more likely to create facades of conformity when their job security is under threat–especially if they’re younger. And she’s shown that creating these facades can take a psychological toll.

Pat Hewlin: over the 20 years of research that I've conducted in creating facades // I have found that, participants who score high in facades of conformity tend to experience high levels of emotional exhaustion. There's a sense of dissonance. There's also lower levels of work engagement. So that's really the irony of it all, that when one is creating a facade, they're actually finding themselves not to be as engaged in the work that they do. The other irony is that they tend to have higher intentions to leave their work environment, and so the very act of trying to fit in can be so stressful that the thought of leaving the organization tend to increase.

Conformity becomes a problem when it comes at the expense of expressing our ideas and identities.

Pat Hewlin: We learn to conform so early in our lives that it becomes part of us. But the problem is when we go too far, then we lose ourselves. And that's been the big issue with conformity to the point where conformity has become a bad word.

// And so we need to strike a better balance and kind of talk about what we mean by conforming? What do we mean by conforming? What should we be yielding to in this work environment in terms of values and then what’s being enforced upon us is unreasonable so, to the point where we can't be ourselves.

Striking this balance can be tricky. It’s not just about finding the right amount of conformity. It’s about making sure we don’t push for the wrong kind of conformity.

And if you feel like a misfit, you need survival strategies.

Sallie Krawcheck: It was a portly gentleman who was smoking a cigar and sort of growling.

Meet Sallie Krawcheck. She’s talking about her first day of work at a bank full of men. She was 22, lonely, and scared when her boss’s boss’s boss walked in.

Sallie Krawcheck: And as he walked by me, he looked me up and down and said, what kind of maternity wear is that, looking at my outfit. // And so that sort of sets the culture there.

[00:02:14] Adam Grant: Oof. So I imagine you felt a lot of pressure to fit in.

Sallie Krawcheck: A lot of pressure to fit in a lot of pressure to survive, pressure to conform in a certain way, um, and to play the game.

[00:01:55] Sallie Krawcheck: It was tough, and, um, I didn't really have a choice because I had signed a lease for a year. My parents didn't have the money to pay it and I needed the money to pay it. And so it wasn't a, you know, I'm just going to, I've just made a mistake. I'm going to get out of this. It was a, I have to gut it out here because I need to make a living.

Research suggests that ironically…the best way to fit in is often to stand out. You can see it with cultural misfits–people who come from different backgrounds than the majority of their colleagues. 

When they’re able to express their cultural identities, others feel closer to them– and are more likely to include them. 

You can also see it with organizational misfits: people who take career paths that are atypical for their workplace. Their unconventional backgrounds leave them better positioned to build bridges across silos.

Psychologists call it optimal distinctiveness. You can belong by carving out a unique niche. The key is to stand out in ways that are valued by the organization. In other words, take what makes you a misfit and show how it can help advance the mission.

That’s what Sallie set out to do. 

Sallie Krawcheck: I already stand out, so I might as well take something that is a fact and make it into an advantage. 

//So I might as well really, really stand out. // actually just really lean into being an outside um and and make it a feature, not a bug.

She looked at the stocks everybody loved, and found a few that were in danger of tanking. And she looked at stocks no one liked, and identified some that had real potential.

Sallie Krawcheck: // I never made a research call that was in line with consensus. I instead only made // big calls on big stocks. So I would only publish research reports if I had something very different and pretty contrarian to say. 

Then…she made sure her voice was heard.

Sallie Krawcheck: I was loud // a senior analyst said to me early on that if you have an insight, a research insight. And you don't share it then it doesn't matter. It's like you never had it. // you could have a strong opinion and you can sort of be your own person. 

Research shows that raising ideas that go against the grain can signal competence–especially for women.

By differentiating herself from others, Sallie started to make a name for herself. She became a pioneer in an industry where women in leadership positions are few and far between. 

She became one of the most powerful people on Wall Street–as CEO of Smith Barney and CFO at Citi.

But Sallie’s path was littered with obstacles. The pressure to conform never really went away. 

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, she was hired as CEO to turn around Merrill Lynch after Bank of America bought it. And during a performance review, she received some shocking feedback.

Sallie Krawcheck: my profile was too high, and therefore I was standing out too much.  And that it was intimidating to others who were around me. 

Adam Grant: Wow. What did you say to that?

Sallie Krawcheck: So I first said I don't know how to get my profile down as one of the very few women in a senior position by definition, I stand out and the press has been good in terms of the turnaround. Isn't that a good thing? to which I was told again, it was sort of my problem.

They wanted someone who would conform to their norms. 

Sallie Krawcheck: They would send in someone from HR to brief me on what the meeting was going to be, what was going to be discussed, and what my expected role was before the meeting. So there's a meeting, there was a literal meeting before the meeting, and then there would often be a meeting after the meeting to talk about what had happened at the meeting.

But Sallie didn’t conform to those expectations. She continued to stand out. And the people above her, didn’t see her nonconformity as advancing their goals.

Sallie Krawcheck: after the business had been turned around and was told in part that I was, um, you know, thanks for the turnaround, you're more of a turnaround expert now that the business is more business as usual, we're going to give it to, you know, someone who was more in the inner circle of the CEO // And, you know, the feedback I got later when I sort of called, called around for folks who were there, they said that the words had been used that I wasn't a culture fit for the company.

That left a lasting impression on her.

Sallie Krawcheck: Probably because of that I recoil against cultural fit.

Sallie’s take on fit tracks with the evidence. By over indexing on fit, we’ve taken a good thing too far. We need to be more precise about what we mean by cultural fit. 

Research suggests that alignment on mission and values is important. Say your principles are generosity, excellence, and integrity. 

It would be a terrible idea to hire people who are okay with selfishness, mediocrity, or dishonesty. So when it comes to the very heart of what the organization stands for, you’re looking for fit.

[00:18:30] Sallie Krawcheck: I completely agree with that. 

Sallie is now the founder and CEO of Ellevest, an investing platform built by women, for women. She’s clear about what it means to fit the mission and core values. 

Sallie Krawcheck: So at Ellevest, we have a very clear mission that everybody, I think if you wake them up at 3 o'clock in the morning and shake them and say, what's Ellevest's mission, all of our folks who work there can say it's to get more money in the hands of women. 

//It reduces their stress. They live bigger lives. They live happier lives. They can leave cruddy jobs and cruddy relationships. And on a macro basis, It's a great thing because it helps the economy grow, society's fair.

// if you don't believe that, please don't apply for a job at Ellevest. If you think, you know, I really like that gender wage gap. I think that's a Super great thing. Um, then go please someplace else. Um, so that core value is of the greatest importance of what, what, you know, really motivates all of us for the other things.

But beyond mission and values, you’re not looking for fit. You want misfits. A variety of backgrounds and experiences. A range of personalities and identities. Diversity of thought and action.

Sallie Krawcheck: You know, I want optimists. And pessimist and realist working at the company. I want people. Some people are analytical. Some people are marketing oriented. I want rule followers and rule   ers. We spend a lot of time with this. // I want people who, you know, come from all kinds of different backgrounds and bring themselves to work and and share.

// if we really try to limit people, you know, and limit the type of people we have, we, we simply won't be successful in my opinion.

  // Who are the people who bring an experience, a perspective that we don't have that, you know, can then // add to the company and add to the performance.  // personally atEllevest we always look for not people who are culture fits, but people who are culture adds.

So how can organizations embrace cultural misfits–and support them in becoming culture adds?  More on that, after the break. 

AD BREAK - 2 sec pause 

Seg B [How orgs can allow and support employees to stand out]

James Yurcheno: I got a degree in environmental studies and a degree in art And then a few years later I got an MFA in sculpture

In the late 1970s, Jim Yurchenco got a call from an old classmate. The request was to join a new design firm as an engineer. But Jim was a misfit.

James Yurcheno: I never really took an engineering course of any kind.

Despite his utter lack of relevant experience, he got pulled into an engineering project for Apple: to design their first computer mouse. 

James Yurchenco: And at the time, there weren't any commercially available mice that were cost effective to sell a MA and a mass produced consumer product. And so Jobs came to us and said, I want a mouse and I want it really cheap. And our business at that point was, no matter what anybody wanted from us, we'd say, oh, sure, we can do that.//  And um, so we said, sure, we can design a mouse.

Steve Jobs hated the existing options. 

James Yurchenco: We looked at the existing mice that were around. Xerox had one and it cost 400 bucks and was, you know, was full of lots of little interesting little parts and it worked, but it was way, way, way too complex and not reliable enough. 

So Jim’s team decided to reimagine the mouse. 

James Yurchenco: we started thinking about what are simple, similar analogs and came about, well track balls. They're primarily used for games of course, and we, we started looking at track balls and realized, you know, if you could just turn this upside down and make it really small, you got a mouse. 

So the next step was taking these working prototypes, which were made. Well, the most famous one we did was made out of a soap dish that we bought down at Walgreens.

Jim’s sculpting background made him a misfit on an engineering team. But it gave him a fresh perspective on design.

James Yurcheno: Being a sculptor, you have to be able to visualize things in 3D space. And so designing a mouse was figuring out what are the 3D shapes in space that will. Kind of hold together all of this stuff that has to work. And it was mostly a matter of sitting at a piece of paper, pushing around shapes, until they would do what I want and then taking those shapes that would do what I want and saying, okay, now I have to make them using, a certain process,

MUX

The mouse Jim’s team designed for Apple was revolutionary. And their firm, IDEO, became known as the world’s leading design innovation consultancy. 

At most companies, Jim would have never been on the team in the first place–let alone leading it. But IDEO flourished by consistently hiring and nurturing misfits like Jim.

Diego: So Jim is another example of someone who, by a classical definition of who an engineer should be, is a misfit. But he ends up being arguably one of the most impactful engineers of the 20th century.

This is Diego Rodriquez. He started at IDEO as a design engineer and rose to become their global managing director, where he spent years working alongside Jim. He knows firsthand the power of hiring and collaborating with people who are outside the cultural norms of an organization.

Diego: The more diverse the people in your organization, the more points of inspiration it will contain. There will be more potential sparks of creativity, and it's that combination that fosters the creative connections that generate the kinds of innovations that will keep you at the edge  that keep you relevant.

Research reveals that when startups put a premium on cultural fit, they’re less likely to fail and more likely to go public… but then they grow at slower rates. They start to get stale. Diversity of thought disappears, and groupthink rises.

Over time, organizations are frequently better off hiring people who enrich the culture than those who clone it. 

One of my favorite demonstrations is a study of CEOs. It turns out that results-focused companies achieve greater financial performance gains if they hire a relationship-oriented CEO. And relationship-oriented companies are better off bringing a results-focused CEO.

Diego refers to this kind of culture add as cultural contribution. 

Diego: When we hire somebody based on how well they fit in today, that's cultural fit. We tend to choose similar people, or identical even, to everybody around us. It's just human nature. Like you say, you know, I feel really comfortable with them. They're a great fit. Let's hire them. When you do that, you're choosing to perpetuate the status quo. From the standpoint of seeking out innovation via diversity and having all those diverse life experiences in the room, I think it's much better to try to choose candidates who could make a positive contribution to the future of our culture and our organization, even if they don't feel like they're exactly today's mainstream person. And you do that by envisioning this future. Where that person's unique point of view and life experience has shifted how we work and what we value.

Early in Diego’s tenure at IDEO, the firm was filled with designers and industrial engineers. But as they started doing a wider range of projects– from reimagining Sesame Street to redesigning shopping carts–it became increasingly clear that something was missing from their process. Designers and engineers weren’t always equipped to understand what people needed.

Diego:  if we could bring in someone who could help us understand not only what people are saying they want, but actually what they're feeling inside and what they're thinking, which is much harder to get to. We could really change the game in terms of how products get designed because we're gonna be fundamentally working on the right problem as opposed to working on the problem that we think is right. 

So the team created a new role and hired an anthropologist. She couldn’t draw like an industrial designer. And she couldn’t build like an engineer. But she had the skill to help them understand unfamiliar worlds.

Diego: They had the foresight to say, she will fundamentally change the way we work. we're just gonna make a bet on her and see what happens.

Adam Grant: It seems like when we encounter those kinds of misfits, we often underestimate their potential.

Diego: Yeah, this thing that we all, we just do as humans, because your pattern recognition immediately goes to almost like, you know, and it's immediate. Stereotyping of, well, I don't really understand that person, but they seem to belong to this other group of people and it doesn't feel like the group of people around me. Therefore, there must be some kind of deficit.

Adam Grant: Yes. As opposed to an advantage that they're bringing.

Diego: Yeah, an advantage. And, and, and a lot of times you can't even see the advantage..

Evidence highlights three key steps for organizations to welcome cultural contributions. 

Step 1: rewrite your job postings. You want to deemphasize credentials and past experience– it often brings baggage and blinders.

Diego: Let’s just say hypothetically that you and I decide we want to create an app. Based on the conversation today.  We need to go find somebody who can code apps // So we're gonna get somebody with a master's degree in computer science, and then we're gonna say comma, preferably someone with a PHD because we only want the best. And then we're gonna say, they need to have eight plus years of coding experience, and then we're gonna email a friend and say, Hey, what are all the languages that somebody should know how to code in? And we're gonna list all of those languages and say, you need to be affluent in all of these things, et cetera, et cetera. Well, what you've just done there is you've filtered out so many people.

Diego:  I mean, I wouldn't have gotten hired against that checklist, and that's when the light bulb went off for me saying, oh, that's no way to attract the people we want to attract. 

You want to emphasize your core values– and the cultural contributions you’re seeking. Here’s how Diego likes to do that:

Diego: We're looking for someone who can write elegant code quickly and has demonstrated high performance in collaborating with data scientists, cultural anthropologists and designers, and other engineers and marketers, and who is respectful, but also high candor in how they work with other people and, and how they critique the work product of other people.

Adam Grant: It's very good.

Diego: If I put that job description out, I guarantee you we're gonna get a lot more people raising their hand and saying, you know, I think I could see myself in that role 

Sure enough, when organizations convey culture information in job postings, they’re more effective in attracting candidates. 

Once you have a job posting that will help recruit cultural contributors, next up is the screening process. I like to read resumes upside-down– the interests and activities at the bottom often reveal potential for cultural contribution. 

Say you’re hiring a scientist and you’re torn between two candidates. There’s evidence that the future Nobel Prize winner is more likely to be the one with artistic hobbies. Dabbling as a musician, artist, poet, or dancer is apparently a signal of curiosity and creativity.

So rather than focusing only on job-relevant skills, you want to craft questions that get to the heart of the candidate's background and passions.

Diego: I'll never forget interviewing this woman who had worked at Google, um trying to figure out, did she have that life experience of being able to stare at a proverbial blank sheet of paper and make something magic? And she had this little one-liner in her CV that said, Started Fermentation Club at Stanford and I thought, okay, this is weird. Let's talk about fermentation for an hour. And so she had all these experiences of imagining something that could be cool. Starting it, recruiting other people to be part of it, watching it grow, helping them take it over. So it's kind of a weird conversation to have in a job interview. You know, let's talk about beer and your love of it. But it resulted in someone who made an immediate impact in the job we hired her for.

Once you’ve brought misfits in the door, the third step is to make space for their cultural contributions—to let them know that variations from the norm are not just accepted but encouraged. 

Diego: And not just stereotype them as, oh, you're this specific kind of person who does this kind of work. That's like, it's not only boring for the person, it's kind of eliminating a lot of their humanity, which I think is painful for them and ultimately is a big impediment to the organization being able to change and grow in important ways.

Research suggests that in onboarding, it’s helpful to share stories about what it looks like to uphold and violate core values. To invite cultural contributions, we should give people a chance to share their own stories too. 

For example, newcomers end up contributing more and staying longer when they’re randomly assigned to present their personal highlight reels–moments when they were at their best. It gives them a chance to start standing out as well as fitting in from day one.

I’m also a fan of inviting new hires to be culture detectives–asking them to observe what’s working in the culture and what can be improved. Newcomers are the ideal insider-outsiders: they know enough to weigh in, but they haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid yet. 

And most importantly… people need support and encouragement to stretch the culture and express their ideas.

Diego: There's kind of a baby turtle metaphor you might use here as well, like, you know, a misfit or a person who is not in the mainstream of an organization can be very vulnerable left alone. And so we need to do things to radically increase their likelihood of surviving in that time period before they're kind of fully grown or fully situated. And ensure that they get to the point where they can actually start making that big impact at scale. And I  think the way you do that is by a)  just being a really good manager, which means spending time with the person on a regular basis, listening to what they need and doing things to help them out. But also by selecting specific projects and experiences that will introduce them to their organization. Build the right relationships that they'll need over time and most significantly give them a small platform that could turn into a bigger platform. Give them a way to highlight that unique thing they have that will foreshadow that bigger place they could get to. Kind of like start off Broadway before you put them on stage in Hamilton, you know?

MUX

If you want to unlock the potential in people and workplaces, you have to embrace misfits. Steve Jobs knew that. 

After working with Jobs on the mouse, Jim Yurchenco recognized him as a fellow misfit.

James Yurcheno: he had a totally non-traditional background as well. He did not care about, uh, what your degree was. He cared about what you were able to produce. So if he was really aware of who I was and what I did at that point, I don't think it would've mattered to him. All he cared about was what was coming off my table.

Adam Grant: And clearly he liked the result that you produced

James Yurcheno: Yeah, I think so. They sold a lot of those,

Apple was onto something in their iconic Think Different commercial where they said: 

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently…

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… 

They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Next week on WorkLife…

ANITA WOOLLEY: Students regularly will say, wow, this was one of the best teams I've ever been on. I don't know what you did. All the magic and composing. And I'm like, \\ it's not really magic. \\ it's kind of pretty basic, but it's pretty powerful. 

Team effectiveness, and how to make a group more than the sum of its parts.  

[CREDITS] 

This episode was produced by Courtney Guarino. Our team includes Daphne Chen, Constanza Gallardo, Dan O'Donnell, Gretta Cohn, Grace Rubenstein, Daniella Balarezo, Ban Ban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar and Roxanne Hai-Lash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Ben Chesneau [shay-no]. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown.

For their research, gratitude to the following lead researchers and their colleagues: 

• Amy Kristof-Brown on the upsides of fit 
• Sameer Srivastava on swearing as a clue to culture fit
• Lauren Rivera on how culture fit can weed out diversity
• James Barker on peers enforcing culture
• Rachel Arnett on cultural self-expression
• Adam Kleinbaum on organizational misfits 
• Marilynn Brewer on optimal distinctiveness
• Elizabeth McClean on how gender affects idea endorsement 
• Joeri Hofmans and Tim Judge on getting culture fit right
• Jim Baron and Michael Hannan on cultural fit and startup success 
• Chad Hartnell on CEO culture contribution and firm performance 
• Chad Van Iddekinge on past experience 
• Gina Dokko on baggage and blinders 
• Joseph Pacelli on cultural information in job postings 
• Robert Root-Bernstein on artistic hobbies among scientists
• Sean Martin on core values in onboarding
• Dan Cable on newcomers’ highlight reels