The wrong way to think about culture fit AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast WorkLife with Adam Grant

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Episode: The wrong way to think about culture fit

Author: TED
Duration: 00:33:45

Episode Shownotes

Many workplaces hire, reward and promote on culture fit. But that can come with real costs to individuals and organizations. In this episode, Adam dives into the evidence on why overemphasizing fit can overlook promising people — and shows how organizations can fight conformity and support self-expression. Guests include Ellevest

founder Sallie Krawcheck, IDEO innovators Jim Yurchenco and Diego Rodriguez, and organizational behavior expert Patricia Hewlin.Available transcripts for WorkLife can be found at go.ted.com/WLtranscripts

Summary

In this episode of 'WorkLife with Adam Grant,' organizational psychologist Adam Grant discusses the detrimental effects of prioritizing culture fit over cultural contributions in hiring and promotion. Guests like Sallie Krawcheck and Patricia Hewlin share insights on how conformity can suppress individuality and hinder emotional engagement. The commentary emphasizes that embracing diversity and encouraging unique perspectives can lead to innovation and improved organizational dynamics, as demonstrated by successful companies like IDEO. Grant argues that organizations should focus on candidates who enhance culture rather than merely fit into it.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The wrong way to think about culture fit) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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00:01:21 Speaker_00
There are very few people who looked like me 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.

00:01:35 Speaker_09
This is Patricia Hewlin. When she first started her career, she was working in the corporate world, and she often felt like a misfit.

00:01:41 Speaker_00
This was in the 1990s, and so being a Black woman in an environment where most of my colleagues were up-and-coming white guys, I often did not know exactly how to fit in.

00:01:57 Speaker_09
Growing up, she was warned to be careful about expressing herself.

00:02:01 Speaker_00
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.

00:02:13 Speaker_00
And 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.

00:02:24 Speaker_09
So she focused on doing what she could to fit in.

00:02:27 Speaker_00
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.

00:02:46 Speaker_09
She wasn't a big sports fan. She wasn't talking about what actually interested her. And she even changed her appearance.

00:02:53 Speaker_00
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 just the old way of thinking is to be like your boss, look like your boss.

00:03:09 Speaker_00
And that was really the message that has carried on in many ways.

00:03:16 Speaker_09
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.

00:03:25 Speaker_00
I chose to move on because it did not align with my approach to work.

00:03:31 Speaker_09
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.

00:03:56 Speaker_09
I'm Adam Grant, and this is Work Life, 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.

00:04:11 Speaker_09
Today, culture fit, the problems with conformity, and the value of self-expression. 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.

00:04:33 Speaker_09
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.

00:04:45 Speaker_09
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.

00:04:58 Speaker_09
So there are clear upsides to alignment. But if you struggle to decipher and follow the code, you're at risk.

00:05:06 Speaker_09
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.

00:05:18 Speaker_09
Yep, if you swore a lot more often than your teammates or a lot less often, you were more likely to get fired. It was a sign that you weren't reading the room. F**k that.

00:05:30 Speaker_09
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.

00:05:42 Speaker_00
In those days of banking and we were interviewing people, that was the big word. Do they fit?

00:05:51 Speaker_09
Today, Patricia Hewlin is an organizational behavior expert at Columbia. She studies what happens when organizations pressure people to fit in.

00:05:59 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:19 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:38 Speaker_09
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.

00:06:55 Speaker_09
You dress differently. You adjust your mannerisms. But you're creating what Pat calls a facade of conformity.

00:07:02 Speaker_00
But facade of conformity is basically a front that we erect in order to give the intention of being in agreement with the values or the perspectives of a given environment.

00:07:18 Speaker_09
Pat had lived it in her corporate job. She'd created a facade of conformity by talking about sports and even straightening her hair.

00:07:26 Speaker_00
We create these facades in order to signal that, oh, we're OK with it. But internally, one is not.

00:07:39 Speaker_09
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.

00:07:54 Speaker_09
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.

00:08:07 Speaker_09
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.

00:08:14 Speaker_09
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.

00:08:23 Speaker_09
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.

00:08:36 Speaker_00
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.

00:08:56 Speaker_00
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.

00:09:11 Speaker_00
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 thoughts of leaving the organization tend to increase.

00:09:30 Speaker_09
Conformity becomes a problem when it comes at the expense of expressing our ideas and identities.

00:09:36 Speaker_00
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.

00:09:55 Speaker_00
And so now we need to strike a better balance and kind of talk about, well, what do we mean by conforming? What should we be yielding to in this work environment in terms of the values?

00:10:09 Speaker_00
But then what's being imposed upon us unreasonably so to the point where we can't be ourselves?

00:10:18 Speaker_09
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.

00:10:32 Speaker_01
And it was a portly gentleman who was smoking a cigar and sort of growling.

00:10:39 Speaker_09
Meet Sally 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.

00:10:51 Speaker_01
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 set the culture there.

00:11:02 Speaker_09
So I imagine you felt a lot of pressure to fit in.

00:11:04 Speaker_01
A lot of pressure to fit in, a lot of pressure to survive. Pressure to conform in a certain way and to play the game. It was tough and I didn't really have a choice because I had signed a lease for a year.

00:11:19 Speaker_01
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 gonna, I've just made a mistake. I'm gonna get out of this. It was a, I have to gut it out here because I need to make a living.

00:11:32 Speaker_09
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.

00:11:43 Speaker_09
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.

00:11:57 Speaker_09
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.

00:12:09 Speaker_09
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 Sally set out to do.

00:12:21 Speaker_01
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 outsider and make it a feature, not a bug.

00:12:35 Speaker_09
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.

00:12:46 Speaker_01
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.

00:13:00 Speaker_09
Then she made sure her voice was heard.

00:13:03 Speaker_01
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.

00:13:23 Speaker_09
Research shows that raising ideas that go against the grain can signal competence, especially for women. By differentiating herself from others, Sally started to make a name for herself.

00:13:34 Speaker_09
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 Sally's path was littered with obstacles.

00:13:49 Speaker_09
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.

00:14:04 Speaker_01
My profile was too high, you know, and therefore I was standing out too much, and that it was intimidating to others who were around me.

00:14:15 Speaker_09
Wow. What did you say to that?

00:14:19 Speaker_01
So I first said, you know, 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?

00:14:35 Speaker_01
To which I was told, again, it was sort of my problem. They wanted someone who would conform to their norms.

00:14:41 Speaker_01
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 was a meeting, there was a literal meeting before the meeting.

00:14:56 Speaker_01
And then there would often be a meeting after the meeting to talk about what had happened at the meeting.

00:15:01 Speaker_09
But Sally 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.

00:15:12 Speaker_01
after the business had been turned around and was told in part that I was, you know, thanks for the turnaround. You're more of a turnaround expert.

00:15:20 Speaker_01
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.

00:15:29 Speaker_01
And, you know, the feedback I got later when I sort of 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.

00:15:38 Speaker_09
That left a lasting impression on her.

00:15:41 Speaker_01
Probably because of that, it causes me to recoil against culture fit.

00:15:47 Speaker_09
Sally'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.

00:16:02 Speaker_09
Say your principles are generosity, excellence, and integrity. It would be a terrible idea to hire people who are okay with selfishness, mediocrity, and dishonesty.

00:16:15 Speaker_09
So when it comes to the very heart of what the organization stands for, you're looking for fit.

00:16:20 Speaker_01
I completely agree with that.

00:16:22 Speaker_09
Sally 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.

00:16:33 Speaker_01
So at Ellevest, we have a very clear mission that everybody, I think if you wake them up at three o'clock in the morning and shake them and say, what's Ellevest's mission?

00:16:41 Speaker_01
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.

00:16:52 Speaker_01
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.

00:17:00 Speaker_01
If you think, you know, I really like that gender wage gap, I think that's a super great thing, then go please someplace else. So that core value is of the greatest importance and what really motivates all of us for the other things.

00:17:17 Speaker_09
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.

00:17:34 Speaker_01
You know, I want optimists and pessimists and realists working at the company. I want people, some people are analytical, some people are marketing oriented. I want rule followers and rule breakers.

00:17:45 Speaker_01
We spend a lot of time with this, like what's the right ratio of our rule followers to rule breakers? I want people who come from all kinds of different backgrounds and bring themselves to work and share.

00:17:58 Speaker_01
If we really try to limit people, you know, and limit the type of people we have, we simply won't be successful, in my opinion.

00:18:04 Speaker_01
Who are the people who bring an experience or perspective that we don't have that, you know, can then add to the company and add to the performance?

00:18:14 Speaker_01
So personally at Ellevest, we always look for not people who are culture fits, but people who are culture adds.

00:18:25 Speaker_09
So how can organizations embrace cultural misfits and support them in becoming culture ads? More on that after the break.

00:18:49 Speaker_02
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00:19:47 Speaker_05
I got a degree in environmental studies and a degree in art. And then a few years later, I got an MFA in sculpture.

00:19:55 Speaker_09
In the late 1970s, Jim Yurchenko got a call from an old classmate. The request was to join a new design firm as an engineer. But Jim was a misfit. I never really took an engineering course of any kind.

00:20:10 Speaker_09
Despite his utter lack of relevant experience, Jim got pulled into an engineering project for Apple to design their first computer mouse.

00:20:19 Speaker_05
And at the time, there weren't any commercially available mice that were cost-effective to sell in a mass-produced consumer product. And so Jobs came to us and said, I want a mouse and I want it really cheap.

00:20:36 Speaker_05
Our business at that point was no matter what anybody wanted from us, we'd say, oh, sure, we can do that. We can design a mouse. Steve Jobs hated the existing options. We looked at the existing mice that were around.

00:20:49 Speaker_05
Xerox had one that was designed at Xerox PARC and it cost $400 and was full of lots of little interesting little parts and it worked, but it was way, way, way too complex and not reliable enough.

00:21:02 Speaker_09
So Jim's team decided to reimagine the mouse.

00:21:05 Speaker_05
We started thinking about what are similar analogs and came about, well, trackballs. They're primarily used for games, of course.

00:21:14 Speaker_05
And we started looking at trackballs and realized, you know, if you could just turn this upside down and make it really small, you got a mouse.

00:21:22 Speaker_05
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.

00:21:32 Speaker_09
Jim's sculpting background made him a misfit on an engineering team, but it gave him a fresh perspective on design.

00:21:39 Speaker_05
Being a sculptor, you have to be able to visualize things in 3D space. That's sort of key because sculpture is 3D.

00:21:47 Speaker_05
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,

00:22:02 Speaker_05
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.

00:22:11 Speaker_09
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.

00:22:26 Speaker_09
But IDEO flourished by consistently hiring and nurturing misfits like Jim.

00:22:31 Speaker_06
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 Rodriguez.

00:22:48 Speaker_09
He started at IDEO as a design engineer and rose to become their global managing director, where he spent years working alongside Jim.

00:22:56 Speaker_09
He knows firsthand the power of hiring and collaborating with people who are outside the cultural norms of an organization.

00:23:02 Speaker_06
The more diverse the people in your organization, the more points of inspiration it will contain. there will be more potential sparks of creativity.

00:23:11 Speaker_06
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 at the fore, that keep you relevant.

00:23:25 Speaker_09
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.

00:23:42 Speaker_09
Over time, organizations are frequently better off hiring people who enrich the culture than those who clone it. One of my favorite demonstrations is the study of CEOs.

00:23:52 Speaker_09
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,

00:24:06 Speaker_09
Diego refers to this kind of culture ad as cultural contribution.

00:24:13 Speaker_06
When we hire somebody based on how well they fit in today, that's cultural fit, we tend to choose people similar or identical even to everybody around us. It's just human nature. Like you say, you know, I feel really comfortable with them.

00:24:29 Speaker_06
They're a great fit. Let's hire them. When you do that, you're choosing to perpetuate the status quo.

00:24:37 Speaker_06
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.

00:25:00 Speaker_06
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.

00:25:12 Speaker_09
Early in Diego's tenure at IDEO, the firm was filled with designers and industrial engineers.

00:25:18 Speaker_09
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.

00:25:29 Speaker_09
designers and engineers weren't always equipped to understand what people needed.

00:25:34 Speaker_06
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.

00:25:45 Speaker_06
We could really change the game in terms of how products get designed because we're going to be fundamentally working on the right problem as opposed to working on the problem that we think is right.

00:25:57 Speaker_09
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.

00:26:10 Speaker_06
They had the foresight to say, she will fundamentally change the way we work. We're not sure how, but we're just going to make a bet on her and see what happens.

00:26:19 Speaker_08
It seems like when we encounter those kinds of misfits, we often underestimate their potential.

00:26:25 Speaker_06
Yeah, I think that's, again, it's this thing that we just do as humans, because your pattern recognition immediately goes to almost like, you know, 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.

00:26:46 Speaker_06
Yes, as opposed to an advantage that they're bringing. Yeah, an advantage. And a lot of times you can't even see the advantage.

00:26:56 Speaker_09
Evidence highlights three key steps for organizations to welcome cultural contributions. Step one, rewrite your job postings. You want to de-emphasize credentials and past experience. It often brings baggage and blinders.

00:27:11 Speaker_06
Let's just say hypothetically that you and I decide we want to create an app based on this conversation today. We need to go find somebody who can code apps. We're going to get somebody with a master's degree in computer science.

00:27:25 Speaker_06
And then we're going to say, comma, preferably a PhD, because we only want the best. And then we're going to say, They need to have eight plus years of coding experience.

00:27:38 Speaker_06
And then we're going to email a friend and say, hey, what are all the languages that somebody should know how to code in? And we're going to list all of those languages and say, you need to be all fluent in all of these things, et cetera, et cetera.

00:27:49 Speaker_06
Well, what you've just done there is you've filtered out so many people. I mean, I wouldn't have gotten hired against that checklist. And that's when the light bulb went off for me saying, oh, pfft.

00:28:01 Speaker_06
That is, that's no way to attract the people we want to attract.

00:28:05 Speaker_09
You want to emphasize your core values and the cultural contributions you're seeking. Here's how Diego likes to do that.

00:28:12 Speaker_06
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.

00:28:27 Speaker_06
and who is respectful, but also high candor in how they work with other people and how they critique the work product of other people. It's very good.

00:28:38 Speaker_06
If I put that job description out, I guarantee you we're going to get a lot more people raising their hand and saying, you know, I think I could see myself in that role.

00:28:47 Speaker_09
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.

00:29:00 Speaker_09
I like to read resumes upside down, because the interest in activities at the bottom often reveal potential for cultural contribution. Say you're hiring a scientist and you're torn between two candidates.

00:29:12 Speaker_09
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.

00:29:27 Speaker_09
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.

00:29:35 Speaker_06
So I'll never forget interviewing this woman, trying to figure out, but did she have that life experience of being able to stare at a proverbial blank sheet of paper and make something magic?

00:29:47 Speaker_06
And she had this little one-liner in her CV that said, started fermentation club. And I thought, OK, 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.

00:30:04 Speaker_06
starting it, recruiting other people to be part of it, watching it grow, helping them take it over. And 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.

00:30:17 Speaker_06
But it resulted in someone who she made an immediate impact in the job we hired her for.

00:30:24 Speaker_09
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.

00:30:35 Speaker_06
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,

00:30:49 Speaker_06
is a big impediment to the organization being able to change and grow in important ways.

00:30:55 Speaker_09
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.

00:31:08 Speaker_09
For example, newcomers end up contributing more and staying longer when they're randomly assigned to present their personal highlight reels, the moments when they were at their best.

00:31:19 Speaker_09
It gives them a chance to start standing out and 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.

00:31:31 Speaker_09
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.

00:31:45 Speaker_06
There's kind of a baby turtle metaphor you might use here as well of like, you know, a misfit or a person who is not in the mainstream of an organization can be very vulnerable left alone.

00:31:58 Speaker_06
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

00:32:12 Speaker_06
and ensure that they get to the point where they can actually start making that big impact at scale.

00:32:17 Speaker_06
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 the organization

00:32:36 Speaker_06
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, that kind of give them a way to highlight that unique thing they have that will foreshadow that bigger place they could get to.

00:32:55 Speaker_06
Kind of like start off Broadway before you put them on stage in Hamilton, you know?

00:33:03 Speaker_09
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 Yurchenko recognized him as a fellow misfit.

00:33:17 Speaker_05
He had a totally non-traditional background as well. He did not care about what your degree was. He cared about what you were able to produce.

00:33:26 Speaker_05
So if he was really aware of who I was and what I did at that point, I don't think it would have mattered to him. All he cared was what was coming out of off my table. And clearly he liked the result that you produced. Yeah, I think so. I think so.

00:33:39 Speaker_05
They sold a lot of those.

00:33:42 Speaker_09
Apple captured this in their iconic Think Different commercial when they said, here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently.

00:33:55 Speaker_09
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.

00:34:12 Speaker_09
Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do. This episode was produced by Courtney Guarino.

00:34:39 Speaker_09
Our team includes Daphne Chen, Constanza Gallardo, Dan O'Donnell, Greta Cohn, Grace Rubinstein, Daniela Balarezo, Danban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Highlash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Ben Chano.

00:34:55 Speaker_09
Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown. For their research, gratitude to the following lead authors and their colleagues. Jim Barron and Michael Hannon on culture fit and startup success.

00:35:33 Speaker_09
Chad Hartnell on CEO culture contribution and firm performance. Chad Van Adekenj on past experience. Gina Doco on baggage and blinders. Joseph Petelli and colleagues on cultural information and job postings.

00:35:45 Speaker_09
Robert Root-Bernstein on artistic hobbies among scientists. Sean Martin on core values and onboarding. And Dan Cable on newcomers highlight reels.