I’ve been at the PMI Regina PDC this week. I did a general session talk Monday, and am leading a two-day estimation workshop through tomorrow. Andy Nulman had a great riff on normal vs. abnormal employees. You can see a clip of it here. Warning: racy, not completely clean.
If you think of normal as conforming to a type (see normal) and as average, then most of us want to be abnormal Should you specifically hire for “abnormal”?
If you are in an entrepeneurial environment, yet. In a high innovation environment, yes. In a place that takes risks, yes. But not everyone works in places like that. Hiring for people who have a wacky way of looking at the world is part of cultural fit. Don’t just hire people who are not average, who don’t conform because it’s an interesting idea. Make sure you have cultural fit, too.
But I still like the idea of not hiring “normal” people
In a recent workshop, one of the participants explained, “I like to ask personal questions to see if the candidate will fit in with the team socially.”
Well, that’s anillegal discrimination. * in the US, but not in other places. (It’s illegal because if you reject a candidate based on their answer, you’re discriminating about something not work-related, a big no-no in the US.) Even for non-US interviewers, I still think it’s a bad idea.
People enjoy different activities at different times in their lives. Before I had children, I took bicycling vacations, camping and cycling for a week or two. But by the time I had children, there was no way I was going to spend precious vacation time doing something active when I could sleep in
Even without the obvious difference of kids/no kids, people choose to spend their time and money differently–a difference that doesn’t make a bit of difference for the job.
Assessing cultural fit is important, and the questions you want to ask might be some of these:
“Tell me about your greatest successes. What caused your success?”
“Tell me about your greatest challenges. What caused them?”
“How has the work environment helped you or prevented you from being successful?”
Now you’ve got a conversation about work, and how people fit in (or not) at work–a much more relevant set of questions than what people do in their off time.
* Thank you to askamanager for your comment. You are correct; unless you hit on a protected class, the questions aren’t actually illegal. Ill-considered, not helpful, but not illegal.
George Dinwiddie pointed me this post, I got rejected by Google – woe is me. Read through the comments; they are as illuminating as the post. Here’s the stated Google hiring strategy, Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy.I don’t see Google’s stated practice of hiring above the mean as congruent with what’s happening in practice. It looks as if their strategy as implemented only looks for specific functional skills–not domain expertise or the interpersonal skills that really make an environment work. Sure, they may be hiring above the mean in some small ways, but they’re creating a mono-culture.Whether or not my conclusions are correct about Google and their hiring strategy, the one thing you can learn from this is to make sure your hiring strategy does not create a mono-culture. If you look for people who can work all hours of the day and night for months on end, you will hire young people, some of whom do not have the maturity to know when they’re creating technical debt. If you ask theoretical computation questions, you’ll get people who aced their Theory of Computation classes, but may not know how to release software. The riskier the work, the more diverse a team you need–not a mono-culture. (I discuss this in Successful Project Management.)We’ll have to watch Google (and other companies that hire narrowly), to see what happens. Be aware that the more narrowly you define “smart” for your environment, the more likely you are to build a mono-culture.
Interviews and how they are set up reflect on the hiring manager and the organization’s culture. If you want to read about some particularly bad interviews, take a look at Jerry Weinberg’s most recent article on the AYE site, Getting Some Good Out Of Bad Interviewing. It’s hard to believe, but every situation in this article is real.
Larry Summers has been ousted as the President of Harvard. (I’m based in the Boston/Cambridge area, so you can imagine the news coverage here.) If you look at the facts, it’s clear to me, he was canned because he didn’t fit the culture of the institution. (See the USA Today editorial and the Time article.)I did not attend Harvard. I have no affiliation with Harvard, so it’s possible I can’t see all of the cultural issues from the outside. But here’s what stands out for me:
It’s not acceptable for the President of Harvard to question generally accepted ideas. (His questions re women’s genetic capability to perform hard science. I would have loved to hear the debate on that!)
It’s not acceptable to provoke change at Harvard. Instead, change needs to come about slowly. Summers was trying to provoke change.
It’s not acceptable to discuss what should be measured and rewarded. His idea that faculty should teach and focus on real-world problems is an example.
I would have loved to see the academics sink their teeth into these questions, perform real research and debate the answers. Harvard missed the boat–the faculty could have used the publicity of the debates to further define their brand and make Harvard an even more valuable institution.
But here’s what I saw: a bunch of overpaid underworked faculty who are more interested in protecting their positions than in helping undergraduates or graduate students learn. Daughter #1 didn’t consider Harvard. I hope Daughter #2 doesn’t either. I don’t want to subsidize a bunch of close-minded ivory-tower academics who aren’t willing to ask hard questions, research and discuss the results. That’s not an academic institution. An institution yes, academic, no.
Harvard wouldn’t hire me either to take Summers’ place I wouldn’t fit the culture (and I don’t have PhD). But it’s clear that their next pick for President needs to fit enough of the culture so that he or she has the influence and negotiation skills to do whatever needs to be done. Summers may or may not have those skills–but given the culture he was unable to use them effectively.Cultural fit is critically important for any knowledge worker. I don’t know enough about other kinds of roles, but I suspect it’s equally important for other jobs. Make sure that when you hire, you consider how a person fits into your culture–even if you want to change it.
Tester extraordinaire Mike Kelly pointed me to Interviewing the Interviewer: Beyond Getting the Job. If you’re a candidate, you should read this. Dave lists a bunch of questions that help a candidate see the culture of the organization. And yes, I’ll take this as another ding to post my cultural fit article.
I’m doing a webinar for Kennedy Information Systems next Friday, Dec. 9, 2005. The webinar is Detecting Cultural Fit Issues. It’s updated from the webinar I did in February. Please use the Kennedy link to register for the webinar.
And for those of you who are wondering, I’m fine, just crazy-busy, which is why I have not been blogging much. I hope to be blogging more in the next couple of weeks.
Auren Hoffman has an intriguing post, It is too risky not to take a risk, suggesting that people take what appears to be the “risky” job rather than the safe job.I see it differently. I don’t see jobs as risks, but as opportunities. I tried to select my jobs based on where I would learn the most. The two times I took a job where I wasn’t going to learn, I got fired. (I was moving too fast for the rest of the organization.)
I see the risk a little differently. I don’t see the risk in what appear to be safe or risky jobs in terms of money or advancement or whatever. I see the risk in not matching the culture to the candidate. When I see unhappy employees or frustrated managers, I typically see a mismatch of culture–both in what the hiring manager hired for, and what the candidate was looking for.
The key for hiring managers and candidates is to match the opportunity (and culture) with the candidate. Otherwise, the match is too risky.
In a previous comment, a reader points to a resume that’s written like a cross between a cover letter and a resume. While the resume has a number of useful points, the resume is too quick to tell possible hiring managers what they are doing wrong. That dismissal of what hiring managers sometimes do also dismisses a possible partnership between the hiring manager and the candidate.
A partnership? That seems like an odd comment or expectation. Here’s why: Part of what candidates seek is a cultural fit with the hiring company — in particular, the hiring manager. What the hiring manager looks for is someone who can perform the work the hiring manager perceives is needed, and who can fit into the existing organization.I have to admit, I hadn’t thought about this notion of a partnership before, but when a position really fits the candidate (and vice versa), it does create a partnership. I’ll be thinking about this more… But in the meantime, whether you’re a candidate or a hiring manager, it’s worth your time to think that each person is doing the best job he or she knows how to do, and that each person’s goal is to treat each other with respect.
Should you specifically hire for “abnormal”?