Ep 56 – The Red Hen

The notion of choosing politics over business has been in the news lately, and it begs the question: how you know when choosing clients for fit is discriminatory, and when it is beneficial to the culture of your business. That’s the topic of this episode of So Here’s My Story.

 

Why is that important for business?

There are pros and cons and limitations to the concept of “fit” in business. Fit can tell you who to hire, what clients are ideal, and how to build a team. But they can also lead you to discriminate and look only for people like you.

What doesn’t work is having one homogenous glob of the exact same person at the table, because you need diversity of skills and strengths. This is when the concept of fit can be a scapegoat – an excuse to not get along with a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. In those ways, fit can be incredibly dangerous. But not accommodating for fit can hurt culture. If a company’s core values aren’t clear enough that some people might say “no thank you, that’s not for me”, then they aren’t clear enough. They need to be clear enough to hire and fire by.

If your team can say “that’s not who we are”, that’s a great sign of direction and clarity. There has to be enough substance to the culture that it can be identified and cared about. After all, everybody likes vanilla, but nobody loves vanilla.

Fit becomes easier when the company has its own core values and personality; when the company becomes almost a separate entity with identifiable likes and dislikes. If fit starts to look like trying to match each individual with each individual, you risk having something homogenous and dangerous and lacking in diversity. But if there is this other entity that is the company and you fit to that, fit can create a even stronger culture.   

For it to work, you have to be okay with people saying, “that’s not for me”.               

Fit has to be bigger than each or any one individual. That’s where fit starts to fit. 

 

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