Culturescape: how to hire for culture
There are five different levels of culture when it comes to a company.
It is important to get the culture right in a company and hold integrity and boundaries when it comes to levels of culture.
Culture is a word that most companies never understand. There are many levels of culture when it comes to relationships.
A company is a style/type of relationship and culture is like their baby.
Bare, with me here, no pun intended…
When a company is founded, especially outside of a solo-founder (which in my opinion is very challenging to make feasible), it is a marriage between two partners and all the relationships that company chooses to create. Some of these relationships include employee, financial advisors, technical advisors, investors, etc. It can vary all over the place depending on the company.
What does culture complex mean?
We can go through the following explanations of the levels to understand, see below:
Level 1
This level is how you view the world and how the world views you.
Stuck in this level, you are about you, you care about what people think around you.
“Am I a great engineer?”
“Am I a great asset to this company?”
“I want to switch jobs, all my employees, hate me”
These are all thoughts that occur to an employee on level 1. This level is about insecurity and uncomfortably in the workplace.
If you make the world and your actions about you instead of the company, then you are your circumstances and you are run by them. There is no you in the say of the matter of who you are. They are in the matter of who you want to be.
In order to be who you want to be, you have to operate outside of yourself.
Level 2
This is who you are in relationships, and is one level outside of the level 1, this means you operate at a level of relatedness between others. You can have family relationships, friendships, and even romantic relationships that operate at this level.
This relationship looks like friendship and comradery among your teammates and peers.
This allows you to build transformation growth in product and culture.
It is only the beginning of what needs to happen for a successful culture.
Level 3
You are accountable for more than yourself, your close relationships and a greater amount of people.
In order for a person, furthermore, a group to be successful the members must operate at the same level of integrity. Holding each other accountable to the fact that it isn’t about the success of one individual. It is not about the success of the group. It is about bringing this group to the level of organization.
Level 4
This is the level that if executed properly, can change societal norms, it can remove stigmas in places that are not doable by an individual, a group of individuals, and only by an organization.
So what is an organization, can a company be an organization? How do you get to this level of culture? How can this be a level of culture, if it isn’t about me?
An organization is a group of people that can be accounted on and creates a gateway to leadership. It allows people to fully express themselves in ways that they could not by themselves.
Level 5
When “one” is operating at the level 5. They can change the world. Most people jump to the conclusion that in order to change the world they have to impact a large number of people.
In order to change the world all you have to do is change the world of one person.
If you can bring a person from level 1 to a level of 2, 3, 4 or even 5 then that means you have transformed them into a reality in which they have not experienced before.
What does this have to do with the world?
All these levels are important to have in order to have a fully functioning, healthy world.
So as an example let’s look at a company.
How can a company operate powerfully as one?
How can people within this company express themselves to not only empower their team but others beyond what they expected?
How can the culture on an individual team, group, organization, operate beyond themselves?
This first starts with a mission statement.
Mission Statements are so important
This is the base case you turn to when under pressure when facing a tough decision, this is a guiding principle. This is what you face when making choices within your company.
How can you refer back to this when making a tough decision?
Hiring…
Hiring is a very difficult decision for a company, especially a young company.
So much time, resources and poured into finding the right fit.
The natural question that comes up is how to measure if they are the right fit?
This question is important to answer because you do not want to make an emotional decision about a candidate (this does not mean neglect your instincts) but it is very important to be responsible for the risks you are taking.
You have to weight the risks and rewards for each individual person and it is hard to filter out false negatives and false positives.
Interviewing comes down to an art form and most candidates that are more qualified do not get selected. But, why do they not get selected?
Since this article is about culture, this is where we can have guiding principles and metrics for how, when, and who to hire.
These metrics start with an alignment of Core Values
Core values hold you to a level of integrity that allows you to operate outside of yourself and make decisions on behalf of an organization or company.
Culture is scoped at the level of 4.
These pillars or core values shape how individuals relate to each other, the company and the product itself.
I think it is a highly important metric to measure how well someone aligns with the pillars and core values.
Even on a scale 1–10, or a Myers Briggs style.
You want to gauge whether this person is headed in the direction of your mission statement and is aligned with the integrity of the company.
Essentially you are asking, who is this person outside of the context of this company?
Does this individual fit a level of operating that is intuned with us, and how we operate?
Can this person support us through our process to change the world at a level greater than ourselves?
Hiring is a difficult process, but it is more important to define the culture you want, so when someone walks through your door that fits it, you have a measuring tool to access if they are the right fit for your company or not.
I plan on writing an article on how to access technical talent against culture and how these intertwine together but for now, let’s take what we have learned and apply it!
Comment below if you have any questions and reach out at https://mindmatter.club to get some coaching around culture.
