Hiring for DNA

Culture is more than office parties

Don’t you want to have as much fun at the office as these guys?

A positive company culture is important not just to the success of the company, but to your individual success as well. How do you contribute to forming this culture when you aren’t the chairman of the board, the CEO or even in the C suite?

The answer is a quote I’ve used in a previous article: “What E’re Thou Art, Act Well Thy Part.”

At Madison Wall’s companies, we hire first for what we call DNA.

We look for the innate attributes that are valuable to our organization and will be positively accretive to the company culture we try to form and maintain.

Technical expertise and job performance and those sort of things are important. But to us, they’re secondary.

What’s more important is what they’ll add to the team and company culture.

So how do you become someone we are looking to hire?

The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. In your attitudes, your habits and your skill sets. Your primary asset in life is yourself.

To quote a phrase, “Do you well.” There should be an alignment between you and your DNA and the company’s DNA and culture. Be positively accretive to the organization in terms of performance, of course, but also in terms of culture.

Happy coworkers makes for better results.

Insert yourself into the team holistically, and become the leader of your department of one. Present yourself in a way that demonstrates your personal attributes and positively adds to the culture.

The great thing with that is it becomes addictive and magnetic. Others in the company will latch on, and that positivity will spread itself throughout the organization, in the same way a bad apple or Negative Nelly can ruin the culture.

The reason that enables you to be successful is that it gets noticed and the performance that flows from it is directly attributable to you. And your approach allows you to move up the corporate ladder, assume greater influence and control whatever it is you want to have, in terms of that corporate company culture and your own career path.

The ability for you to do that then grows with each step as you move up through the corporate food chain.

That company culture is ultimately what drives performance. Yes, there are those measurable things, those financial metrics and all those other operational guidelines that you will have and businesses need. Businesses are a business after all. But the way you go about them and the way you achieve them is, in most instances, organizationally driven. Who you are, what you’re about as an individual, as a team, as an organization is manifest in the results you produce.

Top DNA leads to top culture leads to top performance, as measured by operational and financial metrics.

That’s how it’s important to your success, the team you lead’s success and the organization as a whole’s success as you positively contribute to it, and maybe even work your way up through the food chain to actually lead the organization.

Aaron Webber is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Webber Investments LLC, as well as a Managing Partner at Madison Wall Agencies.

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