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A Good Fit on a Good Team

Fit,” that amorphous notion describing how well we meld with a team or company’s culture, is consistently listed as an important element by Millennials when discussing why a position is a good one or not. While I understand that chemistry in the laboratory is an exact science, it’s more an art form in the workplace.

I learned this the hard way. When I was in my thirties, I figured out that bad fit was affecting my outlook and my happiness and, most importantly, my bottom line. Fit is now an important business filter through which we view all potential employees and potential clients. After “only take a client if someone other than Lee is interested in the work,” rule number two in client vetting: Don’t take the client unless the fit is good—there should be a chemistry match, a culture match, and a values match.

Millennials have watched their parents negotiate their own work lives, and they know already that they don’t want to work with people they don’t respect or want to spend time with. What took me more than fifteen years to implement Millennials now want at the beginning of their careers. “The team around me matters a lot,” says Jennifer, age twenty-nine. “People want to work around people they like, that make them better, who work well together. We want to have good relationships with all of the people we work with.”

One recruiter describes a call she got from a person she had placed in a job. On the new employee’s first day at the company, the recruiter says, “She called me in the early afternoon and said, ‘These people are not a good fit for me, how could you place me here? Don’t you know who I am?’ This was after four separate day-long interviews at the company and a long screening test.”

Sorting out fit starts with knowing what your company’s values are and what your culture really is. It’s also important to show people how they can fit in now and in the future.

What are your company’s or your team’s values? Do you know? Does your team know? Would everyone give the same answer, if asked?

Values need to be declared, socialized, and reinforced. And they need to be explained: How would someone work within the values of your office regarding the way they collaborate with colleagues, hold a standard of work, communicate with customers, and service clients? If your team doesn’t have clear values, this is the time to cocreate them, so that you can improve the way people work together and better determine who fits into your company as you grow and change.

Define Company Values

There are as many ways to go about defining and declaring values as there are leaders. The most important piece of declaring company values, however, is including everyone in the process. Cocreating company values with your teams ensures that people really understand what those values mean and how team members bring them to life and are invested in them (or not).

Besides cocreation, common tenets in the methods I have used—both in my own company and in helping clients do this important work—are:

1. Include everyone in the discovery process.
2. Identify and synthesize four to six commonly held beliefs.
3. Use memorable phrases to describe your values. “Excellence” is trite if you can’t describe what it means specifically to your organization.
4. Define how you will know if the company and the people are living and working within the values.
5. Define how you will socialize and reinforce the values so they are constantly communicated and part of the social fabric of the team.

When you are recruiting, try to sort out fit before someone (young or more mature) starts his first day on the job. Be prepared to help the people who are a poor fit not apply and to help the people who will be attracted to the position apply and rise to the top of the stack. Start by putting your company’s or team’s values into all of your job descriptions. Do everything you can to convey in the job description the culture, what matters in the office, and the way people work together.

Personality Matters

Remember that one person’s star is another’s misfit. For example, someone who likes to work alone and then report in won’t fit well in a team that works collaboratively in person and crowdsources its ideas and decisions from the group.

Think about who is on your team and who else you might need to round it out. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, abilities and opportunities, and natural tendencies. Understanding the different personalities or profiles on the team not only helps people work together better, it also helps determine strengths the team lacks. Filling these gaps on the team when you make new hires improves efficiency and productivity.

Consider adopting a personality indicator system that helps everyone understand themselves and one another better. Once understood, these can help you make adjustments to maximize everyone’s contributions.

A couple of years ago, everyone at my company completed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator² (MBTI) and the Strength Finders³ assessment, and assembled and shared our team profiles based on the results of these tests. It was enlightening in so many ways.

Most startling, we discovered that fully half of the staff are introverts, people who work better by absorbing information, mulling it over, and then responding. This is in stark contrast to extroverts, who often work well in the moment.

It’s unusual in a public relations and marketing firm to have more than 20 or 30 percent of the company test as introverts, and we have fully 50 percent of the people testing not just as introverts, but as strong introverts. And 12 percent of our people throughout the organization are INFJs, which make up only 1 to 3 percent of the general population.

With this information in hand, we looked at some of our processes and figured out quickly that some of the things we were doing, including the way we were approaching brainstorming, were best suited for extroverts. Wake-up call! I set up the company to work for me, a strong E[xtrovert] NFP—no wonder some people felt like they weren’t contributing as much as they could.

We also have several ESTJs, strong personalities that can be perceived as insensitive unless they are understood on teams with their opposite types, INFPs and ISFPs. While everyone liked and respected one another, the two groups were having a hard time understanding why the other couldn’t see their point of view. With the MBTI types and Strength Finders results in hand, we were able to bridge the divide between the types and to more readily tap into different people’s innate strengths as well as minimize areas in which they are less strong.

Today, we tackle projects at the outset to suit different types so everyone is better set up for success. One thing we do differently now is prepare for brainstorm sessions earlier so that the introverts in the group can think about the topic ahead of time and then contribute more fully during the session. Adding one to two days of preparation and thinking time has dramatically improved our sessions.

Other companies use the DISC personality assessment based on the work of William Marston, Walter Clarke, and John Geier. The DISC model measures personality based on four categories—D: Dominance, I: Influence, S: Steadiness, and C: Compliance.⁴ A considerable amount of work has been done on the best type of DISC profile to fill different roles and jobs in companies. For instance, for salespeople, choose people with high D (driver) and high I (influence); for accountants, choose people with high C (compliance) and S (security).

Whichever way you decide to assess people’s personalities and work styles, pursue a model and implement it. It will help you and your team work better together and recruit people who fit your team well.

Recruiting the Next Team Member

Sort out as many cultural misfits as you can on the phone, before they get into the office for an interview. Unless you value having your own Island of Misfit Toys, doing this ahead of the interview phase saves both you and them a great deal of time and effort.

In our company the set of criteria is pretty straightforward. At Double Forte, we are looking for:

• Initiative takers
• Those who are demonstrably curious
• Team players
• People who can write two lucid, compelling paragraphs together
• Those with a sense of humor (if you don’t like to laugh along, you definitely won’t be happy at Double Forte)

In the prescreen, focus a chunk of time on questions that elicit responses about how your candidates work and what they value. Include questions such as:

1. What type of work environment are you are most comfortable in?
2. What makes you happy about your work?
3. What are the characteristics of the best boss you’ve had, or the one you wish you’d had?
4. What are your expectations about the team you’ll be working with?
5. Where do you see yourself in two years?

Of course, if you’re interviewing Millennials just entering the workforce without any previous work experience, then you’ll need to focus on character questions that get to work style.

Once you’ve got a young candidate in for an interview, be prepared to answer questions like, “Why would I want to work here?” “What are the teams like?” and “What’s the mentorship program?”

While we might find these off-putting and presumptuous, try not to let them get in the way. These inexperienced, young adults have probably been steered this way by their parents or their uninformed friends. If they make it past the interview with you, give them pointers for their interview with the team.

Leigh, an in-house recruiter at a large entertainment company, says, “Once my candidates get past the first screen, I really put them through the paces about how to get through the in-person interviews. What to wear. What to ask. How to answer questions so they don’t sound entitled. Some great candidates take hours of work to get them prepared for a successful interview. And if we’re successful, they end up having a much better entry than the candidates that don’t reframe their expectations.”

Let the team interview the prospective employee—perhaps by going to lunch or having coffee together. As much as the candidate wants to know whom she might work with, the team should have the opportunity to understand who’s in the mix for open positions. Ultimately, making the team dynamic positive matters more to the existing employees more than it does to the prospective ones.

Make sure your team is well versed in how to conduct themselves in interviews (for example, don’t ask questions about race, age, family, and so on). Team members should offer feedback in as uniform and constructive a way as possible. As much as you can, discourage people from talking together in public about any candidate.

Consider a simple form that ranks a candidate on five factors:

This way all of your team members can weigh in on the candidate in a constructive way.

Advice for Candidates of All Ages

Interviewing for a new job with people you don’t know is daunting; you are up against an unknown number of other people. While an interview is as much for you as it is for the potential employer, take these steps to make sure you use the time to showcase your talent and solicit information about the position without hurting your chances.

• Please, don’t ask questions like, “Why should I work here?” or “What do you have to offer me?” I know that’s what you’re thinking, but don’t do it—you will be blackballing yourself before you’ve had a chance.
• Don’t just talk about how great you are. Be ready with intelligent questions about the company, the team, and the position. Read the company website before you go in. Do a news search on the company and its key players before the interview. Know what job you’re applying for.
• Do match the dress code “plus one” for interviews. If this is a casual office and everyone’s in T-shirts and flip flops, wear a cool button-down shirt and clean casual shoes. If it’s a professional casual office, wear a suit, no tie. Ladies, opt for closed-toe shoes until you know the policy. You get the idea.
• If you are left in a conference room or office to wait for your interviewer, don’t forget to stand up to shake your interviewer’s hand when she comes in. Take your sunglasses off your head as soon as you walk in the building. Drop the coffee cup and/or spit out the gum before you go into the building.
• Your interview starts as soon as you go through the door: be courteous to the receptionist and assistant—their reactions may be the deciding factor for you getting to the next level.
• Send a written thank-you note to everyone you met with, articulating why you’d like to be on the team and conveying your appreciation for their time.
• Parents: stay home. Do not call. Do not negotiate for your children. You are hurting your child’s chances, even at parent-friendly offices.
• Turn off your phone before the interview. If you forget to turn it off and it rings, silence it immediately and apologize.

Protect Your Culture

Once new people roll onto your team, pay close attention to the team’s dynamics. Are people getting along? Are they working well together? Is the work product what you expected?

Use a thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-day check-in schedule to get a good handle on how your new team member is doing and what the team dynamics are like after the honeymoon is over and people aren’t as conscious about being on their best behavior.

Are there team communication conventions that the new person hasn’t gotten the hang of yet? Does the new person seem clear about his direction? Is he meeting deadlines? Is he on track with the work you expected? Show people exactly what you expect, so that the team keeps moving forward.

As Eion, a thirty-four-year-old CEO of a multinational service software company says, “Protect your culture at all costs. Everyone wants to be part of a great team, but not everyone is a good team match for our culture. If someone doesn’t fit, they need to go.”

Management Dos and Don’ts

• Do define and socialize your company values so everyone can live them.
• Do understand the team you have. Use Myers-Briggs, Strength Finders DISC, or another assessment tool so everyone can understand themselves and each other better and adjust accordingly.
• Do identify key cultural attributes for new team members and hire with them in mind.
• Do involve multiple people in the interview process; solicit constructive input of the candidates from everyone.
• Do protect your culture.

Millennial Dos and Don’ts

• Do put your best foot forward in interviews by being prepared.
• Do be able to articulate your values about work.
• Do not lead with work–life balance in any question about your work aspirations.
• Do remember it’s NOT about you – it’s about how you fit in with whoever is already there.