Don’t copy culture fit — define your own.

The phrase culture fit has become a common bookend in job posting descriptions over the last two decades.

At first it was a fluke. Growing companies gaining momentum would be hiring at a neck-breaking pace. This pace did not allow for the proper time to vet candidates, nor setup new hires for success in their new roles. Many never found their rhythm or burnt out, while some succeeded and thrived. Consequent waves of hiring at these companies aimed to find candidates similar to those who were able to fight the odds and flourish.

A wave of successful companies became the benchmark for the next wave of buddying entrepreneurs. They began to emulate the behaviors of previous successes, assuming that what worked for others, will work for them. This included the approach to hiring and filtering criteria for candidates, including the now coined culture fit.

The mistake is sifting through candidates, looking for those that would be successful based on the criteria of other companies. Take two examples of companies, both of which require hard-working and intelligent technologists: Facebook and SpaceX. At the very core of Facebook is the phrase “break things and move fast”. The only downside when FB is down due to a bug is ad revenue lost. SpaceX is moving faster than any space program in the history of humanity. Yet, with the potential of launching humans into space in 2020, the company needs a reputation of stability and reliability. It takes very different personalities and interests to succeed at Facebook vs. SpaceX.

Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why touches on culture fit from the perspective of having a common “why”. A successful company has a “why” (mission) to focus what it does and how it does it. Similarly each person has a “why”. A professional culture fit becomes a match between a company’s and an individual’s “why”. Avoid matching candidates to a different company’s “why”.

To hire the right people for an organization, it is critical to identify the attributes that will make a new hire a success at this organization. Turn the potential fluke into a sure bet.

The next step, after identifying the attributes that definite a good culture fit for a company (or a team, in a bigger organization), is to determine which of those attributes is defined by nature vs. nurture. Nature can’t be altered. It’s a constant and you will fail trying to change someone’s nature. Nurture is coachable. Both, Turn this Ship Around! by L. David Marquet and Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, discuss altering team behavior through distribution of ownership and decision making.