From DEI to High-Performance: A New Blueprint for Culture Fit

Key Takeaways

• “Culture Fit” is Dead; Long Live “Culture Contribution.” Discover why hiring for sameness can be a diversity-killer, and how a new focus on an employee’s authentic power is the key to building high-performance, resilient teams.
• The #1 Threat to Innovation is Groupthink, Not Conflict. Learn the surprising lesson from a leader workshop: even a demographically diverse group can suffer from a dangerous narrowness of thought if you find candidates with a singular personality archetype.
• Warning: Your DEI Efforts May Be an Imperfect Proxy. Focusing only on “counting” demographic categories risks overlooking the essential need for diverse thinking styles, emotional intelligence, and experience.
• Stop Asking People to Leave Their “Superpowers” at the Door. An organized planner who’s “tolerated” by a spontaneous team instead of celebrated for their new ideas will eventually quit. Find out how valuing and leveraging differences is the core of successful retention.
• Your 5-Question Leader Toolkit: Before your next interview, use five critical coaching questions for actionable insights to audit your team for blind spots, flesh out the job description, assess candidates, and pinpoint the specific, authentic contribution the new hire must bring.

As a leader, you know that building a great team is about so much more than résumés and skill sets. It’s about finding people who will not only do the job but also enrich the team’s spirit and the company’s culture. For years, we’ve called this “culture fit,” but that idea has often led us astray. Too often, “culture fit” has been an excuse for leaders to give their unconscious bias free rein to reinforce homogeneous teams and groupthink, screening out people who could contribute value because they didn’t fit their idea of “people like us.” Today, we know better. We know we have to open ourselves to working with people “not like us” to recruit the best talent. But we also know something else: human teams must be more competitive, creative, and collaborative than ever before to stay afloat in the modern economy. A new twist on culture fit can help us do both these things.

One way to view historical culture fit dynamics in the hiring process is to see them as the force they often were: an effort to create a cohesive work environment for the current team within the workplace environment. While a certain amount of team stability is good, today we need workplace environments that improve and enhance team performance. We need the team to “be on their toes,” for purposes of furthering the company’s core values, contributing fresh perspectives, and improving employee satisfaction.

Today, a cultural fit shouldn’t be about finding people who are just like you or the existing team. Today, we know that you’ll benefit by building a more inclusive environment with individuals who all value the company’s mission and company values while also offering new perspectives. It’s about finding people who are authentic—who show up as their full, powerful selves—and whose personal strengths can elevate everyone around them, contributing to a qualitative team culture that fosters continuous learning and drives performance metrics.

The Opportunities and Pitfalls of Building “Diverse Teams”

The recent focus on inclusivity (including Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DEI) hiring) has been a dual effort to infuse social justice core values into a company’s core values and existing culture while simultaneously exorcizing groupthink from that same organizational culture. I support both goals, but I worry that the complex and nuanced challenges of these efforts to enhance current culture fell prey to a simplistic strategy of counting demographics, which also made DEI efforts vulnerable to being politicized into a reverse form of discrimination.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe that “you can’t be it if you can’t see it,” and that emerging leaders need to see people who look and act like them at the top to be motivated to do their best and seek more influence in the organization’s culture. Underrepresented leaders–including women, people of color, introverts, differently-abled people, and many other people who don’t look like the non-white, extroverted, charismatic male–need to make it into leadership. We need variety in our leaders because it’s fair and also because people with unique perspectives contribute to an overall culture likely to be more in tune with their broad employee and customer base.

However, using demographic categories to “count” how well we’re building diverse perspectives into our company’s culture amounts to an imperfect proxy effort. Expecting race and gender to create diversity of thought, soft skills, intelligence type, and career experience can cause us to overlook these same factors. Believe it or not, it’s possible for a group that looks different to still fall victim to group-think.

Here’s a case-in-point.

Earlier this year I conducted a corporate workshop for senior women at a US company in a male-dominated industry. Prior to the workshop, I had the participants take an archetypal career-focused personality survey to help them tap their authentic values and strengths for personal branding work. Most of the time when I do this, we find a smattering of all the archetypes represented. There are as many Caregivers, Revolutionaries, Jesters and Sages as there are Magicians and Creators.  But this group was not a broad representation of employees and entrepreneurs; it was a select group of corporate leaders in a very male-dominated firm. And literally all but two of them embodied the archetypes of the Hero and Ruler, the two types that almost always bubble to the apex of patriarchal systems.

On the plane to the workshop, I wondered if efforts to conform to the masculine versions of Ruler and Hero energy would have blotted out these ladies’ authentic femininity in our work together. I was pleased to discover that their vision, determination to overcome obstacles, and commitment to excellence extended beyond the corporate mantra of “shareholder value” and “innovative results,” a place where male Rulers and Heroes often get stuck.

Leveraging one of the most consistent strengths of female leaders, they didn’t stop at financial results. Instead, they challenged each other to build supportive cultures for their employees, provide better experiences for their customers, and find authentic ways to realize their own potential. This is consistent with my broader experience of female leaders. I see over and over again that women—even in the claws of patriarchy—view power as a lever to elevate communities more than individuals. Simply speaking, their female-inspired values helped them bring a complementarity to the typical company culture, where their male colleagues focus more on market performance and financial gain.

However, my sense was that these ladies had been chosen from a broader pool because they aligned with the masculine-inspired culture fit of the “hero and ruler” mentality. As a result, in our brief work together, I observed that overall they did not bring other kinds of complementarity to the organizational culture such as: transformational “thinking outside the box” to find fresh perspectives, pushing back on authority to champion new perspectives (except in the area of work-life balance!), and creative problem solving. My guess is that while the recruiting team for this company sought to make hires that align with the company’s Hero and Ruler culture, they succeeded in hiring people who may not have helped strengthen the company long term as much as they could have with some of these other talents.

To be clear, these women are to be celebrated. It was a joy to work with them, as they are smart, driven, and committed. Their archetypes express genuine human strengths and proclivities, and women are just as capable as men of embodying the authentic characteristics of the Hero/Warrior and Ruler/Queen. What was interesting was how the organization they worked for had selected such a narrow range of personality types to elevate into leadership. It told me they were hiring for culture fit, and that they did not want to challenge the existing culture “too much.” A company culture willing to challenge itself more would not have stopped at gender demographics in an effort to strengthen itself with diverse perspectives, but would also have pushed itself to find women and men with greater breadth of thinking styles, cultural backgrounds, and experience.

When Fitting Into Company Culture Means Leaving Yourself Behind

Many leaders who’ve had hiring success with bringing in diverse talent understand the challenge of creating a culture fit–a culture fit that works for different kinds of job candidates and potential employees–is worth the extra effort to explore the nuances in the situation above. However, too many hiring managers declare failure with such efforts, using examples of poor employee retention to justify defining culture fit too narrowly. What’s going on when this happens?

Sometimes we want to shake up our team. We want to bring potential employees into the talent acquisition process with shared values and interview job seekers with differing perspectives and fresh ideas. But when these people make it through the recruitment process, they struggle to find enough job satisfaction and leave. We’ve all seen a version of this story (or maybe lived it!) A candidate lands a job where they seemingly “fit” the bill. They have the right background, the perfect education, and the skills to match. They might even look the part. But something feels off.

I worked with a client who took a job on a team that, on paper, was a perfect match. She was sharp, organized, and a master of detailed project planning. But once she started the job, she discovered that her new team was more spontaneous and free-flowing. They good-naturedly teased her about her love of spreadsheets and structured work, not understanding that this was her superpower—a core part of her personal power. They also totally missed the fact that her superpowers had a lot of value to add to their team’s work practices. She felt like an outsider and, over time, that sense of being an “outlier” chipped away at her. Her strengths weren’t celebrated; they were tolerated. She eventually left to find a place where her authentic self was not just accepted but valued and leveraged.

This story is a powerful reminder that “fitting in” can be a trap. When we hire people for sameness without being willing to value their differences, we ask people to leave their best selves at the door, and we all lose out. Also, when the hiring manager isn’t thoughtful about how to manage the team to welcome and accept people’s differences, the team loses its ability to change and become more effective.

Your Personal Power as a Leader: Hiring for Contribution to Your Organization’s Culture

As a leader, one of your greatest contributions to employee satisfaction and your team’s increased productivity can be your ability to see the unique power in others. A healthy way to approach hiring for culture fit is about asking: “What unique value can this person’s authentic self bring to our team?” It’s about seeing new hires not as puzzle pieces that fill an empty spot but as catalysts who can transform and grow the team.

However, a word of caution: even this enlightened approach has its own pitfalls. A new leader I know once inherited a team that was brilliant at execution but struggled with innovation. To solve this, she brought in new people known for their “change agent” abilities. Her thinking was sound, but she missed a crucial step. These new hires, brilliant and bold, felt no loyalty to the team’s existing processes and created a culture of conflict. The chaos was so intense that many of their valuable ideas were lost in the process.

What did this leader learn? That it’s not enough to just hire for a needed skill set and technical skills. You also have to hire for the people skills that allow someone to bring their unique power into an unfamiliar culture with respect and an eye toward collaboration. True culture growth happens when you find people with the personal strength to lead with authenticity, even in an environment that is different from their own.

Your Coaching Toolkit: 5 “Culture Fit” Questions to Ask Yourself Before Beginning the Interview Process

Before you even meet with a candidate to assess culture fit and job readiness, take a moment to reflect. This is your chance to lead with authenticity yourself and clarify what your team truly needs. Ask yourself these five coaching questions:

• “Does my team challenge itself? Do we push each other to think differently, or are we stuck in groupthink?” [Coaching point: A team that feels safe enough to disagree is a powerful team. If you need more of that, look for a candidate who is comfortable leading with a new perspective and fresh ideas.]
• “How much work do I have to do to create psychological safety on my team? Do they naturally have each other’s backs?” [Coaching point: Great teams build their own safety net. If you’re doing all the heavy lifting, you need to hire someone whose personal power includes empathy, curiosity, and the ability to listen to others, and give them room and support to succeed.]
• “When was the last time my team surprised me with a new idea? Are they just waiting for direction, or do they own their contributions?” [Coaching point: You want a team that is proactive and takes initiative. Look for candidates who can demonstrate a history of taking personal ownership and making things happen. Don’t have enough of this on your team? Hire it!]
• “What’s missing in our team’s emotional intelligence? Do we have the right balance of soft skills to make great decisions?” [Coaching point: Technical skills are table stakes, but a team’s heart is what makes it resilient. Be honest about where you could use more listening, more compromise, or more emotional awareness.]

“When I think of the people who thrive here, what personal quality do they all share? How can I find more of that, and also find people who can stretch us?” [Coaching point: This is a chance to define your team’s unique spirit. Look for candidates who possess that same core value, but also a healthy amount of personal difference to help you grow.]

There are many other avenues to explore how your team might lack differing perspectives and identify whether a candidate aligns more with your current employees or the new vision of the team you’re working to build. Don’t stop exploring with the questions above, probe all the different ways your team can benefit by hiring candidates who are a culture fit for your company’s values, and will also help you expand and grow the company’s culture to stay competitive and create a healthy environment to work in for current employees and new hires alike.