Rethinking Work: Blame Poor Performance On Your Boss


Culture is not defined at the corporate office, or by some HR edict. Culture is defined by the pace of the organization, the actual work the person is doing, whether the person finds the work satisfying or not, and the relationship the person has with his or her supervisor and the other team members.

The premise behind this Rethinking Work series is that when hiring, too much emphasis is on skills, experiences and behaviors, and not enough on those factors that actually drive on-the-job performance. Cultural fit and motivation both fall into this category. I contend that these two factors are more dependent on external circumstances than the person’s innate ability, personality or self-motivation. Let me use a story to explain this view.

Many years ago, when I arrived in Southern California for my first real job, most of the engineers in my department had just been transferred from another project. While I thought figuring out how to aim ballistic missiles was pretty cool, they thought it was boring, and rarely put in more than a minimum effort. The problem was obvious. For the five years prior, they had been going 24/7 working on the most exciting project of their lifetimes: putting a man on the moon on the Apollo program. Although the work itself was nearly identical, the lack of a bigger purpose impacted the quality of their work, their motivation, and their team skills. As a result of this first-hand experience, when I started hiring people, I knew that finding the cause of motivation was as important as finding people who were naturally motivated. Cultural fit turned out to be one primary cause.

However, a company’s culture is not defined at the corporate office or by some HR edict. Culture is defined by the pace of the organization, whether the person finds the actual work intrinsically satisfying or not, whether the work has some grander purpose, and the direct relationship the person has with his or her supervisor and the other team members.

In a previous post in this Rethinking Work series, I used the corporate life cycle as a means to identify the pace of the organization from a start-up, where decisions are made on the fly with limited information, to an approval-laden bureaucracy, where time seems to stand still. In this post, I'll focus on another critical dimension of cultural fit: the relationship with the hiring manager.

Assessing Managerial Fit

Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Model offers some guidance on this, suggesting that managers should adapt their style to meet their subordinates’ needs. I have a different approach since most managers aren't too flexible: hire people who already fit the manager's dominant leadership style. A loose interpretation of Blanchard suggests that managerial style ranges from the very directive to the very loose, with the categories of supervisor, trainer, coach and delegator filling the spaces in-between. Subordinate needs vary in similar fashion with some requiring heavy direction and supervision to those requiring little. In-between this range are those who are trainable, coachable and manageable. Since the relationship with a person’s manager is so important to performance and motivation, it’s vital to get this part of the style matching correct.

One way to predict potential problems is to find out how successful the candidate has been working with different types of managers. For example, performance will suffer if a candidate needs a lot of independence, but is working for a manager who provides excessive direction. A different candidate who needs more direction, support and coaching than the hiring manager is willing to provide, will also underperform. On the other hand, a managerial fit problem is unlikely if the candidate has been successful working for a variety of managers with different styles, or the hiring manager is flexible enough to handle all types of subordinate developmental needs.

To determine Managerial Fit during the interview I suggest using The Most Significant Accomplishment Question described in The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired. In this approach the interview is used to look for clues to determine how the manager's style affected the candidate’s job performance. This reveals itself by digging into the person’s major accomplishments and asking how the person took direction, how much coaching and advice was received, how the person planned his or her work, how much follow-up was involved, and how the candidate ranked his or her working relationships with different managers. After two or three different accomplishments, patterns begin to emerge revealing how the manager's style impacted the person’s performance, either in a positive or negative way. This can then be compared to the new hiring manager's style to determine the quality of the managerial fit.

If job satisfaction and performance is on the decline, look for problems related to cultural fit, especially those involving the hiring manager's role in hiring, managing and developing people. For any company that wants to hire and retain stronger people, this is where Rethinking Work should begin, but it should begin before the people are hired.

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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the creator of Performance-based Hiring and the author of the Amazon Top 10 business best-seller, Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007). His new book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, (Workbench, 2013) has recently been published. Feel free to join Lou's new LinkedIn group and explore his Wisdom About Work series on Facebook.

Joao Tiago ILunga

I help ordinary people become famous

10y

Thanks

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Chris Turpin, Ph.D., SPHR, SHRM-SCP

Chief Human Resources Officer at HandCraft Linen Services

10y

I am new to this linked in posting...this may have posted twice, sorry! There is person job fit...the easier part of the equation because it is the normative part of the process and we have person organization fit, often referred to as cultural fit, which is more difficult to assess...Lou you may be interested in my recent qualitative dissertation where I studied the extent that executive search firms who specialize in college and university president searches utilize p-o fit in the search process...my conceptual frame work was based on an oldie but a goody, Corporate Cultures -Deal and Kennedy...love this topic!! 14 minutes ago

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Gail Katz

Need Superior Assistance? See My Summary and Resume Below!

10y

I'd substitute another word for "culture." It's akin to using "global" to describe anything other than diversity.

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Prabha Kutty

Organisational Development Consultant, Kutty Consulting

10y

Thanks Lou for your interesting and thought provoking post. I would question the basic premise of your post re the cultural fit with the hiring manager. There seems to be an assumption here that things would remain static. That is, the manager would remain in their position, without considering the possibility that they would move on and a new manager would replace them. One who may be innovative where the former was conservative. Would this not then create a misfit with the new manager? I do agree though that there is no such thing as an organisational culture. However there are distinctive cultures within organisational units, largely driven by the respective manager, though in some instances a new employee with strong upward management skills would have the capacity to change the culture.

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D K Sabharwal

CEO, ABACUS MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS PVT LTD

10y

But the difficult one remains unanswered...how do we read the culture! Mind you,before you dismiss it simplistically..Most of us have a diverse perception of what we call the culture from the frame wherein we have been served,and how at workplace. Now vesting it on one person-the hiring manager-and assuming he/she would know the nuts...all of them would be assumptive. Besides one needs key skills to analyse critical achievements. And verify them prior deciding a fit in cultural context !See there is a lot of thin air stuff in an approach hinging largely on perceptive atmospherics and a fit therein.There are dangers if one relies on this alone! Imagine the hiring manager justifying a culturally unfit alibi for an otherwise obviously skilled candidate!Till we are on same page with clear metirics of defining culture and how its fitness or otherwise can be evidenced ,this approach may be open to whimsical hiring decisions!

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