Company Culture: Weeding Out Diversity

photo by akean2

A couple posts ago we wrote about a poll RoundPegg had posted (login req.) on LinkedIn asking whether people would be willing to complete a 25-minute assessment to help identify how well they fit the culture of the company to which they were applying.

There were some strong opinions in the comments, both pro and con.  The takeaway is that many people who are against assessing whether they fit a culture have a different understanding of what culture is altogether.

“Homogeneity and lack of diversity are bad.”  That rebuttal may sound compelling but it has nothing to do with company culture (at least not how we define it).

What they mean is that you don’t want a company who thinks alike or, even more cynically, doesn’t hire people of certain races, genders etc.

First, let’s clear a few things up:

• * Culture has nothing to do with the color of your skin, your age or what associations you have
• * Culture is not what or how you think
• * A homogeneous ‘culture’ doesn’t mean that everyone blindly agrees

Culture is about values.

A company rewards what is collectively valued (e.g. being decisive).  And individuals are motivated by what they value.  You WANT those two to be aligned.  Desperately.  A lack of diversity/homogeneity in values is a good thing.

When people are rewarded for doing things that motivate them, they will work a hell of a lot harder and produce far better results.  They find themselves swimming downstream instead of up.

With respect to diversity, nobody should be discriminated against because of race, sex, age, disability – absolutely.  But that doesn’t mean you get better results when you mash people together with wildly different values (see: Congress).  Nor does it mean you get people who think alike.

Everyone comes to the table with different life experiences, different work experiences and different interests.  All of those create the diversity of thought both sides of the conversation desire.

Imagine we both value ‘being decisive.’  Without talking about it beforehand (ground rules are rarely set for our work conversations) we have implicitly agreed that we need to make a decision quickly and move forward.

But because we’re both seeking a quick decision that doesn’t mean we agree on the solution.

Sharing a value system creates a strong foundation upon which to constructively disagree.  We both understand the motivational forces behind the others’ argument.  So when I abruptly deliver my solution you aren’t going to see my curtness as a personal slight.  It’s not that I don’t value your opinion.  But I value our time more.  We can discuss it rationally (but quickly).

All those things we call ‘politics’ are lessened when we share a common set of values and we can now focus more on solving our business’ challenges instead of deciphering what the other meant in our last conversation.

When we talk about company culture let’s put aside the automatic reflex to fall back on diversity and start critically thinking about what culture actually means.

Company culture is what is valued and what is rewarded.  Period.

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