Have you heard that age old saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast?
Well, what I’m going to explore in this video is the concept of square pegs in round holes.
You might have heard it talked about before, and I always would joke and say that in my business, we were very much a round peg company, a round hole company, and we needed round pegs to fit in our round hole company.
So, I’m going to share with you a story of where we hired a square peg and I’ve tried to fit my square peg into my round hole company…
And I think the takeaway is that it’s important to look for people who really fit the culture of your business.
I remember, it was a few years ago now, and we were recruiting for a head of marketing, and we’d been trying to recruit for this role for what felt like an eternity. We went through rounds and rounds and interviews, and the people we were interviewing just weren’t right. They weren’t the right fit for the business and they didn’t have the right skills.
Then, I remember getting a CV through and thinking it was absolutely perfect. This person had all of the skills that we needed and I was so excited but when she came in for the interview, I knew within the first five minutes there was a bit of a rub and I thought, she’s not quite the right person.
However her interview was phenomenal, she absolutely had all of the skills we needed and more. What she was going to bring to the business was going to drive us no end I was so excited at the prospect of having her in the business but I knew and it was screaming at me ‘she’s not a round peg’. We’ve learned this in the past we’ve tried this before and it hasn’t worked but I was so desperate to have those skills that I convinced myself that ‘you know what I’ll work on it, I’ll work on a personal development I’ll try and you know polish off the corners of that square peg so she’s maybe a bit hexagonal and we’ll wedge her in’.
I went into that recruitment eyes wide open, knowing that she wasn’t a cultural fit in the business but underestimating the importance of that and thinking that I could make it work.
The problem was, once she’d been in the business a few weeks for all she was having a fantastic impact with the stuff that she was doing, you started to see the cracks showing and the problem is the whole of the rest of my company, every other one of those employees, they’re all round peg employees.
We’re all the same culture, all driven by the same values, that’s why we work so well as a team. So when this square peg came into the business in a leadership role and started trying to make changes to the way the marketing team is run and that cause some friction with the staff.
And at this point, the staff were thinking one of two things. They were either thinking, ‘hmm, this person’s bad and does Sara think this is acceptable? Does she think this is okay for this person to be behaving this way? The sort of things they’re saying and the way they go about things. Is Sarah thinking this is okay in our company?’. Or they were thinking ‘Sara can’t possibly be on board because she’s not aware of all this stuff’.
Either way, these people were thinking poorly of my leadership. They were losing respect for me, which means I was losing what’s called Leadership Equity.
Leadership equity is a really, really valuable concept and it’s basically the trust and respect that you have built up with your staff over time. It’s really important to understand that Leadership Equity is a really, really precious commodity. It takes a long time, years and years in fact, to build up leadership equity within your teams. And as quickly as, well, as slowly as it takes to build it up, it can drop off a cliff in seconds and you could lose that leadership equity with people instantaneously.
Now, eventually my actions with this head of marketing role were to sit down, have a chat with her, explain that it wasn’t going to work out as great as she was, had fantastic skills, she wasn’t a fit for the business and this is was why. I had to explain to her that it was my fault, I’d made a mistake in recruiting her, she wasn’t a bad person, she didn’t not have the skills, I knowingly put her into our business knowing that she wasn’t a cultural fit because I was so desperate to recruit the role and to have her in there.
The problem is, and please don’t underestimate this, it took two years for that marketing team to fully get over the damage that she’d done in just a few months. Two years. And I’m not just meaning it was two years people were still banging on about it, but to really feel like it had totally gone away as though it had never happened, even though it was only a few months, it was years and years to unpick that.
I think there’s some really big lessons to learn here and some huge takeaways, and I want you to learn from the benefit of my experience.
So the key takeaways here are – we recruit for values not for skills. I’m a firm believer that you can teach anybody anything but you can’t teach them to be the right person.
Secondly, recruit people that you like because chances are that feeling’s mutual. Ifl you’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people, you really need to be enjoying working with them.
Then thirdly, as I learned, understand what type of company you are. I was a round peg company so we needed to recruit round pegs to fit in our round hole company. It’s really important to always make sure that you are recruiting the right type of people into your organisation because remember what I said, culture eats strategy for breakfast.