This blog post is based on Episode 1/ Season 2 of the Culture Unfit Podcast. Listen Here:
Welcome back to Culture Unfit everyone! This is the first episode of the new season and we have an exciting line up of interviews in store, however this first episode is a special one. It is with someone you'll hear more about. Her name is Elyse Kane and she's played a really pivotal role in my life, in my professional growth and I'm excited for you all to hear her nuggets of wisdom and today's conversation will focus on a few but primarily the journey into understanding this notion of culture fit and what we really mean when we talk about it Then of course, we wouldn't be Culture Unfit if we didn't delve into the feeling of not fitting in and those external markers. So without further adieu, this is a conversation between myself and my mentor, Elyse Kane.
Nikkia (N) I'm extremely excited to have this conversation recorded and have these seperate bits of our lives saved for prosterity. I can just say if you wanna know about me and Elyse just listen to this episode. So tell us about yourself!
Elyse (E) Hi I'm Elyse Kane and I left a 32 year career at Colgate several years ago. My most recent position there was VP of Insights and Analytics for North America and I left because I decided that I wanted to try my hand at something new. I wanted to teach and I had been guest lecturing for a number of professors... so as I was doing that as well as consulting which was very different to what I was doing in research. I actually started my career in psychology, in experimental psychology which I went into because I really loved to think about the ways people's minds' worked and what motivated people... but decided not to continue. I went to my MBA and had no idea what to do. I took a marketing class, there was a chapter on marketing research, I looked at it and I said that's exactly what I wanna do and I was very happy doing it for my thirty five tears.
Nikkia: I love that story and for those who don't know this story, Elyse was my first real boss, manager and mentor... the person who took me in and matured a kind of growth that was very technical in introducing me to the field of research and insights, but also very personal. So much of showing up in an organization requires personal leadership beyond the technical side of things.This is one of the main reasons why I started this podcast because you don't really learn the skills of personal leadership in schools unless of course, you're blessed with a professor who really cares to prepare you for work. But what you do learn in school is how to do things right technically. So I'm really excited to share a little bit about the things that Elyse did that helped me blossom into the leader that I am today.
I'm very curious to hear you answer to my next question because I think it's a great springboard to describe how me met. Back then, did you have a philosophy or a way that you approached recruiting and hiring of new people that guided you as a manger?
Elyse: So I had never thought of it as a philosophy, I just lived it. I never articulated it as a philosophy. I thought about it that way when I was looking for a job, my first career job, because like you, I worked for many years before I found my career. I just remember I was looking for an entry level job and it took me two years to find my first job in market research. I would go on these interviews and and they wanted people with experience that was so specific to what they did. I could not get them to understand that my research capability was far better than theirs probably. Though I came from experimental psych background, all that they needed to do was teach me how to apply that within a marketing organization.
It amazed me how closed off they were to that. So when I started working at Weight Watchers and then Colgate, I really felt that I would give people a chance because somebody eventually have me a chance, right?
I got my first job at Weight Watchers and I thought I did a great job there. So if I can fo it, I figured other people can do it. I really wanted to give people an opportunity, even if they didn't have exactly what I was looking for or exactly what the company was looking for.
Nikkia: Can you talk a little bit about that process or exactly what the company was looking for, because I think to hear it is one thing, but to put it into practice is another thing. Particularly when you exist within the confines of an organization that may have certain expectations for who comes in. And so for this notion of taking a chance, I'm fascinated because there's a difference between the organization taking a chance, and when it's really you believing in a person enough to fight to have them stay.
So what does this really mean- to take a chance on somebody?
Elyse: So you and I have talked many times about traits that we think are very valuable. Those traits have to do with curiosity, passion, a desire to learn, a desire to leave things better than how people found them. And so my feeling is that if people exhibit these types of qualities and they seem intelligent to you, seem as if they can think critically, can articulate their thoughts, then I feel that they can learn almost anything. Maybe not science, maybe not math, but certainly marketing and market research.
Those qualities are more important to me than the exact job experience. Bringing in somebody who I feel is an analytical thinker, is curious, passionate and so on. It's taking a chance because I'm going to have to fight the organization a little bit to do it and if it doesn't work, they'll say to me, "we told you", and I might lose the opportunity to do it again. For me, I don't feel like it's taking any more of a chance than bringing anybody on. I've hired a number of people who had a great resume and I unfortunately needed to get rid of them because they weren't delivering what I needed delivered.
I just want to say one other thing because this is important. Obviously what you're bringing in that person to do and who's going to train that person is very important. Because if you need somebody to come in running and manage a business or handle a brand, it's a little harder to bring somebody in that doesn't have any experience, because you don't have time for them to come up with the experience. The other thing is that who trains them is very critical, because if you're bringing somebody in who doesn't have the experience, you need somebody who's going to take the time to train them. Otherwise they can't learn. Right?
Nikkia: Right
Elyse: Those are the two things you need to take into consideration if you're going to bring somebody in who you're kind of taking a chance on. But I brought in [redacted]... he had no market research experience, but he was getting his PhD in political science. So I felt that he could definitely take that experience and use it within the marketing. I actually did hire him for a slightly higher grade. It wasn't about the grade level, it was about the experience and I was never sorry about hiring him.
Nikkia: I love that story. I want to go back to something that you said in describing this notion of taking a chance. You said, "if I have to fight the organization", and the use of fight for me suggests that what you are doing may not be, for whatever reason, what the organization is expecting. It's fascinating because the organization isn't a human being, it's a collection of many things. So when you talk about the expectations that may be looming in the organizational fabrics, and what you're doing, there's some dissonance, some discrepancy. So tell us a little bit about why organizations have these sort of strict rules around who they're looking for, what schools they go to, and why it has to be such a fight to break the shackles of those traditions.
Elyse: I think it's pretty simple and I think that it's not that complicated. It's just you put together a job description. Within that job description, you put together experiences that you're looking for, required experiences. I just don't think people are really thinking about how they're recruiting to be honest. It's not like they're taking the easy way out. I teach consumer behavior, and I teach all about System One. The brain is lazy and so I think when people are getting ready to hire, including HR, it's just rote. It's the way it's been. Another reason is that if you're speaking about experience, that experience is easier to assess than the traits that I talked about. How do you even put that on paper? How do you have people rate people's curiosity and passion? The radar is subjective for the person rating those things. So I think there's a couple elements to it, and it's just the way it's been done and it's an easier way to evaluate and measure somebody based on experience. It's what's comfortable.
Nikkia: And you talked about System One thinking and this automatic response and we're not even conscious of these decisions.
We make so many of these micro decisions a day. And then the other thing is, just as human beings very much in our psyche, deep within our subconscious is like a desire for comfort and familiarity. So when you see a name that looks familiar, when you see a school name that maybe you didn't go to but you're aware of their reputation, all of these signals that are embedded inside of a LinkedIn profile or a resume, become a nice shortcut. And sometimes we're not aware that we're making these shortcuts.
Now I want to go into this notion of this subjective and these qualities because you started off talking about them, because I would imagine after years into hiring, that a lot of this is just intuition. But when you have managers and other leaders that you'e trying to get to embrace this and they're doubtful, how do you assess productivity, hunger, passion?
Elyse: So in HR, as you know, there's a way of interviewing around the Star. It deals with the situation, the task, the action, the results. The philosophy behind Star is that when you question people directly, for instance what they would do in a situation where they were not getting along with a coworker, everyone's responses would be the same because everyone knows what they're supposed to say. However, if you ask them specifically about an occasion when they didn't get along with someone, when they go into storytelling mode, they tell a lot more detail than they would if you asked a hypothetical question. You learn a lot from this. You can also use Star to ask questions that get out curiosity and passion.
So if I'm hiring somebody with no experience and they're a student, I can ask them about a project that they worked on that they really loved. I can tell by the way they talk about it, not only about their passion but their curiosity. You can learn all this by just talking to them about their experience, their life, what interests them, how they learn things...
Nikkia: All of that I certainly wished in my career. I still wish that to a certain extent, but I think this is why I love doing this podcast so much and having these conversations for more managers or people with the responsibility of hiring to take it upon themselves, to want to find better ways to suss out those emotive qualities. Because not all HR departments are aksing about the way you should approach hiring.
Thank you for reading along the first Episode of season 2. Next time, we will dig into the second part of my conversation with Elyse and explore the questions of fit. Who is fit? What does it mean to be fit and should we even try to achieve it?
