Episode 043: Our Response To "Culture Fit Is Bullsh!t"

Hey everyone, Jeff here from the Fleet Success Show. Before we dive into this week's episode, I wanted to take a quick second and make sure you know about the first of its kind Fleet Success Summit happening here in sunny Phoenix, Arizona on April 20th and 21st. This 2-day event will be unlike anything you've ever seen before in the world of fleet. We're bringing 12 speakers to the stage to share the best in business, leadership, culture, and technology, all with the messages that will help your fleet succeed. Grab your tickets and register to attend at fleetsuccesssummit.com.

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show. All right, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, and joining me again today, Jeff Jenkins.

Hey, hey, hey.

And Steve Saltskiver.

And we're glad to have you back.

Hey, thank you.

Yeah, it was rough last time. I had to do all the hosting gigs and just, it's not the same.

It really isn't.

You don't have anybody to kind of like be the idiot and just ask the stupid questions, right?

Well, I was the talent, right? Which we all know that's true. It's the funny guy. But I also had to be the same one that asked the stupid question.

So it's tough. It's a tough role. I'm glad that I'm here for you guys.

We are too, because we missed you.

Welcome back.

So today's episode, super fun one. Culture fit is bullshit.

Ahaha.

Right?

That sounds like something Jeff would say, doesn't it?

I would never say culture fit is bullshit. I would say bullshit a lot, but not with that.

That's true.

Yeah.

So we're on LinkedIn. You guys know this, we are on LinkedIn quite a bit. And we're coming across this post and I just saw it as I was scrolling through while I was at home sick with the COVID super fun, and saw this one that said culture fits bullshit. I'm like, what? And you know us, you've heard everything that we've talked about and it definitely struck me and I said, I disagree with everything in this post. You know, our producer James Rex even said everything in this is just fundamentally wrong. Right? Paraphrasing a little bit about this gal on LinkedIn who said culture fit's bullshit. She says, you know, I'm not sure where somebody got this idea, but you can't hire for culture fit. You know, we disagree with that. But, you know, if anything, when companies do it, she sees it as a red flag that it's an indication that the culture they have is not sustainable, that somehow one bad hire could ruin the entire soup. You know, could ruin the entire company. You know, she's setting up a little bit of a straw man with that argument, but I'm happy to debate on that. She does go on to say that great cultures don't allow for a single bad hire to ruin the culture. They remedy it or get rid of the culture that, you know, the culture threats, which we do agree with. But doesn't that mean that it's more important that you do hire for culture fit?

Are we going to go through this whole thing and then comment on it? Go through the whole thing.

Uh, she said, you know, reality is some people are great bullshitters during the interview process. I totally agree with that. Uh, you might think they fit into your culture, but you'll never truly know until they're in the thick of it. Uh, and then legally, this is also something to be avoided. In her opinion, you're walking a slippery slope if you're part of the culture fit club, so be cautious. So focus more on does this person seem like a good human and can they do the job and be productive, and less on the facade. So let's dive into it.

Uh, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with my comment because the fact that someone thinks a single hire cannot ruin a culture means you're an idiot. Now, one, you've got to scale it, right? Because if you're at a company with thousands of people, you're less likely to have that issue, right? Right. You can ruin a department, you can ruin some fellow, uh, employees, some co-workers, It's for the smaller companies that really need to focus on those hires because one person can truly ruin a culture at a smaller company. I've got a perfect example. Lady used to work for me, right? We'll call her Wendy, even though her name's Wendy. And she was the office gossip. She was the one that stirred up shit every time it happened in the office. She was the instigator. She'd worked there for 30 years. Okay. Our company, we had about 300 people, but a lot of those were drivers. So it's not just all office. In the office, we had about 35 people. I will tell you, Wendy single-handedly ruined that culture. It can happen, but it was with 30 other people. If there had been thousands of people in that office, it was less likely Wendy would have ruined the culture in that office. She would have just ruined it more in what she touched.

And for that, my comment was almost the exact same. Was, yeah, one person might not in a bigger company, but in a smaller company, one person absolutely could. In a bigger company, maybe it's not one, but 10 could do it.

Oh yeah.

You know, if you hired 10 people that didn't fit the culture, and that's because our belief is that everybody that comes into the culture brings their own ingredients, they bring their own baggage, and they will affect the flavor of the soup. You know, yeah, maybe one drop of Tabasco won't do it, but man, if you put in 10 drops of Tabasco, it's gonna change the flavor of that thing. You know, and for her, I don't think she's understanding. Yeah, maybe you don't, maybe you miss one hire, but if you continually don't hire for culture fit and you don't make that part of your process, you're going to bring in a lot of bad eggs.

Yeah, I've been in big and small cultures, you know, and I, I was just thinking some of the big operations I've been in, it's like, you know, you fire one that wasn't a culture fit and then another one pops in. It's like whack-a-mole there for a while until you get it to the point where people are all aligned in one culture. I think it's important, but in the same vein, I would say hiring for culture is not discounting diversity. It's not discounting ethnicity. It doesn't have anything to do with that. I mean, I think the argument she was bringing up in there is like you're becoming a homogenous workplace, and I don't think that's the case.

Well, I think it can be if you're not clear on what culture really is.

True.

Right, is that if you look at your culture, as everybody is— maybe we're a tech company or something like that, which we are, but if you look around and everybody's just a bunch of young white kids, right? Are you— and this is where it gets really clear. We talk about accidental culture versus intentional culture. Are some of your accidental values that we want people that have similar life experiences and that's the kind of people we look for, or have you gotten really clear about what it is specifically you're looking for and making sure that other things aren't influencing your decision-making process. We talk about being humble, hungry, and smart. Is there anything else that we would accidentally include as part of our culture that we say, ah, I don't know that they'd really fit in with the culture here? Is it that they don't fit with those three values, or is there some other peripheral accidental part that we're, like a standard we're holding them to that we shouldn't be? And that's where I think you can get into trouble with EEOC or any legal issues when you're not holding them to a defined standard of, wait a minute, we said, I'm not a culture fit. Okay, but can you tell me which part of the culture?

Yeah.

And I think that if someone was to challenge us on that about what part of the culture fit I'm not, we could call it out pretty easily.

Because we've defined it.

We've defined it.

We know exactly what we're looking for.

Yeah. And we address it. Every single interview I talk about, I talk about our core values. I ask them, hey, what do you think is a strength? What do you think is a weakness? Give me some examples. I mean, there's things you can ask to dig into it and see it. If someone's not hungry, one of our core values, they're not going to be a culture fit. Right. We need that hunger, and you can tell that in the interview process.

Well, we do extra things too, like, you know, I mean, if they're getting close, we do in-person interviews. We have almost a scripted interview. We get rid of the bullshitters right off the bat.

We can cut through it, right? That's where you design a process that helps cut through the bullshit.

Yeah.

Because they will, and you will have people that put up the facade. You know, they have a great resume, maybe they're great interviewers, and we'll cut through that. The key is there is just to ask good questions, you know, to ask pointed questions. Tell me more about that. You know, I mean, we've got Jeff and Scott on our team who are very good at exposing falsehoods and exposing like, well, wait, how did you— in the resume you said that you helped improve marketing turnover or marketing leads by 70%. What did you do to do that? And then when they give you an answer and it doesn't quite pass the smell test, you know, now all they're doing is just handing you a little bit of, you know, leash to you can get back with and you say, "Well, wait a minute. Did you do that? Because everything you just said sounds like somebody else did that. How are you taking credit for that?" Well, that's what happens too.

I mean, people get their resumes written by professionals and they don't really— it's not really their story. So, you got to probe deeply and you got to get into the weeds. And I think sometimes people don't ask those questions.

No, they don't. And a lot of— here's the thing, when she's talking about you know, you're going in there and you cannot tell what someone truly is a culture fit or not until they're in the thick of it. That's partially right.

But you don't— you never know 100%.

No, but how they interact with you, right? That's why there's more, more steps than just I'm going to talk to you on the phone or I'm just going to talk to you in a face-to-face interview and bring you in. That's why you have other people who also get involved in that interview process without you there. I mean, I've had people I've interviewed which I thought, man, this person's fantastic. And then Josh, James, Steve, whoever interviews them afterwards, and they're like, yeah, I saw this red flag, or I saw this, and it helps. I'm like, okay, you're probably right. They may not be a good culture fit because you were able to unearth something that I couldn't.

Or in the conversation, how many times have we done this? You're having a conversation with somebody and it naturally is going to flow a certain direction, and that direction might be an area that they're really strong in. But then when we get in, we ask different questions and that pulls them in a different area where they're not as strong and not as comfortable.

Yeah.

And it's not that you were a bad interviewer, it's just that, well, the conversation never got there. I mean, we don't want interviews to go 3 hours long. You're only going to uncover so much in 30 minutes, which is why we do multiple 30-minute interviews, is because the conversation just changes based on who's asking the questions. She's probably one of these gals that, you know, if we told her we had a 6 to 8 step interview process, would be like, oh my gosh, that's too many. You should be able to tell in 30 minutes. Whether or not a person's going to be good or not.

Well, we can tell in 30 minutes whether they'll be good enough to go to the next level.

Right. Right.

Yeah.

One of the things that I do think she's spot on with, though, is that when companies do have empty promises, empty values, empty words, right? There's probably a lot of people out there. She's been a part of companies, I assume, where they say this is what we look for in a culture, but it's not really what they're looking for in the culture. And so they use culture fit or culture as an excuse to dismiss a good candidate or to keep from promoting a good candidate. And so I think in those cases, that's where you do have to be very careful about our— if we say culture is important, what do we mean by that? And what specifically are we looking for? What behaviors specifically are we looking for?

Well, I can tell you a good example there. One of the companies I worked for, they had set values, and they always told everybody that their number one value, core value, was people. But if you looked at what they wrote in their strategic plan, the number one core value was profit. It never correlated with what they told you all the time, right? So what's the takeaway there? Are they more interested in profit or are they more interested in you? And it's probably a balance of both. They can't be in business if they're not focused on profit. But sometimes it depends on the message that you write. And how you deliver that message, you know, as you're putting— you got your people involved in this.

I've done a lot of interviews lately hiring for trainer, SDR, just different positions, and I always bring up culture. And how I'll frame it up when I do this is I say, so the company you're at now, or you were just at, tell me about their culture. And they'll be like, uh, well, you know, and then they'll like give some tagline or something, right? And I say, okay, Do you live up to that at the office? Well, I guess so. Okay, so you've got posters on the wall that say these are our core values, this is our mission, this is our purpose, but how often do you guys talk about it and address it actually in the business setting? Well, hardly ever. My response is always, that's not us.

Yeah, that's— those are what Josh calls empty platitudes.

Yeah, it's all it is, right? And I want to go back to a previous comment, I mean, what we talked about a little bit earlier too, 'cause she in there says, you know, good cultures cannot allow a single person, or will not allow a single person, right, to ruin it. That's an absolute, right? And that's not, it's kind of true because if we hire someone and they come in and they're not a culture fit, guess what? They're not gonna ruin everything that we've built in our culture, but they'll take us a step backwards.

Yep.

Right, and then when we have to get rid of them because they're not a culture fit or they're that cancer that's out there, guess what? Now we've gotta spend that time where we should be moving forward towards our goals to repair that culture.

Right.

So you're taking away from everybody else in the organization by not doing that due diligence and getting someone who believes and who lives those values.

Well, then you're abdicating your most important job, right? As the leader, your most important thing is to build the team. And you know, like we talk about, build the team, set the vision, deliver results. And if you're abdicating your most important job to your people, like, hey, you can't count on me to make a good hire, so this is up to you guys to save the ship. That is bullshit.

Yeah.

That is such a cop-out. Like, you owe it to your team to find people that fit the culture. And that's where I get super fired up when I read something like that.

Well, and that's why it takes longer to find people, right? Yep. Because you have to do the due diligence to do it. If you want just to find somebody to fog a mirror, they're not gonna fit the culture.

Well, maybe you will, right? But that culture's gonna be a—

That's accidentally luck, right?

It's not a high-performance culture, that's for sure. So, at the end of the day, we strongly believe you have to hire for culture fit. You know, this gal is— unfortunately, she's not alone. There's a lot of people out there that don't believe in hiring for culture fit. And we will absolutely put our stock that you have to hire people for culture, but you have to define what that culture is. You have to be very specific, and you cannot use your culture as an excuse to discriminate or dehumanize anybody. Like, that's something else. You can't undermine the importance of culture and use it as a way to discriminate or something like that, but use it as a way to enhance the lives of the people that are working for you. I'll just kind of leave it with that. I don't know if you guys have anything else you want to add.

No, I think we beat that one up pretty good.

Poor lady.

I know.

Listen, and we're right, she's wrong. So that's all we're going to leave it at. So speaking of absolutes.

She did make a couple of good points, but I think she's just confused.

And so she did well. And a lot of people can be that way because of what they've experienced in the past. Like, we try to preach about culture and how it needs to be something, right, that's very intentional. But 90% of everybody out there that's worked somewhere, they have never got it. They've never experienced it, right? All they hear is lip service. All they see is a poster on the wall and no one ever does anything about it. So of course they think it's bullshit, right?

I think that's really the key. If you've lived in a good culture and you know what a good culture consists of, then you're going to be more prone to say, okay, culture really matters and it's not bullshit. But if you've been in all these terrible cultures and there's people we interview that have been in terrible cultures. I mean, me, I've had a dozen jobs in my life. I could tell you a good culture from a bad culture, but it all comes down to what Josh says. I mean, it's people not living their core values. That's really what it amounts to.

It's not having integrity. It's saying one thing and doing another.

If the values are that important, they've got to be manifested all the time, constantly. Yep.

Good point.

All right. Well, that's going to wrap up this episode. As always, as a reminder, we've got the Fleet Success Summit coming up April 20th and 21st, talking about culture and leadership and resource efficiency and risk management, all the fun stuff with fleet success. These topics, hearing from thought leaders in this space, you know, that you're not just hearing it from Jeff, Steve, and I. but also hearing it from, you know, people that really have lived it in different areas and different arenas than, than we're used to hearing from. FleetSuccessSummit.com, April 20th, 21st out in Mesa. As always, tell your friends, coworkers about the Fleet Success Show. Tag us on social media @fleet_success and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

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