Week 23 Day 2: What You Actually Want Is Culture Add

Culture add is not the opposite of culture fit. It is the evolution of it. Culture fit asks: 'Does this person match our existing culture?' Culture add asks: 'Does this person share our core values AND bring perspectives, experiences, or skills we are missing?' The 'and' is critical. Culture add does not mean hiring people who disagree with your values. It means hiring people who share your values but approach problems differently than you do.

Here is how to operationalize culture add in your hiring process. First, define your non-negotiable values -- the three to five principles that every team member must share. For my teams, these are: intellectual honesty (say what you think, not what you think I want to hear), ownership (if it is broken and you can see it, it is yours to fix), and growth orientation (you are not the same professional you were a year ago). These are the filter for culture fit. Everyone must pass it. Second, map your team's current perspective gaps. What experiences are underrepresented? What thinking styles are missing? What domains does nobody on the team know well? These are the targets for culture add. If everyone on your team has a computer science degree, look for the candidate with a philosophy degree who taught themselves to code. If everyone is an introvert, look for the extrovert who will energize team discussions. If nobody has worked at a startup, look for the candidate with startup experience who will bring urgency. Third, in the hiring debrief, separate the two assessments explicitly. Ask: 'Does this person share our core values?' and then separately ask: 'What does this person bring that we do not already have?' The first question is pass-fail. The second question is what differentiates good hires from great ones.

The culture add framework draws on research at the intersection of organizational behavior and cognitive diversity. Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, and Malone (2010) in their research on 'collective intelligence' found that the collective intelligence of a group is not predicted by the average intelligence of its members but by three factors: the equality of conversational turn-taking, the average social sensitivity of group members, and the proportion of women in the group -- all of which are enhanced by culture-add hiring. Phillips (2014) in her research on 'how diversity makes us smarter' demonstrated that the mere presence of socially different group members changes the behavior of the majority -- they prepare more thoroughly, consider more alternatives, and process information more carefully -- effects that occur independently of any contribution the diverse member makes. The non-negotiable values approach reflects what Collins and Porras (1994) call 'core ideology' -- the small number of principles that define organizational identity and should be preserved across all changes in strategy, structure, and personnel. Their research found that companies with clearly defined and consistently enforced core ideologies outperformed comparison companies by a factor of 15 in long-term stock returns, suggesting that values-based hiring (when values are genuinely defined) produces measurable competitive advantage.