Is yours an international business struggling with cultural fit? Consider the aid of a consultant to … [+] help you successfully navigate the divide.
Cultural fit is often cited as an important element of a successful business, and for good reason. According to Harvard Business Review, “Cultural fit is the likelihood that someone will reflect and/or be able to adapt to the core beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that make up your organization.
Cultural fit can apply to hiring employees as well as selecting trading partners. And a 2005 analysis revealed that employees who fit well with their organization, coworkers, and supervisor had greater job satisfaction, were more likely to remain with their organization, and showed superior job performance.”
Notably, this means cultural fit shouldn’t be about hiring people or engaging trading partners who all come from the same background. Rather, it is about finding people who will become a good fit for the culture you are trying to build at your company. Of course, overcoming implicit biases and getting widespread buy-in can be a major challenge in this regard.
Successfully navigating the nuances of cultural fit can be a challenge, but when you partner with a qualified consultant, you can be far more likely to achieve cultural alignment throughout your organization.
1. Get A New Viewpoint For Your Organizational Culture
As with any other area for which you might hire a consultant, a consultant brings value simply through their ability to provide an objective outsider’s perspective. Your organizational culture is the starting point for navigating cultural fit, and consultants can use their experience working with companies across a broad range of industries to assess the effectiveness of your current culture.
This includes evaluating how your organizational culture compares to best practices observed in your industry and others, how well the culture aligns with your company’s goals and values, how your leadership and communication style contributes to or detracts from your ideal culture and so on.
Quite often, gaps between your current culture and desired culture can play a major role in preventing cultural fit. For example, the failed merger between Sprint and Nextel in the 2000s was directly attributed to cultural incompatibility between the two companies. A consultant can help you identify issues in advance that would contribute to cultural incompatibility with potential employees and partners.
2. Develop Strategies To Better Integrate New Hires
One of the most valuable ways a consultant can help you navigate cultural fit is by ensuring you have the right systems in place to integrate new hires into that culture. Even when someone seems like a good cultural fit based on their mindset and values, they still need assistance during the onboarding process to become fully aligned and engaged.
This became especially apparent during a recent conversation with Marie C. Lee, a Hong Kong-based marketing consultant and an adjunct lecturer in the City University of Hong Kong who has consulted with a wide range of international clients.
She explained, “Consultants can help businesses improve cultural fit by ensuring that the onboarding process immerses employees in the company’s values and culture right from the start. For example, much of my work focuses on AI and its use in customer engagement. Successful integration of new hires wouldn’t just focus on the what of how a company uses these tools — it would also focus on the why, the goals of using these tools and the values behind their use. Effective communication of the mission and vision right from the start is key to getting that buy-in.”
In many situations, consultants could also help businesses develop specific strategies focused on cultural integration, such as offering mentorship programs to new hires or getting them involved in team-building activities that help them learn the new culture through direct involvement and participation.
3. Evaluate Cultural Fit With Trading Partners
A consultant can also help you evaluate cultural fit with your trading partners to ensure you are properly aligned. A wise consultant will use appropriate tools and measurements to help you evaluate partner compatibility so that your work together is built on a foundation of trust.
I’ve had the to opportunity to teach several consultants about my research on the compatibility and trust (C&T) assessment over the years, which is a tool that measures partner compatibility in the areas of focus (or a common purpose and sense of direction), communication, team orientation, innovation and performance trust. These principles are essential to any partnership that aims to stand the test of time and deliver win-win outcomes.
Regardless of the tools or resources that consultants use to help you evaluate cultural fit, a good consultant will help you not only evaluate the effectiveness of your trading partnerships in these areas, but also identify and implement strategies to make improvements to ensure the lasting success of the partnership.
4. Guide You Through Scaling Your Culture
One of the greatest challenges for many businesses is losing their sense of shared culture — and the ability to maintain cultural fit — as the organization scales. Companies ranging from Google to Buzzfeed have all been cited as examples of businesses that turned away from their original cultural values as they scaled, often to the detriment of workers and customers alike.
Hiring at scale often plays a big role in this loss of organizational culture, which can erode the overall health of the organization over time. However, a consultant can provide much-needed guidance to ensure that expansion efforts remain aligned with your core values and mission, and that your teams receive proper guidance and support through any culture shifts that may need to take place.
Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Jordana Valencia recommends that businesses “Define culture in terms of clear, observable behaviors […] Build an accessible, digital library of learning content […] Use blended learning programs to scale culture training [and] Ensure managers relentlessly reinforce target behaviors.”
With the right consultant as a partner, you can better implement these efforts, track their progress and ensure that culture remains consistent even as you scale.
Consultants Help Navigate Cultural Fit
In reality, navigating cultural fit largely comes down to ensuring that your business has a strong, healthy culture — and that you have developed the framework necessary to help your new hires adapt to and thrive within that culture. When you partner with a consultant, you benefit from an outside perspective that will help you evaluate what you are (and aren’t) doing well, and develop strategies that will help new hires succeed even as you scale.
As you leverage this expertise to improve your culture and better manage cultural fit, you’ll enjoy better employee retention and engagement and create a work environment where everyone can thrive.
