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Book notes: Wrong fit, Right fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever

  • Wed, 25 Oct 2023

Book notes on "Wrong fit, Right fit" by André Martin

These are my notes on Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever by André Martin

Very interesting view on how to find your ideal job, and how companies can hire the right people: focus a lot more on how day-to-day work is done (and our preferences).

Key Insights

  • Fit: Deep and authentic connection to how a company works day-to-day.
  • No place will be a perfect match.
  • Working harder to fit in does not produce right fit; rather the opposite.
  • Who a company says they are rarely matches how that company works day-to-day.
  • Talent is “forced” to bump into ill-defined ways of working, use their creative energy to understand how things actually get done.
  • Begin sharing the choice you are planning to make. If feel hesitation, doubt, or anxiety as you share there is likely something not lining up.
  • Top 20% talent produce 80% of value.
  • What if interviews where less like first dates and more like family reunions?
  • Chapter 4 is gold to understand yourself. Holistic Candidate Profile:
    1. What are my core values?
    2. What is the life I am building?
    3. What is my craft/superpower?
    4. Who is my ideal leader?
    5. How do I like to work?
    6. What am I solving for?
  • When a product appears superior on aspects that are comparable with other products, we will fill in the gaps on missing information or difficult to ascertain attributes in a manner that supports that superiority.
  • As an interviewee, “How can I position myself as the best candidate for the job?”
    • We end up “acting” versus “being”.
  • Most variance in satisfaction of an employee can be accounted for by their manager or leader.
  • Questions to understand ways of working in the company:
    1. What is the profile of the person who succeeds here?
    2. What is the reputation of the function/team you are joining?
    3. What happens here that didn’t happen at the other companies you worked at previously?
  • New talent is highly impressionable. Make sure they are surrounded by the “models of your culture” early and often.
  • Onboarding:
    • Keep a journal.
    • 90 days.
    • To figure out if it is right fit.
  • How does the company get work done?
    1. How does the company collaborate?
      • Most fundamental attribute of right fit.
    2. How company assess performance?
      • Companies pay for one of:
        1. Performance.
        2. Demonstrated expertise.
        3. Lived values/behaviours.
        4. Long-term commitment.
  • Who owns my career, the company or me?
  • Our education has trained us to ignore all the positives and go straight to the places to improve.
  • As an executive leader, how you decide to work sets the floor (minimum expectation), not the ceiling.
  • The Fit Assessment (page 126).
  • The later you marry, the less likely you are to divorce.
  • Learning improves self-confidence, curb anxiety and depression.
  • Companies that promote learning regularly outperform competitors.
  • Try to create a week calendar that is closer to your ideal in terms of time, types of meeting, and people you work alongside.
  • A team makes the manager, not the other way around.
  • Individual feedback have an inverse relationship to seniority. (Should be the opposite!).
  • If you don’t say no, then your yes is meaningless.
  • Culture is an outcome.
  • With each new recruit, it gets harder to consistently teach or develop consistent unwritten practices.
  • To know how to the company should work in the future, study the company’s most productive teams of today:
    • Somewhere out in your company, there is a better practice for everything.
  • Realistic job preview.
  • Team membership is as much of an art as team leadership.
  • Transition from one role to another:
    • Companies usually ask to cover for both roles:
      • More stress in an already stressful situation.
    • Instead:
      • 7 days off to rest.
      • 7 days for reflection, reconnection and reset.

TOC

Introduction: There is a Right Fit Company Waiting for You

  • What if it isn’t about changing how we work, but rather improving our chances of creating and finding a better fit?
  • Book based on 65 in-depth interviews, all level and different company sizes.
  • Fit:
    • Deep and authentic connection to how a company works day-to-day.
    • Days feel easy, work is meaningful and connection with company grows exponentially.
  • Ways of working is innate in the fabric of the company and often emanate from early days:
    • How prioritize work, solve problems, innovate, manage conflict, socialize projects.
  • Way of working often undervalued during recruitment.
  • Pressure during interview to “fit in”.
  • Three key misalignments:
    1. Total mismatch: “Nobody at the company looks like me or works like me”.
    2. Person mismatch: “Nobody at the company looks like me, but many people work how I prefer to work”.
    3. Way of working mismatch: “People look like me but nobody works the way I prefer to work”.

Part 1: Context + Right Fit

Chapter 1: How the Workplace Has Changed

  • Great Resignation:
    • 2022, 77% of talent resigns within the first three years. 45% within one year.
    • Survey: Of 2000 US employees with less than 6 month at the company, 50% are actively looking for something new.
    • 2020:
      • PwC estimated 65% employees are looking for a new job.
      • Gallup estimated $7.8 trillion of productivity loss due to disengaged employees.
  • As human being, we want to be part of a community and be committed to something bigger than ourselves.
  • Trends:
    1. Rise of the culture deck:
      • Netflix started it.
      • Brand campaigns made culture aspirational and the day-to-day climate less and less of a priority.
      • More adept to talking about culture than doing.
    2. The Ping-Pong table of purposeless perks:
      • Clarity about what actually matters was being clouded by more and more stuff.
    3. The decade of decedent growth:
      • 2009 to 2020 marked the longest economic expansion in the last 80 years.
      • Habits are formed that don’t help in tougher times.
    4. A crisis of commitment:
      • With the abundance that surrounds us, we have entered into a constant state of infinite browsing where we strive to “keep our options open” over “the option to choose to dedicate ourselves to”.
    5. The side hustle economy:
      • 46% americans took on a side hustle to cover their monthly budget.
      • Formal employers are getting the rest of us, not the best of us.
    6. Being more vs doing more:
      • Does what I am doing matter?
      • 2017 study: found that 41% of a typical knowledge worker task don’t add value.
      • Not simply doing less, but better connect all the things we do to a higher purpose.
      • When we are inspired, we have a nearly insatiable energy to create.
      • Proximity can accelerate work.
  • If you’re talent, maybe it’s time to start searching for a place you can love day-to-day in balance with searching for a position you can do or a brand you revere.
  • If you’re a leader, create an experience that fits those who “love what we love” as opposed to either allowing many cultures under one umbrella or trying to create a place where everyone can be, on average, not unhappy.

Chapter 2 - Why Right Fit Is So Rare

  • World Health Organization definition of burnout: a syndrome resulting from workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
    • Three dimensions:
      • Feeling of energy depletion.
      • Increased mental distance or negative feeling about one’s job.
      • Reduced professional efficacy.
  • Cost of labor is typically 70% of operating budget.
  • Cognitive dissonance:
    • Discomfort of making a choice or acting in a manner that is incongruent with one’s stated values, opinions or preferences.
    • Begin sharing the choice you are planning to make. If feel hesitation, doubt, or anxiety as you share there is likely something not lining up.
  • Approach and Avoidance Systems:
    • Avoidance system: stop us from doing thing that put us in danger.
    • Approach system:
      • Pleasure-based desires.
      • Pleasure now and pain later.
    • When choosing a job, approach system can overtake the avoidance system.
  • BIRG-ing and Fit:
    • BIRG-ing:
      • Basking in reflected glory.
      • Using others’ success to boost our own self-image.
    • CORF-ing:
      • Cutting off reflected failure.
      • Distance ourselves from failure.
    • Football: we won vs they lost.
    • Choosing a job for BIRG-ing.
  • Fit is not about fitting in.
    • In wrong fit, we end up using our creative energy to “fit in”.
  • Do I fit here?

Do I fit here?

Part 2 - Talent + Right Fit

Chapter 3 - Beginning the Search for Right Fit

  • Researchers were able to prove that there is no standard bell curve when it comes to performance.
    • Top 20% talent produce 80% of value.
  • 82% of Fortune 500 executive said they do not recruit highly talented people. 93% don’t believe they develop people fast and effectively.
  • What if interviews where less like first dates and more like family reunions?
  • Holistic Candidate Profile:
    1. What are my core values?
    2. What is the life I am building?
    3. What is my craft/superpower?
    4. Who is my ideal leader?
    5. How do I like to work?
    6. What am I solving for?
  • Realistic Experience Preview:
    1. What are our lived values?
    2. What promise do we make to talent?
    3. How do we make money/have an impact?
    4. What is the profile of your leader?
    5. What is the job the next 12-18 months?
    6. What are the principles, practices, and platforms that define how work gets done?

Chapter 4 - Self-Reflection and Fit Excursions

For talent, 8 core question. This chapter contains one “Excursion”/exercise to help you answer them.

  1. What are the values you most consistently hold?
    • Pick from pairs of values.
  2. What is the life you are trying to build?
    • In two years time, what if:
      • Nothing changed.
      • Dream the dream.
  3. What are your superpowers? What are you best at (vs what do you love to do)?
    • Superpowers:
      • What gaps do you fill in every company you have joined?
      • What areas of expertise are you attempting to hone?
      • What do people come to you for?
      • What activities do you volunteer to take?
    • Shadow side:
      • Often from overused strengths or non-productive behaviours when under stress.
      • When under stress for long period, we flip into “the grip” (Myers Briggs): unfamiliar and unproductive version of ourselves.
  4. Are you of craft, company or cause?
  5. Who is your ideal leader? What do you need from them to succeed?
    • Good chemistry with a manager is so important and so rare that many successful talent and leadership experts advocate for following a great manager.
    • Things that we look for in our managers, will be gifted at ourselves.
    • We gain our skills as managers from our managers.
  6. If you were to start a company, what would you do? How would you want it to feel?
  7. Above all else, what matters most to you right now? What are you solving for?
    • Our careers can be central to our life in some moments, and they can be enablers of our life in others.
  8. How to you bring all of your answers together into a single leadership story?
    • At the heart of finding right fit is changing the frame of how you see yourself.

Part 3 - Interviewing and Onboarding + Right Fit

Chapter 5 - Don’t Judge a Company by Its Career Page

  • Motivated reasoning: When the early signals we get about a product or a place are positive and hold true, we will likely stop our search for new information or comparisons to other options.
  • When a product appears superior on aspects that are comparable with other products, we will fill in the gaps on missing information or difficult to ascertain attributes in a manner that supports that superiority.
  • Confirmation bias: potentially confirmatory evidence tends to be taken at face value while potentially dis-confirmatory evidence is subjected to critical and skeptical scrutiny.
  • Information available about a company is “mostly true version of the truth”:
    • Doesn’t give enough information to really see the cracks that every company has.
    • Employer-brand version of Snapchat filters.
    • Most sources are internally produced and relatively subjective.
  • Rules to validate information:
    1. More than three sources.
    2. Internal and external materials.
    3. Subjective and objective data.
    4. If something feels off, dive deeper. Don’t ignore it.
  • As an interviewee:
    • “How can I position myself as the best candidate for the job?”
      • The very nature of the question can lead us astray.
      • We end up “acting” versus “being”.
  • Questions to understand ways of working in the company:
    1. What is the profile of the person who succeeds here?
      • Learn how the company defines success.
      • Ask interviewer to tell you about a real person.
    2. How does the company get work done? (chapter 6)
    3. What is the company’s relationship to time?
      • Most important.
      • Productivity equals full calendar?
      • Is unlimited vacation really unlimited?
      • Do you need to be at the office or in a meeting to be deemed productive?
    4. What is the reputation of the function/team you are joining?
    5. What are your day-to-day duties?
      • What will be the first three deliverables be once onboarding is complete?
    6. How does the leader get productivity out of their team?
      • Most variance in satisfaction of an employee can be accounted for by their manager or leader.
      • Study by Artz et al. found that technical competence mattered above else.
    7. Where do people go once they leave this job/team/leader?
      • Most underrated skill as a leader is being a “star maker”.
    8. What happens here that didn’t happen at the other companies you worked at previously?
      • Whether the culture has been solidified enough to turn into longstanding and unique practices.
    9. What are the nonnegotiables at the company?
      • How consistent are across interviews?

Chapter 6 - Figuring Out If You Really Fit

  • To find right fit, you should spend your first ninety days focused on understanding the reality of how the company truly works day-to-day and assessing that against your preferences.
  • New talent is highly impressionable. Make sure they are surrounded by the “models of your culture” early and often.
  • Fitting in is shifting away from your natural preference to be included or feel sense of belonging. This is a normal reaction to starting a new job.
  • Most companies rarely fully understand or know how to articulate how work actually gets done.
  • Three versions of a company:
    1. The company we would be if we were at our best:
      • Recruiter version to sell the position.
    2. What is shown to talent on their first day:
      • Akin to being toured through a museum.
    3. How it is for most people, every day.
  • As talent, onboarding:
    • Is about determining right or wrong fit.
    • Rules:
      1. Avoid snap judgments: take the full 90 days.
      2. Keep a journal.
      3. Review what you have learned at day 10, 30, 60 and 90:
        • Patterns and themes.
        • Share with your manager/mentor.
      4. Let the facts lead you to your conclusions, not the other way around.
      5. Focus your assessment on the ways the company works.
      6. Make a decision to commit, or not:
        • Most important and difficult without a framework.
      7. Create buffers to sustain right fit as the company grows/transforms.
  • How does the company get work done?
    1. How does the company make decisions?
      • Tradeoffs made. Is everything a priority?
      • Is there a clearly defined strategy that people can make decisions in alignment with?
    2. How does the company solve problems?
      • What information is most valuable when determining the best solution?
      • Best companies use approach depending on the size and complexity or company values.
    3. How are ideas communicated?
      • Full sentences or pithy one-liners?
    4. How does the company collaborate?
      • Most fundamental attribute of right fit.
      • Area that diverges the most from team to team.
      • Pay attention to:
        • Meeting culture.
        • Primary tools used to communicate.
        • Cadence of work.
    5. How company assess performance?
      • Output, outcomes, strength of relationships, time in your seat or billed hours?
      • Companies pay for one of:
        1. Performance.
        2. Demonstrated expertise.
        3. Lived values/behaviours.
        4. Long-term commitment.
      • To understand your own beliefs, look back at the classes you most enjoyed in school:
        • How did you get graded?
        • Work alone or in groups?
    6. How does the company provide feedback?
      • Open, honest and consistent feedback is a rarity.
      • We are fairly self-centered and idiosyncratic in our measurements, and thus our assessment is ultimately random and potentially damaging.
      • Our education has trained us to ignore all the positives and go straight to the places to improve.
    7. How does the company resolve conflict and break ties?
      • Are purpose, values or principles used?
      • Full commitment or “disagree and commit”?
    8. How company develops its talent?
      • Turning key events into lessons takes self-awareness, feedback, coaching, learning and testing out new behaviours, things that most companies fail to invest in.
      • Who owns my career, the company or me?
    9. How does information flow?
      • Tells where decisions get made.
    10. How does the company socialize/gather?
      • What does the company celebrate?
    11. What is the company’s relationship with time?
      • When on vacation, are I still available or unreachable?
    12. How does the company view rest and recovery?
      • Do leaders take vacation quietly, or are they vocal about taking breaks?
  • No place will be a perfect match.
  • As an executive leader, how you decide to work sets the floor (minimum expectation), not the ceiling.
  • The Fit Assessment (page 126).

Part 4 - Buffers + Right Fit

Chapter 7 - Inspirational Buffers and Enhancing Fit Over Time

  • Great fit now doesn’t guarantee that it will remain that way.
  • Wrong fit is rarely sustainable for an extended period.
  • Buffers to fit:
    • Actions to improve the overall experience over time.
  • Two categories:
    1. Inspirational:
      • Those that connect us to something more meaningful.
      • Increase better and more value-adding work.
    2. Relational: center around people who we interact with.
  • The later you marry, the less likely you are to divorce.
  • Correlation of pay to satisfaction is very weak.
  • Intrinsic motivations FTW!
  • Inspirational buffers:
    1. Connect to Purpose or Cause:
      • Company: why is the world better with us in it?
      • Try to connect to the company purpose at least once a week.
    2. Increase Meaningful Work, Decrease Busy Work:
      • Two ways:
        1. Align nature of work:
          • To your passions.
          • Learn new skills.
          • Connect to a cause you care.
        2. Spend more time in high-value activities.
      • Once people know you are passionate in something, they will give you plenty of opportunity to do it.
      • Say “no” more. Volunteer more.
    3. If you are learning and growing:
      • Learning improves self-confidence, curb anxiety and depression.
      • Companies that promote learning regularly outperform competitors.
      • Five clusters of learning opportunities:
        1. Challenging assignments.
        2. Developmental relationships (mentors, teachers, managers).
        3. Hardships or adverse situations (wrong fit).
        4. Coursework and training.
        5. Personal experiences (birth of child, living in a new country).
      • Majority of learning come from 1 and 2. Least from 4.
      • Learning takes work: reflection, making connections to previous events, practicing new behaviours.
      • Diversity of experience matters.
      • Hardship often brings out the most raw version of ourselves.
      • Treat every day as a prototype (== small experiment).
    4. Find a consumer in need that you can relate to and can help.
  • In any project, ask if the consumer would pay an extra 5% for the work.
  • Make better use of your time: 41% activities are neither personally fulfilling nor add value.
  • Procrastination:
    • More during stress.
    • Losing time on the tasks at had due to our urgent need to “manage negative emotions”.
  • Working harder to fit in does not produce right fit; rather the opposite.
  • Try to create a week calendar that is closer to your ideal in terms of time, types of meeting, and people you work alongside.

Chapter 8 - Relational Buffers and Enhancing Fit Over Time

  • 4 Buffers:
    1. A supportive leader/manager:
      • Look at how you can shape your manager to the one that you need.
      • A team makes the manager, not the other way around.
      • Positive reinforcement.
      • Individual feedback have an inverse relationship to seniority.
        • It should be the opposite as the stakes are higher!
      • Managers understand if their teams are performing, but they know very little about the why.
      • Researcher found that managers estimate their impact way higher than their reporters.
    2. Meaningful mentor:
      • 70% of talent who have a mentor are satisfied with their jobs.
      • Mentors create connections, and connections are the seeds of commitment.
      • 3 types:
        1. Storytellers: those who have been in the company for many years.
        2. Models: bleed the mission and values of the company.
        3. Masters of craft.
          • Rarely in the top leadership positions, very rarely used as mentors.
      • Think what are you looking for in a mentor (career advise, connections, …)
      • Agenda should be question based and focused on real areas where you are struggling or looking for wisdom.
    3. Workplace BFF or Doppelganger:
      • Good social relationships are one of the most consistent predictors of a happy life.
      • Doppelganger:
        • Somebody like you but that moves through the org with greater ease.
        • Represent future possibilities.
      • Invest your time in the relationship.
    4. Life outside work is magic:
      • If you don’t say no, then your yes is meaningless. Peter Block.
      • The happier we are at home, the more engaged and committed we will be at work.
      • Don’t let your outside work hours be filled with sensory pursuits.

Part 5 - Company + Right Fit

Chapter 9 - Crafting and Communicating How the Company Works

  • Employee experience:
    • All the touch points an employee has with the company in a single year:
    • Physical, human, digital and administrative.
    • Excludes “culture”. Culture is an outcome.
    • 3 elements:
      1. Work principles:
        • How it should feel to work in a team.
        • What differentiates the company.
      2. Work practices: chapter 4.
      3. Work platforms: the technology used to do work.
  • With each new recruit, it gets harder to consistently teach or develop consistent unwritten practices.
  • Creating Right Fit doesn’t mean being the right place for everyone.
  • To know how to the company should work in the future, study the company’s most productive teams of today:
    • Make consistent what has already been innovated on.
  • Research: people make judgements within a fraction of a second upon seeing a person’s face.
  • Balance first impression is key: both who the company is today and what want to be tomorrow.
  • Tips:
    1. Make values the ground and work principles/practices/platforms the figure.
    2. Purpose and how it makes money overt.
    3. Show the real company in real ways.
    4. Create a network.
  • Realistic job preview:
    1. Nonnegotiables: set the base at a certain level.
    2. What we do:
      • How the product/service flows through the system.
      • Focus on how the role adds value.
    3. How we work:
      • Be super clear about how work gets done.
      • Prose-based work principles, practices and platforms.
    4. What capabilities we need.
    5. The three top deliverables for this position or this team:
      • In the next eighteen to twenty-four months.

Chapter 10 - Reimagining Fit - Recruiting and (Re)recruiting for Right Fit

  • Onboarding:
    • A company will never have a more excited or engaged employee than the moment they walk into their first day.
    • If a company just focuses on the new joiners, their culture will transform automatically over the next few years:
      • Turnover + growth.
    • Anything the company spends on onboarding will be far less expensive than the hidden cost of losing new employees within their first six months.
    • Cultural immersion: what is expected, what is valued and how works get done.
  • Your early network will dictate much of your long-term success.
  • Great managers are rare:
    • Gallup: companies fail to choose the right candidate 82% of time.
  • Team membership is as much of an art as team leadership:
    • Teach our teams “teaming”.
  • Performance as the collective act by individuals dedicated to a single mission:
    • Have one strategy:
      • Teams/individuals simply need to know their place in the strategy.
    • Outcomes, not activities.
    • 1-2-1 focus on ensuring everyone is growing faster than the company:
      • Moving key events to lessons of experience.
    • Pay well and distribute bonuses to the team.
    • Find and celebrate the “better practice”:
      • Somewhere out in your company, there is a better practice for everything.
      • Positive disobedient.
  • Ensure strategy is participated in, not just developed:
    • The life or death of strategy is determined in the number of day-to-day decisions that are made in service of it (or not).
  • Unnecessary meetings:
    • Those that don’t directly connect to purpose, how we work or sense of community.
    • Asses the monetary cost of every meeting.
    • Clear outcomes for each meeting.
      • What cannot be done in another way?
    • Set a limit for the size of meeting.
  • Transition from one role to another:
    • Companies usually ask to cover for both roles:
      • More stress in an already stressful situation.
    • Instead:
      • 7 days off to rest.
      • 7 days for reflection, reconnection and reset.
  • In times of transformation, think about how you work before you launch and design how it will work after.
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