In my post, An Unlikely Hero, I said that performance trumped personality when considering people for promotion (and hiring). However, when I interview people for jobs, I have a criteria that ranks even higher than proven performance, and that is how well the person fits with the team’s values.
Importance of Values
Values are important because the CCCC team developed them on the basis of which behaviours and attitudes cause team members to raise or lower their respect for a teammate as a productive contributor to accomplishing our mission. The team’s values ended up defining the qualities of a very high-performing team. As a result, our performance reviews are based on adherence to the values, not activity levels or results. Activity and results are natural consequences of working by the values. Since we evaluate performance by our values, it only makes sense that they should also be the selection criteria.
My main concern about hiring to our values is to preserve the integrity of our high-performing team. I am proud of the team and the quality of its work and don’t want to insert a new person who does not live by our values. I think that would be setting them up for a bad experience and it would be demoralizing to the current team. We don’t ask about values directly, but the questions are designed to bring out the candidate’s past behaviours that are related to the values.
Why Personalities Should Differ
As for personality? If everyone on staff had the same personality, this would be a dull place and we’d have few perspectives to bring to the table. A good variety of personality styles helps ensure we have a variety of viewpoints and real options to consider. It also contributes to a healthy dynamic in the workplace. We have lots of laughter here at CCCC.
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