Edan Haddock Total Talent: On current versus desired culture

Hiring for the culture you're trying to change

One theme Edan kept returning to is a contradiction plenty of HR leaders will recognise. An organisation is fairly risk averse, with established processes and cautious decisions. Its strategy says it needs to become more innovative. Then every new hire is measured against how the team works today.

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If you only hire against your existing culture, what happens?
You keep hiring people who thrive in the existing environment.

Edan Haddock, host of Edan Haddock Total Talent, Episode 8

Edan's reflection was that the process quietly recruits for the status quo while the strategy asks for change, and the gap shows up later at the top of the organisation.

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And then leadership spends the next three years
standing on stages telling everyone we need to be more innovative.

Edan Haddock, host of Edan Haddock Total Talent, Episode 8

Current culture, desired culture and the gap between them

The distinction at the centre of the conversation was between two versions of the same team. Current culture is how a team actually works today. Desired culture is how its people say they want it to work. Edan reflected that the gap between the two is the more useful thing to look at when deciding who to hire next.

Justin gave Edan an example using one of the 12 culture dimensions Compono measures. Picture a team that sits towards Internal Effectiveness: lean, cost-conscious and focused on running its own processes well. Its desired culture sits much closer to Customer Focused. Hire another perfect match for today and the team stays where it is. Someone who leans towards the desired state could stretch the team instead. Edan reflected that this is a better description of what culture add should mean.

Justin has since followed up on that example in a separate article. His point is that a new hire still walks into today's culture on their first day, so the gap to desired culture is more useful for deciding what a hire should add than for scoring candidates.

Difference needs room to land

Edan also pointed to the risk at the other end. Bring different thinking into a team with no capacity to hear it, and the new person gets welcomed for being different, then slowly worn down for it.

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That person becomes the outsider.
They're the difficult one.

Edan Haddock, host of Edan Haddock Total Talent, Episode 8

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Diversity without inclusion doesn't work.
You can't hire difference, then demand conformity.

Edan Haddock, host of Edan Haddock Total Talent, Episode 8

Before hiring for the gap, it's worth checking whether the team agrees on where it wants to go, and whether the manager knows the new person will work differently and is ready to make room for it.

Listen to the full episode

The episode goes well beyond culture. From his conversation with Justin and Mathan, Edan also reflects on where psychometric assessment belongs in a hiring process, and why people data so often ends up spread across systems that were never built to talk to each other.

For more on the culture discussion, read Current culture vs desired culture: what it means for your next hire, and Justin's follow-up, Why we don't hire against your desired culture.

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