How would you feel if you arrived at work on a Monday Morning and your Principal asked you to bail his son out of jail? What if your CEO said skip the office today, jump on a plane to Brazil and value bloodstock? Or, what if you were tasked with unexpectedly negotiating the contract of a heavy-weight boxing champion on a Wednesday afternoon?
In the world of Family Offices, anything is possible and the professionals hired to do the unthinkable have to be problem solvers, agile and absolutely committed to the cause.
It isn’t right for everyone and our role is finding out who is. The key performance indicator? Cultural Fit and there are five steps we take to finding it every day.
Here are our five considerations for the hiring process and five steps you can take to find your perfect Cultural Fit Hire.
1. Defining Your Culture
When hiring for Cultural Fit, you must first think about your own culture. Defining your own organisational beliefs and the ideal qualities the ideal hire might possess.
It is important to look at the gaps missing in your current resources, not simply from an academic perspective but also exploring the likes of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), personality and diversity of thought. You need to identify what characteristics you could benefit from whether that is an analytical profile to scrutinise your commercial decisions or an empathetic mindset to tell you the impact they might have on other stakeholders.
You need to think about your purpose, beliefs and behaviours, look beyond the jurisdictions of the role and focus instead on how this hire might also fit in with the Family behind the Office. Are there idiosyncrasies belonging to your family that may impact the person required to fill your next position?
With the line between Family and Family Office further blurred through the pandemic, it is even more important to ensure your next hire can fit perfectly into your family as well as your team.
2. Exploring Personality, But Not Testing
The hiring process often includes psychometric testing, competency quizzes and open ended questions but something that is often forgotten, is personality.
It is important to distinguish between the endless personality quizzes that can be found online and the simple art of understanding which personalities compliment different scenarios.
Not all personality tests are accurate. They can also be quite overwhelming for a professional who is passionate about working for you and concerned about selecting the wrong answer to an impossible question. They are at times misrepresentative and often cheat Family Offices out of finding exceptional talent.
We saw this very situation unfold some years ago when working with a Family Office in California. They were seeking a replacement for their Chief Financial Officer, on course to retire after earning the title of an unofficial family member. He was the perfect Cultural Fit and as a result, the brief was to find a similar profile in terms of achievements, experience and personality. The Principal was convinced the next hire needed to pass a personality test having recently discovered the phenomenon but upon testing the current CFO to create a benchmark, we discovered he would be an awful Cultural Fit on every single level.
These tests do not focus on personality from a hiring capacity. They should not mine data regarding mental health, gender, race, age, ability or class. They should in no way be discriminative or prejudiced and should exclusively concentrate on personality during a journey of personal self-discovery.
Aligning personalities during the hiring process does not require online testing but rather an understanding of the characteristics, behaviours and cognitions of your employees, present and prospective and utilising them to ensure you have a great culture.
3. Emotional Intelligence: EQ
Something of equal importance to understanding personality, is Emotional Intelligence. Otherwise known as Emotional Quotient or EQ, Emotional Intelligence is the ability to understand, use and manage your own emotions in a positive way to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathise with others and defuse conflict.
Once a buzzword in the hiring process and often coupled with the topics of workplace culture and gender diversity, EQ is one of the most important parts of the hiring process when recruiting into a Family Office.
Professionals in any scenario are expected to carry themselves professionally but in Family Offices, there is an additional prerequisite of interacting with a family.
Prospective hires will often work alongside several key members of a family who despite holding equal authority, have opposing opinions and requests. We see this often with Matriarchs and Patriarchs who have equal vetoing power. Professionals must be empathetic and compassionate enough to listen to their requests, make an accurate assessment and form advice based on analytics and emotions.
They must be confident but obedient, use initiative and influence but adapt and be continually aware that they are an advisor and not a decision maker. Professionals may form a poor opinion of an idea at times based on data or a gut feeling but have to accept that they may not be a change catalyst and the wealth they are generating does not belong to them. They have to be trustworthy, able to communicate and often, manage conflict.
Sometimes however, EQ isn’t about resolving family rifts but simply playing a part. We recently worked with a Family Office where the Principal was also the primary care-giver to her partner. It meant the next hire into the Family Office needed to be the right-hand person to fill in for the Principal, not just in the Family Office but at home too. This meant chairing board meetings and driving her partner to hospital appointments as and when necessary. The line between Family and Family Office was non-existent at times and the next hire had to be empathetic, willing and sympathetic to the cause.
4. Cultural Fit Vs. Mirror Image Hiring
While Cultural Fit should play a pivotal role in the hiring process, assuming the candidate is qualified and competent, Cultural Fit hiring should not offer a smokescreen for Mirror-Image hiring.
This is the process in which a Principal or Hiring Manager recruits an individual based on their almost identical characteristics which can often be their qualities, thought-process, beliefs, education or culture.
To make matters confusing, there are many similarities between this definition and the definition belonging to Cultural Fit which focuses on the alignment of beliefs and behaviours. There is an important distinction.
When hiring a professional based on their ability to fit perfectly into your Family Office, you do so in an attempt to create a successful workplace culture. You can rest assured that the individual is aligned with your principles and is working towards the same goals as the Family Office.
Mirror-Image Hiring while not exclusive to, can often relate to a physical likeness, with many recruiting a ‘mirror-image’ professional. This not only hinders physical diversity efforts but diversity of thought, key not just for an inclusive culture, but commercial success.
Ample and reliable studies have shown that companies in the top quartile of gender and racial diversity are more likely to have financial returns that were above their national industry median, something to consider in the hiring process.
5. Competency Vs. Qualifications
While a workforce made of perfectly aligned professionals allows for a robust and well-balanced team that is both dynamic and amenable, competencies are still key.
During the hiring process, Family Offices often do one of two things. The first is to search for Cultural Fit in their next hire and treat competencies as secondary. Then there are those who in the hunt for the most-competent professionals, forget to consider culture as part of the hiring process.
The two are not mutually-exclusive. You can use a meritocratic approach to find the most-skilled, qualified and competent person for the job who is also able to fit perfectly into the culture of your Family Office. Equally you could find a perfect Cultural Fit hire who lacks in qualifications but has a desire to learn.
We once worked with a Family Office in the Film Industry where the Principal chartered a yacht every summer. Each yacht came with a crew charged with the upkeep and one summer, one crew member in particular caught his attention. He was young, a cleaner and used his summer holidays to earn money while having new experiences. He was also an aspirational Film Director, something this Principal knew a thing or two about. He decided to give this crew member some scripts to look over and true to his word, he did. He spent all night annotating the documents, finding flaws that had otherwise gone undiscovered and impressed the Principal. He showed passion, charisma and an ability to solve problems and by the end of the charter, he had secured a role within the Family Office. Today he heads up the Family Office.
You do not have to sacrifice skill-set to make a Cultural Fit hire and equally, you do not have to hire the same type of person over and over again to ensure you find the right profile. They are not mutually-exclusive so long as you stay open-minded and challenge your own concept of the ideal hire.
Family Offices require more than any other in a prospective employee and it is vital when hiring to set qualifications and competencies to one side and recognise the culture you have today, the culture you would like tomorrow and identify which personalities you need to help you achieve it.
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April 21, 2021 at 04:09PM
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Cultural Fit: The Missing Piece Of The Family Office Puzzle - Forbes
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