Friday Leadership Report | Alan Kearns, Founder & Managing Partner, CareerJoy
Happy Friday,
I entered the people and culture world through executive search. I spent many years helping some of Canada’s leading organizations build their leadership teams, and most of the searches we were brought in for were tied to a leadership change. Before we ever looked at a résumé, one of the first conversations with a client was always about fit. Over time, we built a whole methodology around it, quantitative and qualitative, because we learned early that getting fit wrong was far more costly than getting it right the second time.
I was reminded of that this week talking with one of our partners. She runs a sales team, and she’s been keeping a team member who has been the lowest producer on her team most quarters this year. In most organizations, that’s an easy call. You move that person out and bring in someone who can hit the number.
I asked her why she made a different call.
She told me this team member is the first to put her hand up when someone else is drowning. The rest of the team respects her. They genuinely like having her around. Contrast that with a decision this same leader made earlier in the year, when she let go of a salesperson who was consistently top three on the team. That person was quietly corrosive, quick to criticize, and only generous when it benefited her directly. The results were excellent. The impact on the team was not.
Fit can include many elements, not just results. That’s the thing I learned early in my search career and have relearned every year since coaching leaders across this country. The top performers, the ones worth building a team around, do both well.
A Hays Canada survey of roughly 2,500 employers and employees found that 47 percent of Canadian professionals are unhappy in their jobs. The same research found that 86 percent believe fit with a company and its people is essential to their contentment and success, yet when a new opportunity comes along, fit consistently loses out to money. A lack of workplace fit was identified as the single biggest reason Canadians leave or lose a job.
Here’s the part that should stop every leader reading this. Among employers who admitted to hiring someone they suspected wasn’t a fit anyway, more than half of those hires ended in dismissal. Nearly all of the rest called the outcome negative. The same research found that only a third of professionals could articulate what their ideal fit looks like. We know fit matters. Almost nobody has defined it, and almost nobody applies it evenly to their best and worst performers the way my partner did.
Most hiring and retention conversations collapse fit into one dimension: can this person deliver the result we need? That’s a legitimate question. It’s also the shallowest one on the list, and it’s the one my client would have failed her top producer on, right up until the culture around him started to erode.
In our executive search days, we built our assessment around at least four distinct layers of fit, and confusing them is where most leadership decisions go sideways. Skills fit is the one everyone defaults to. Can this person actually do the job? Robert Half Canada’s most recent research on the national hiring landscape found that hiring managers value specialized skills most when evaluating a candidate (53 percent), but leadership ability trails as one of the hardest qualities to find (41 percent), a genuine sourcing gap. Skill is visible on a scoreboard. Character and leadership capacity are not, and neither shows up in a quarterly report.
There is values fit, whether how someone operates matches how your team actually operates, not how it says it does in the culture deck. There is growth fit, whether the stretch a role demands matches where a person genuinely is in their development. And there is what I’d call team fit, the one my partner was protecting: whether someone makes the people around them better or slowly wears them down, regardless of what their own individual numbers say.
Results only tell you whether someone can hit a target once the other three are already accounted for. A leader who evaluates fit purely on results is judging the scoreboard while ignoring who is quietly building the team and who is quietly dismantling it.
This is exactly the terrain our Work. Made Better. Report has been tracking across the organizations we work with, coast to coast, in public, private, and not-for-profit sectors alike. What we consistently see is that the highest-performing teams rarely got there because every person on the roster was the top individual producer. They got there because leaders were deliberate about protecting the people who made the team stronger, even when that protection meant living with a lower number for a while.
We also see the cost of getting this backwards showing up in the metrics every organization already tracks. Express Employment Professionals, in a Harris Poll survey of Canadian hiring decision-makers, found the average cost of employee turnover in this country has climbed to $30,680 per departure, up from $29,234 the year before. Larger employers are the most concerned, with 37 percent of companies with 100 or more staff expecting turnover to rise this year. Leadership at Express connected the finding directly back to culture, noting that when people feel genuinely connected to a healthy work environment, turnover naturally declines. My partner’s top producer never showed up in a turnover statistic. The three people who eventually left because of how he treated them did.
This is precisely the discipline [LQ] Leadership Intelligence is built to develop in the leaders we coach. [LQ] isn’t a personality assessment, and it isn’t something you apply once during a search or a hiring decision. It’s a leader’s capacity to hold both the quantitative and the qualitative picture of a person at the same time, and to have the courage to act on the qualitative side even when the numbers argue against you.
That’s the harder version of leadership. It’s easy to keep a top performer no matter how they treat people, because the number defends the decision for you. It’s much harder to protect a quieter contributor because you can see, the way my partner could, what she actually holds together. The leaders I’ve watched build the strongest teams over nearly three decades are the ones willing to make that harder call, and to explain it clearly when someone asks why.
Before your next performance conversation, separate the question into its real parts the way we used to in search. Can they do the work? Do they operate the way your team actually operates, not the way your values statement claims it does? Is this person still growing into the role they’re in? And are they making the people around them better or slowly making the room smaller?
Results will always be the easiest layer to measure, which is exactly why so many leaders stop there. The leaders who build organizations people actually want to stay in are the ones willing to sit with the harder, messier layers underneath, the way my partner did when she chose culture over her leaderboard.
Along the road with you,
Alan
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