Culture fit is a lie
The hidden costs of harmony
Hiring for culture fit feels like common sense.
You want your people to get along. Share the same values. Speak the same language. Move in lockstep with each other.
At first, it feels like magic. Decisions flow easily. Meetings run smoothly. Everyone nods at just the right moments, and the workplace hums with a quiet harmony.
But give it long enough, and you start seeing a pattern.
No matter where you look, everyone sounds the same, thinks the same, acts the same. Instead of challenging each other, people validate each other. Instead of questioning their biases, they confirm them. Instead of seeking the truth, they seek agreement.
Every meeting becomes an exercise in mutual reassurance. Every conversation echoes the last. The same lines, the same jokes, the same safe ideas — on repeat. The workplace just doesn’t hum anymore. It murmurs. The same stories. Over and over.
Every challenge feels like a threat. Every dissent feels like betrayal. An opinion that doesn’t conform is met with a soft smile and a sharp kill: “Well, that’s not how we do things around here.”
This isn’t fit. It’s an echo chamber built one hire at a time.
The fiction of fit
When most companies hire for fit, what they really hire for is familiarity. They may say they want a shared purpose, but what they really want is a shared personality.
Beneath all that talk about purpose and values, there are unspoken intuitions that you’d never find in a job description:
Will she laugh at our jokes? Will she get our humour?
Doesn’t he seem too intense? How will he fit in here?
When companies confuse unity with uniformity, hiring turns into a Xerox machine. It mass-produces duplicates where each new hire is a lower-resolution copy of the last. Each “perfect fit” absorbs — and then reinforces — the same cultural grammar.
The more the copies, the narrower the vision.
The narrower the vision, the quieter the dissent.
The quieter the dissent, the stronger the delusion.
The paradox
At the heart of this lies a paradox: the more you hire for cultural fit as it exists today, the more you prevent your culture from becoming what it needs to be tomorrow.
The more you feed it the sameness of the present, the more you starve it of the newness of the future. The more you cling to your current form, the more you harden it.
So, the deeper problem isn’t that organisations misunderstand fit. It’s that they misunderstand culture itself.
They see culture as a fortress to defend rather than a garden to tend.
As something to hold onto, rather than a space to step into.
A script, instead of a dialogue.
A noun, instead of a verb.
Culture isn’t a thing you own. It’s somewhere you live. It’s the space between what is and what can be — the space that lives in the tension of difference and the collision of ideas that crack open the old to make way for the new.
The next time you think about culture fit:
Instead of asking “Do they share our mindset?”, ask: “Will they stretch our thinking in ways we wouldn’t on our own? Will they help us see what we’re taking for granted, while keeping us anchored in our roots?”
Instead of asking “Do they see the world the way we do?”, ask: “Will they help us see the world more deeply, more clearly, more truthfully?”
Instead of asking “Will we get along?”, ask: “Will they question us in ways that improve our character? Will they challenge us in ways that make us wiser? Will they deepen trust, not by keeping the peace, but by helping us see what’s worth fighting for?”
Instead of asking “Do they align with who we are?” ask: “Will they respect who we are, while helping us become who we need to be? Will they honour what we’ve built, while making space for what’s next?”
We don’t need people who fit. We need people who stretch us. Not the people who mirror our perspectives, but those who widen our lenses.
That’s how we build a culture that’s brave enough to adapt and strong enough to evolve.
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