If you’ve ever found yourself in a company that doesn’t value your skills, you’ll appreciate the discussion on finding the right corporate culture for the skills you bring to an organization. In this post, we’ll take a quick look at how you can overcome a very common barrier for moving your career to the next level.
Job fit is fairly easy for the company and the individual to figure out; that is, you have the skills for the job or either the company feels they can teach you what you need to know. Organization or culture fit is much more difficult. It is essentially the alignment of beliefs and values of you and the company.
When companies interview candidates for hire, one would hope that they are asking questions that will assess both fits. Unfortunately, many companies don’t know what their values are. It’s fairly safe to say that many people that get involved in the interview process don’t fully understand their own company’s culture. Assessing whether you will fit or not is too difficult for most interviewers and usually doesn’t happen.
Defining your values. It is useful for you to have a good understanding of why you work. Sure, we all work for the money. But do you work for increasing technical challenge, higher levels of authority, or high visibility? One thing most highly educated professionals value is graduate degrees. The advanced degree is a tool for supporting the desire to do higher level tasks.
Other values that professionals seek are affiliation, autonomy, intellectual challenge, managing people, power, influence, prestige, recognition, security, variety and so on. If you want to achieve higher levels of success within someone else’s organization, you have to know your values and how you will use them.
To know what type of environment that you would thrive in, you must first understand what you value. If your values are not present in your environment, you won’t be happy. You’ll become restless and will make a change. Sometimes this change is a conscious move to another company or it can be a subtle transformation to self-defeating behavior that drives a wedge between you and the company, forcing them to remove you.
As mentioned earlier, ascertaining the values of a company from an interview is a big challenge. So maybe it isn’t the best place to look. Consider your career goals to define the location for a values assessment.
At all levels of management, values are different, but most managers strive to be similar to the managers at the highest levels. Henry Mintzberg defined the Ten Managerial Roles in 1973, outlining the typical behavior for CEOs. Later on, Pavett and Lau (1983) performed similar studies of lower and middle level managers and found that they emulated the higher level managers.
To align your strengths and skills with an organization, you need to align them with the values of higher level management. If they value what you have, you will be more successful. If they don’t, you’ll have a difficult time becoming extremely successful. After all, people don’t like to change, especially if they value security.
Reaching your career goals in someone else’s organization is difficult. We often find ourselves in groups that don’t appreciate our skills and abilities. Of course, we don’t know what kind of culture we are in until we are neck deep in it. At that point, it can be painful and waste a lot of time trying to get out of the company and into a new one.
Read the full article here: http://www.careerrocketeer.com/search?q=Finding+a+Culture+for+Success
