The Under-appreciated Importance of Fit

Summary

I wrote this article to convey the critical, yet often under-appreciated importance of finding a workplace environment and culture that aligns with who you are. Fundamentally, thriving in your professional life depends on the interaction between your personal characteristics and the context. Recognizing this dynamic is essential for finding a satisfying job and making the best career choices.

Whether you’re pursuing a new job, a new career path, or struggling in your current position, understanding the interactions between you, on the one hand, and the system in which you work on the other, is a too often under appreciated driver of professional satisfaction.

“Context determines which genes are turned on and off, so understanding a gene is only useful if you understand which context it occurs in.”

Robert Sapolsky, Neurobiologist, Stanford

Follow Your Passion?

What does this quote have to do with finding a satisfying job, making good career choices and living a good life?

It turns out, a lot.

Let me explain.

Finding work that is fulfilling and rewarding is considered a central ingredient for living a good life. And when we feel good about our work, it spills over to other parts of our lives.

So how can you make the right choices when looking for a job that will lead to a thriving professional career?

If you were to ask your friends and family for advice on this question, you’re likely to hear these kinds of responses:

Find your passion!

Do what you love!

Build up a nest egg and then find your purpose!

None of these, of course, are wrong — and some may resonate more than others depending upon who you are. What’s missing, however, is a dimension that can make or break the outcome of your professional choices—the environment and culture in which you perform your work. Without this contextual information, it’s nearly impossible to predict the level of satisfaction you will feel in a job or even in a field.

Genes and Context

Let’s get back to Dr. Sapolsky’s quote: “Context determines which genes are turned on and off, so understanding a gene is only useful if you understand which context it occurs in.” Let’s replace “context” with work environment and culture and “genes” with your personal talents.

Adding this factor to the model for thriving at work—the workplace environment and culture—is perhaps more complex that you would think. Why? Because there is no absolute way to know how you will respond in a distinct environment and culture.

Sure, there are extremes that may be obvious to you if you pay attention and environments and cultures that 90% of people would either hate or love. Almost everyone would experience these the same way, no-matter who they are.

Unfortunately, most fall somewhere in between. Moreover, the degree to which you thrive or languish in an environment and culture depends almost entirely on how you interact with it.

Finding the Cause

For example, maybe you’re interested in pursuing a career in investment banking. The excitement of pitching companies looking to go public resonates with you and the idea of earning a lot of money is enticing. In your first month on the job, you discover the firm fully embraces a survival-of-the-fittest approach and as a result, you find yourself constantly on edge and stressed, yelled at by your boss and watching others being yelled at. You’re also working in an open cubicle surrounded by screaming colleagues and unable to concentrate.

Does this mean you’re in the wrong field? Not necessarily. You may thrive in another environment or culture where your responses and feelings are more positive. While others may find your current firm to be the right fit, you may discover it’s not at all right for you.

The path to thriving in your work, thus, starts by understanding the interaction between you and the workplace environment and culture. In other words, the issue is less about whether you "have the goods" to perform the job or if the business you work for is a good business. Rather it has more to do with how you, with your genetic composition and everything you have been exposed to since you were born, responds to the particular characteristics of the company.

Applying biology to the goal of finding truly satisfying and fulfilling work reinforces the primordial importance of finding the right fit based on how you will feel and respond to a specific environment and culture. Without focusing on this critical person-environment interactive factor, it’s difficult to assess the degree to which you will thrive.

This has important implications on how you search for a job and pursue your career. Instead of focusing almost entirely on skill development, you also need to ensure you end up in a place that brings out the best in you and feels good.

Defining Environment and Culture

If the environment and culture are so important to thriving at work, what does this encompass? Here’s what I mean by workplace environment and culture:

• By environment, I borrow from Annie Murphy Paul’s recent publication “The Extended Mind” on the outside elements that effect how our brain operates and how we feel: “the feelings and movements of our body, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the other minds with which we interact.” Paul’s key point is that our cognitive abilities —and the potential impact we can have—are influenced by what’s around us.
• Culture includes the shared values, beliefs and norms of how things get done implicitly in an organization. These elements guide behavior and are mirrored, for example, in how decisions are made, work hours and flexibility and communications between employees e.g. formal vs. informal, open door vs. closed door.

Nature or Nurture?

Biology can teach us something about this interactive element and provide some guidance on thriving at work.

The question of nature vs. nurture is a question I suspect most contemporary neurobiologists cringe to hear when asked to explain individual development and behavior

This was not always the case.

For centuries, academics debated the relative importance of genes and environment—sometimes framed as nature versus nurture. We’ve all engaged, at one time or another, in a discussion of what’s most important in shaping an individual’s behavior, talents and overall experience in life.

Behind this question are a couple of important issues:

1. How much of who we are and our life is determined by our parent’s genes (nature)?
2. How much of who we are and our life is determined by the environment, most importantly our upbringing (nurture)?

It turns out, this framing ignores a crucial element—how environment and individual’s genes interact.

Here’s how Sapolsky puts it:

"No biology. No environment," he writes. "Just the interaction between the two."

Instead of asking these questions about nature and nurture, the real question is how will our biology be affected by the environment in which we work. For example, if we have been diagnosed with ADHD, in which environments will this condition become more or less of an issue? Or if we were brought up by parents with strict humanitarian values, how will we feel in a more economically driven culture?

The idea of this concept—that it’s the interactions between our biology and the environment that really matter —can be applied to finding the right job or career. If you buy into this premise, that the interaction is what matters, then you need to start with two essential questions when we’re thinking about the question of finding the right job or career:

First, what are the salient characteristics of a work environment that determine if you will thrive or wither? For example: the balance between recognizing achievement and respecting personal life boundaries? The value placed on creativity and risk taking as compared to operating efficiency and productivity? The role of purpose in shaping decisions?

Second, what are the salient characteristics of the organization you are considering and do they align with who you are? When you show up in this environment, how will your biology respond. Do you sense a feeling of being: Empowered? Overwhelmed? In control? Motivated?

Let’s now expand on how this interactive element works and its importance in determining the outcome of the choices you make about employment.

It Starts with You

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a prestigious brand or an opportunity to earn a lot of money. Let’s face it, we care about what other people think of us, and our jobs represents inputs into how we feel about our social status.

Like it or not, we respond biologically to how we feel about our status. When we have a high paying job that allows to afford expensive cars, a large, luxurious home, and vacation in expensive places, we reinforce our status.

However, the allure of status and money represents just one side of the equation when it comes to work satisfaction. This can create some tension when some other characteristic of our work does exactly the opposite: it causes negative emotional responses that represent essential information about our well being. Often, we choose to ignore these alerts because they conflict with other information: “I like to work for a well know company and earn a lot of income and purchase the things I want.”

This is just one example of a tradeoff. Here’s another one: the company culture appears to punish any failure, leading to disempowering employees who fear sharing their creative ideas.

This undermining of psychological safety not only alienates people, but it limits the ability to have impact and respond to business issues when changes are needed. Eventually, this kind of culture will lead many people—particularly those who highly value making an impact— to head for the exits.

Interacting with the Environment and Culture

How would you describe an environment in which you would flourish? How about an environment in which you risk languishing?

When you’re exploring a new position and going through the interview process, this is something you want to be thinking a lot about. To know if the environment will bring out the best in you, you need to do your research. When meeting with people in the company for interviews, ask the questions that will reveal the salient characteristics of the company’s culture, such as values and behaviors. For example, consider asking:

“What types of people thrive in your company? What types people don't?”

Perhaps the biggest barrier to finding the environment that will bring out the best in you is the dependence on income from a job and the fear of having no other options. This makes people highly vulnerable to staying in the wrong environment and culture and accepting new jobs that may also be the wrong environment and culture.

There are ways to dilute this risk, including developing a vibrant network of strong relationships and continuously adding new knowledge and capabilities to your value proposition.

Your Team

Culture starts at the top of an organization and cascades downward. However, in companies, there are micro-cultures. While these “cultures” are not fully insulated from the influences of top management, they can make a big difference, albeit in both directions.

A great team leader can counter-act a bad company-wide culture, assuming the person sticks around. Moreover, the right company-wide culture can be ruined by a boss whose style does not bring out the best in you.

The Under-appreciated Importance of Fit

When you're considering a job, you're probably focusing on things like responsibility, income, benefits, and opportunities for growth. As you research and engage with a new company, or even adjust in a new job, don’t focus on yourself and the company environment and culture independently. Instead, focus on the interaction between you and that environment and culture.

The most powerful tools we have for that are our emotions, which represent essential information for decision making, and our cognitive faculties that allow us to evaluate the alerts from the emotions we create. There’s our gut feel about a workplace and also our appraisal of the feelings thanks to the cognitive faculties of our brain.

For individuals thinking about their work, the challenge, and the opportunity, is always to consider how you will do in a specific environment and culture. It’s this interaction that will determine how satisfied you are and whether the work environment brings out the best in you.

Conclusion

Whether or not you thrive in your job depends how your biology interacts with the environment and the culture of the organization for which you work. I call this the interactive factor, borrowing from the field of neurobiology. The implications of this are clear: placing a greater emphasis on the characteristics of your employer will lead to a more positive work experience, and yes, a greater chance of thriving.

About David Ehrenthal

After a 25+ year career as a marketing executive and CEO, in the US and Europe, I created Mach10 Career & Leadership Coaching. As a coach, I help people overcome the obstacles that are preventing them from reaching their important professional goals. This may mean helping a client: become a more skilled and impactful leader, successfully transitioning to a new role, progressing more quickly in their career, avoiding burnout, adapting creatively to rapid change, or reconsidering career direction.

Please email David at dehrenthal@mach10career.com or give him a ring at 617-529-8795 if you want to talk.

Or visit mach10career.com.