Diamond (dogs?)

How to improve interviews, enhance engagement and build a culture of alignment at the organizational level

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” - De Beers marketing ad campaign and Marilyn Monroe’s song in Gentlemen Prefer Blonds

Despite the dated chauvinism redolent in this quote, this slogan was responsible for creating a successful campaign that has pushed up the price of common crystalline carbon to stratospheric levels.  Known for its hardness, the diamond has metastasized into the must own gem for its association with elegance, opulence and stability. 

• Want a peridot for your engagement ring? - Here’s a side order of economic shame with it. 

• How much do you love her? - Show her with cut, clarity, color and of course carat$.

But it turns out that diamonds really are a girl’s best friend and guy’s best friend. They are all of our best friends, regardless of how we identify. 

All humans are, metaphorically, diamonds.  We are all born into this world, rough hewn hunks of literal carbon, each nucleated with the seed of a soul. With time, pressure, heat, experience, joy, and heartbreak - that seed crystallizes and blooms into the person you are, all of us, living breathing “diamonds.”  And like a jeweler evaluating inorganic carbon, at Chimera we used our own version of the 4C’s: character, capability, connection and culture.

The specific choice of language to refer to one another as diamonds was calculated.  We opted out of the use of terms like “all hands meetings” for company-wide gatherings and instead spoke of “all-diamonds meetings”.  To us, each human was a gem, sometimes flawed or rough, but always individual and unique. And it was our commitment at Chimera, to collectively help cut and polish each diamond through the different versions of our own personal 4C’s. 

“At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.”

Stendhal, On Love

Where did this language come from?

Our metaphor and language of the diamond came from from a framework that I learned from Gary Swart.  In 2011, Gary was the CEO of oDesk, a global consulting platform that allowed engineers to outsource specialized engineering tasks and projects around the world.  It was a concept ahead of its time, a specialized community, that was eventually mimicked by Fiverr, TaskRabbit and other contracting and outsourcing platforms.  Gary was interested in people and teams. I had met Gary at an offsite sponsored by our shared investors, Sigma Partners.  Gary spoke of how oDesk’s platform tracked interactions between thousands of contractors across the globe, their sponsors, rates of successful engagements, cost effectiveness and mutual satisfaction between partners.  Through analysis of this data, and some gut feel, he began to intuit the factor that led to higher outcomes across all these metrics - the interview.

Gary considered the traditional interview to be a flawed process because of how they were historically conducted.  You’re a hiring manager; you will comb through dozens, maybe hundreds of resumes, some with little alignment with the job you need performed. This is exhausting and as a shortcut, you’ve developed some pattern matching; a resume looks interesting perhaps because of the school a candidate went to, or a specific company they’ve just left, or they wrote that they have a hobby passion for languages, music or juggling. The resume, a historical document of her skills and experience, are indeed of critical importance for determining fit for a particular position.  You invite him onsite and then you largely spend most of the time probing his past work, challenges, how he solved these problems - you know, everything that was already on their resume.  Maybe you like them a little more now, but didn’t gain any new information about their ability to do the job.

It would be challenging to be a surgeon without understanding anatomy, or be a plumber, never having turned a wrench.  Skills and hard earned experience are valuable and necessary to accomplish a work objective.  But it was what was not on the resume was what Gary and his team were after; there was an aspect of the oDesk interview process that was of much much greater import.

Interview Framework - Skills & Experience

Gary described their interview evaluation framework like this:

Skills and Experience form the foundation of the interview process.

Research, highlighted by Wharton’s organizational behavior guru Adam Grant, shows that it is important to ensure that a candidate could meet performance requirements for a job and that a good match along this axis is important for employee engagement.  A job too challenging, or too boring, for the candidate would result in frustration, stagnation and low motivation. Forward thinking companies realized the value of engagement, and attempted to determine fit by having candidates do job talks, work product reviews, answering “critical thinking” questions like how many ping pong balls fit in a 747. Gary asserted, however, that while these techniques were useful to improve the understanding of fit for an individual job, they were insufficient to assess engagement fit on an organizational basis.

You spend (at least) half of your waking hours with colleagues

At Chimera we believe companies are “nothing more than temporary homes for collections of people”. For anyone who has ever lived with roommates, or teenage children, or partners, there is a common understanding that alignment around shared values and household norms are essential for maintaining a healthy, fun, well-functioning community or family. Companies are largely the same but tasked with the additional onus of working together towards a collective mission.

• Who would you want to be a part of your home?

• Would you want someone who energetically took out the trash of their own accord, or someone who you had to bug to clean up after themselves, even if they paid their rent?

• Would you want a partner who empathetically listened to you, or a parent who berates you for failing to get straight As?

These decisions are incredibly important at home. Similarly, we all spend a significant number of our waking hours engaged with our colleagues at work, often more than the hours we spend with family. It is obvious that obtaining information and making a decision about whom, we choose to work with, is equally, if not more important. And while we don’t always get to choose our family, if we’re lucky, it’s possible to do so at work. So how do we find the people we want to share our professional home with?

The Diamond - Mission, Character and Motivation

At Chimera, we used a slight modification of the oDesk interview framework which we call the diamond, for how it graphically fits into the interview framework:

At Chimera interviews, like at oDesk, we believed that we needed to overemphasize assessing fit on an organizational level. This meant that we spent a significant amount of time probing for mission, character and motivational alignment, weighting these features over the candidates, often, exceptional skills and experience. How did we do this?

1. We started by transparently explaining our diamond centric interview framework: hard earned skills, knowledge and experiences were important, but to us it was critical to determine, with the candidate, authentic desire to work at a place like Chimera. We had to determine whether the candidate was a Chimera diamond. Candidates were informed of this up front.

2. We explained the differences between various aspects of organizational fit and what Chimera valued:

   1. Mission - where were we going?

   2. Character - how were we going to get there?

   3. Motivation - why were we going to get there?

3. We assessed this fit through a series of open ended questions that related to mission, values and motivation. We will delve into more detail in a subsequent post on interviewing, but for a preview, you can check out this living, still to be refined, interview deck co-developed alongside our friends Giles Ochs, former CEO of Prospect Bio and PJ Cobut, former CEO of Spry Health.

Mission at Chimera

At Chimera we felt that you would fit well at Chimera if you were oriented to:

• Affirm dignity for all human experiences

• Aid the patient and improve the patient experience

Character at Chimera

At Chimera we felt deepest about looking for candidates with certain character attributes:

• Collaborative and cooperative - the collective mission is the goal and the individuals serve the mission

• Integrity - be introspective to your compass and follow it

• Curious and generous - concurrently be a student and teacher, make mistakes

• Athletic - not in the physical sense, but being willing to practice a deep desire to learn, grow and execute

Motivation at Chimera

At Chimera, we believed that certain aspects of our “culture” would drive motivation in service of the mission, while being infused with the character we valued:

• Build belonging and CAMP: Community, autonomy, mastery and purpose¹

• Build innovative science and technology

• Have fun, be playful and have a low threshold for celebration

It was as simple as that, for us. We did not necessarily commit to a specific technology in our work (in fact we changed and developed new technologies throughout Chimera’s existence). Nor was economic return our central goal, though we understood the role that finances played in fueling the company. We did not think a “rock-star” team was a bunch of PhDs, from fancy schools, with a public liturgy of accolades. Rather it is our mission, character and motivation that are the concrete embodiments of dignity, of what we described as the horizontal curve of the KM plot.

Chimera’s mission would work for some diamonds, and not for others, and it wasn’t pejoratively judgmental. We celebrate that all humans have contributions to make, but we were committed to unearthing motivational fit at Chimera, which meant sometimes hiring the research associate that didn’t have the required educational degree and passing on the superstar post-doc because they were motivated to publish.

Other diamond frameworks are fine too

Chimera is just one of thousands of organizations or groups with its own collective motivations. Other organizations have perfectly fine motivations as well, and should look for candidates that align with them:

• a hedge fund can care about candidates who desire high internal rate of return as motivational alignment

• a company focused on decarbonization may commit to colleagues who are hell-bent on improving their own CO2 footprint

• an athletic brand should find diamonds that celebrate fitness, health and well-being

There is no right motivation for each organization. It is the commitment to motivational alignment that is of paramount importance.

The Diamond - Does it even work? What’s the impact?

After reading this optimistic, idealist tract, you’re probably thinking to yourself: “Yeah this is good and all, but all companies talk like this. They don’t ever back it up. And culture is just some mumbo jumbo that executives go on about to make themselves feel good.” I understand this and agree with you to a large extent.

My colleague Krista was very fond of saying two wonderful expressions about culture:

• Culture is what is rewarded and what is punished

• Culture is what you do, even when it costs you

At Chimera, we have failed many times in this process: we missed out on some great potential colleagues and we definitely had some Chimerans who were not satisfied with their experience because we made mistakes in the trade off between skills and experiences over alignment. An observation, though, was that when cultural fit was off with some individuals, they would naturally self select out of the group. It seemed there was a powerfully discomfiting effect when, everyone else is rowing to the same beat and, you are slightly off tempo. This is the potency of aligned teams and by doing the upfront work of paying attention to the Diamond, allowed us to unearth, cut and polish alignment.

In the end, I’m uncertain how well this Diamond interview framework performs. I intuitively sense that this is a team building framework infused with human dignity, that, as Walt Whitman describes, “we are not [merely] contain’d between hat and boots,” that we all yearn to distance ourselves from the condensed list of impersonal attributes on a resume, as a summary of our existence.

But there is evidence that this does function: greater joy at work, resilience in spite of the oscillations of a startup, deeper connections between colleagues. You’ll have to ask them individually, though, and I know some of my colleagues will disagree with me about how much to emphasize the diamond over skills and experience. Perhaps the best evidence around the success of the Diamond, is that the most memorable aspect of Chimera continues to be Hump Meeting (we will devote multiple future posts to this topic), our weekly meeting dedicated to celebrating mission, character and motivation, the Diamond.

Commitment to the diamond is a practice, a challenging practice. But I believe that it is a practice that is not only worth committing to in service of human dignity, but advantageous and of paramount importance to make progress the mission.

The Diamond Dogs

Here at Lessons in Chimeristry, we draw significant leadership inspiration from the excellent (and side stitch funny and heartfelt) show Ted Lasso: the Diamond Dogs are a group of men who gather at work to discuss their vulnerabilities, relationship woes and self doubt. The group is infectious because, as humans, we crave real connection which is forged in the shared crucible of the human condition. The Diamond seeks to celebrate and edify these connections, through understanding one another on a deeply personal and authentic level, and in doing so create a more human, more dignified, work experience. The Diamond Dogs, fictitious though they be, are a vision to what work environments can possibly aspire to be - and our Diamond framework may be a pathway towards that.

How will you commit to building teams in such a manner - a commitment to Diamond alignment, over skills, experience and knowledge? How will you commit to living your work with alignment to your values and character? Let’s brainstorm and share in the comments!

Feedback!

I’ve already been told that these posts can be too long, confusing and contain too many topics. I will work on this! I’ve been also asked, who is the audience. I’m not sure yet but let’s find out together!

1. These attributes that increase motivation will be discussed in a future article on Dan Pink’s excellent book Drive, which is part of the canon of Chimera literature.