‘Best Fit’ – a help or hindrance to leadership diversity?

I’ve been inspired to write this short piece following a really interesting discussion led by Everton Burke OBE, one of our Leading from the Middle mentors and Chair of Governors at Burton and South Derbyshire College, which occurred during one of our recent middle leadership development sessions.

I’ve lost count of the number of times when at the start of a selection process for a leadership role a statement is made along the lines of “the fact that you are all here means it is very likely that you can do this job, but today is all about getting the best fit for the organisation”. As a Principal/CEO, I myself opened selection processes in this way – but let’s stand back and do some thinking about what this really means.

At one end of the spectrum the phrase ‘best fit’ relates to the fit of the individual with the organisation’s culture, behaviours and values - but at the other end of the spectrum it means you won’t do the job the way the organisation wants you to do it, you may challenge the status quo, or the individuals on the hiring panel don’t feel at ease with you.

It could be argued however that a focus on ‘best fit’ will always result in more of the same, less diversity in the people that are brought into leadership roles in the organisation, and a failure to enhance the intellectual capacity of the organisation – in other words the safest option will always be the preferred choice of the hiring panel if there is an overreliance on ‘best fit’.

Therefore, the use of a ‘best fit’ approach in recruitment could in fact be used as a means of gatekeeping and preventing people from different social, ethnic or career backgrounds becoming leaders in organisations –the phrase ‘people like us’ comes to mind here.

And ‘people like us’ means the preferred candidate will look like us, will think like us, will act like us and will conform to our stereotypes of what leaders and leadership should look like.

As well as there being a strong moral case for moving away from a process overly focused on ‘best fit’, there is also a strong business case for doing so. Different people bring different things -  new ways of thinking, different ways of approaching problems, access to new opportunities, the development of new relationships and enhancing internal and external reputation and perceptions.

So, I have now undertaken to move away from the use of this term and to encourage my clients to join me in this. If we are genuinely serious about achieving diversity in leadership and opening up leadership roles to a more diverse field of people with divergent thinking and wider cultural and social experiences, then the first step is not to focus on ‘best fit’.