Know your place: why finding the right fit is powerful

I was once sacked from a job because I wasn’t posh enough.?

It’s a story I tell often – and people are gratifyingly horrified. At the time, I was boiling with righteous outrage, too. It took years but eventually, I realised they were right.?

And if you’re also repeatedly and self-indulgently picking at a scab of injustice caused by a former employer, there’s a chance that you too might be wrong.

That company had headhunted me. They had courted me and tempted me away from another job. They knew me professionally and they knew my skillset. And they knew I was only 27.

I met some nice people there. And even more clever ones. It was a rapidly-growing TV production company – ambitious, successful and sometimes glamorous. The signs had been there for a while: three of us slunk out for lunch regularly just to chew over the complexities of being from a working class background but employed in this culture.?

It finally unravelled on a work trip abroad.?

Dining in a swanky restaurant, with most of the senior team, talk turned to schooldays. Even now, the 11 plus exam still exists in Kent, where I grew up. I’d passed the test and the grammar school still listed on my CV at the time always confused people into thinking I hadn’t been to state school.?

I shot down their assumptions that, like them, I’d been to private school. I had what I thought was a? friendly chat with my colleagues, tossing in a few anecdotes growing up in Margate. In the days before the Turner Contemporary gallery and the town’s subsequent hipstification, Margate could be an isolated and lawless place. If you walk down the wrong street (for example, the High Street) it still is.?

On our return to the UK, I was summoned to the MD’s desk.?

“You’ve got a great brand,” he told me. “You’re very popular with the staff.” (A note of slight surprise in his voice here.)

“But your brand doesn’t fit our brand. We think you should look for something else.”

These people were famously ahead of the game when it came to brand. Brand was their thing. In the 90s, the independent TV production sector was still pretty much pre-pubescent. Grateful to win commissions, these ex-BBC and ITV staffers blithely signed away all kinds of rights and few looked beyond the traditional confines of making a TV show, pocketing the lovely money and pissing off to Quo Vadis and Soho House.?

Not this lot.

They astutely realised that their intellectual property had legs beyond the screen. They owned and sold their formats, created merchandise off the back of their shows and generally paved the way for others to follow in their commercial footsteps.

I learned a huge amount.

But their obsession with brand is the reason I got fired in such an odd way. My brand was simply wrong.?

They didn’t want this scrappy state school kid, who knew no-one. Being able to fend off the local gluesniffers (“Ere - what time is it?” “Six o’clock.” “Six o’clock at night or six o’clock in the morning?” True story. RIP) wasn’t a skill that mattered within the elegant walls of that Bloomsbury townhouse.?

I don’t remember what stories I told during the evening in Cannes but they instantly knew my tales weren’t funny and I wasn’t useful. So I politely got the heave ho.?

I choked down my injustice and replaced myself. Generous to a fault, me.

I knew someone who’d been to Eton and was currently working as the round peg in the square hole that I should probably have been in. He certainly fitted into the company that fired me – last time I looked, he was still there.?

Never showing it to their faces, I carried the shame for years. I was typically chippy about it, using it to cement my inverted snobbery so that I felt justified in instantly loathing anyone with a cut-glass accent, a second home in Frinton or a tennis racket.

Somewhere along the way, I lost most of my Margate drawl. Did I do it deliberately, to fit in? Possibly. Maybe it just slid away naturally.?

I moved to another job. They weren’t necessarily public school types there. They were Cambridge types. I didn’t fit in there either and they also sacked me in the end.?

Mind you, that time, I’d already resigned, which made the sacking a bit pointless. I assume the MD felt he’d flexed his ego a bit, which will have helped. He ‘sacked’ me during my notice period with his feet up on his desk, so I could see the tread on his shoes spelled Farhi, as in French fashion designer Nicole Farhi. To this day, that feels rather inelegant.?

The story behind that sacking made it to the national newspapers, the Press Complaints Commission and at least one book, but I’ll save it for another time.?

With the first dismissal – the one for not being posh enough, not Mr Farhi-loafers – it took me years to get over the embarrassment and the anger. And one day, I just realised they were right.

Granted, they should never have hired me in the first place. But they were looking for seats on committees, roles in public bodies, honours from the government. Which all, in time, came – to some of them, at least.?

I couldn’t help them with that. Being friends with Margate’s bouncers and knowing a tradesman for every eventuality wasn’t going to win anyone a knighthood. I’m exaggerating, of course. But even being friends with showbiz editors and TV correspondents and knowing how to write a cracking press release wasn’t going to do the trick there.

Today, culture comes before everything else for me. I’ve carried on making mistakes sometimes: a couple of years with a business that believed in paying people the least they could get away with, and working them into serious breakdowns, in some cases. Plenty of utterly brilliant, utterly lovely people have worked there for years. But – and it’s probably that working-class indoctrination again – the things that matter to me weren’t the things that mattered to them.?

My happy place may not be yours. My Eton-educated contact, who replaced me in that TV job, thrived precisely where I was a misfit. It doesn’t make him wrong. And it doesn’t make me wrong. We were just wrong for each other.?

Right now, I work with some people I admire a lot. We believe in the same things. I’m inspired by their talent and vision. Yet I’ve heard a Molotov cocktail of vitriol hurled in their direction. It seems horribly unjust to me, but I’ve learned there isn’t just one version of the truth. (Also, some people can be dicks and they’d moan about their boss if their name popped out when the white smoke rose from the Vatican chimney).

Realising those TV people were right taught me something very valuable. Whether I’m hiring or applying, it’s fit that I look for first and foremost. Skills can be taught. Believing in the same things, having the same work ethic and striving for the same level of excellence is what really matters. And helping everyone on the team to understand and get on board with the culture is the very best bit of the job I do today.