MAKE INFORMAL RULES FAIR

If you are a leader who is serious about creating a highly inclusive organization – one that can recruit, develop, retain, and leverage the different perspectives and talents of a diverse workforce – then the right place to start is by examining your organization's Fit Factors. The Organizational Fit Series includes assessments, along with independent and facilitated online learning. The Series focuses on the formal and informal norms, rules, traditions, and unwritten criteria that are embedded and operate invisibly in your organization's or team's culture.

The Organizational Fit Series helps team members identify the gaps between their strengths and the unwritten requirements and informal norms working on their team and in their organization. It also helps leaders, managers and teams explore and respond to these Fit Factors so they can:

  • Identify and weed out outmoded and unnecessary informal fit requirements that create barriers for various identity groups
  • Hold safe and meaningful conversations between managers and employees about hidden, unspoken aspects of the culture
  • Identify the norms that contribute to some identity group members languishing as outsiders on teams and in organizational cultures

Identify barriers within teams and organizations.

Lean about the formal and informal norms, rules, and traditions that invisibly operate within your culture

The Series Includes Four Modules

Physical Package

Explore the intersection between your identity and the organizational expectations to present a particular look, appearance, or physical and cultural attribute(s). And understand better how this junction can subtly determine success in your organization or on your team. As a manager, learn ways to give feedback effectively and sensitively to colleagues who may have fit issues due to their physical "package." Investigate whether fit factors are understood informally throughout the team and organization or are unwritten and require you to figure them out on your own.

Passages, Potential and Pedigree

Assess and understand how your identity influences your pathway forward - those tickets that must be punched to ensure upward mobility. Also, appreciate the implications of being perceived as having raw talent and native intelligence, and how the status of your social background and heritage influence how leaders perceive your fit.

PR, Perspective and Presence

Explore how your work identity is expressed - through your style, demeanor, attitude, and charisma - and how it affects your ability to showcase your talents. Also, investigate the importance of having the right "team-player" point of view, values, and beliefs. Compare your style concerning the organization's normative style: how does your demeanor, attitudes, charisma, and curb appeal play into - or against - your being recognized as someone with the right stuff and star wattage to ascend.

Passion, Pastimes and Patronage

Explore how aspects of your identity transmit your level of drive, ambition, commitment, and sheer will to succeed. Uncover the expectations for participation in organizational leisure and social activities as an out-of-office way to create team camaraderie. Find out how your identity influences your ability to garner those allies, advocates, and sponsors in high places whose support you will need to achieve upward mobility.

Change Starts Here

Uncover Hidden Norms and Biases

Fit decisions are made every day, both consciously and unconsciously. FIT-IN works with managers and teams to locate the professional and identity-based barriers and biases that often hide in formal and informal practices.

Without realizing it, Fit Factors are influencing the simplest of practices in an organization, from the order colleagues are supposed to speak at meetings and how one wears their hair to the most complex decisions about how people are hired, assigned, promoted, and treated as organizational members.

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the Organizational Fit Series

Identify, Assess, and Respond to Formal, Informal, and Unwritten Norms