We said earlier that people learn cultural routines. Here's what one anthropologist who regularly eats at McDonald's reports about his experience there. Quote, at a McDonald's that I frequent, the phrases uttered by the salespeople are just as standard as those of the customers. If I ask for a quarter pounder, the ritual response is, will that be with cheese sir? If I do not order french fries the agent automatically incants, will there be any fries today, sir? And when I pick up my order, the agent conventionally says, have a nice day sir. Come in again. The anthropologist observing the routines seemed at the time to be unaware that they are the kinds of interactional patterns with customers, or, what we were calling preconceived routines, that managers at McDonald's Hamburger, U we discussed earlier, are trained to implement. They're a part of socially transmitted culture. My colleague at Penn, sociologist Robin Leidner, has written extensively about these routines in her book Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work, and the Routinization of Everyday Life. This brings me to an important point about teams and team culture. In developing a team designed to achieve specific goals, it is crucial that recruitment efforts be focused on finding new team members whose existing cultural orientation fits the culture of the team. In a business context, those involved in hiring need to look at the cultural fit of perspective employees with the firm's culture. Here is an example to bring home the point, Scott Cawood wrote a PhD dissertation in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He recounts his first experience of employment this way. At 16, I entered the workforce as an excited and optimistic employee at a local McDonald's restaurant. My position was officially listed as a sandwich associate, which to me sounded like a good role and certainly one in which I thought I would excel. But things didn't go as smashingly as Scott had hoped. I was immediately pulled aside by my coworkers, he wrote, and line leaders for various things that all fit into the category of, that's not how we do things here. The most famous one was when I tried to make the hamburgers more fun by arranging the ketchup, mustard, and onions into smiley faces when applying the condiments. My tenure at McDonald's was short lived. I was fired after two and a half months for being unable to follow the protocols and for not being a, quote, good fit, unquote. During my termination meeting, the manager told me that they looked for a certain type of person who's able to follow directions and to not take matters into their own hands. And she added that I was unable to do either of those things. I should emphasize that Scott went on to have a very successful business career. He has been president of Synergy, now Optimize, the largest sales incentive software and services organization in existence. He has also been vice president for global talent and management at Revlon. And he has currently at W.L. Gore, makers of GORE‑TEX on their organizational effectiveness team. His particular talents and cultural orientation were better suited for such executive type positions, but not a good fit for the role of sandwich associate at McDonald's. Nancy Rothbard, professor at Penn's Wharton School, argues that it is better to hire based on cultural fit rather than skills or experience. She says, quote, the question hiring managers should be looking to answer is, does this candidate's values align with those of the company? Be they work-life balance, corporate mission, or how to handle a customer phone call. And we might add how to prepare a hamburger at McDonald's.
