Cultural Apprenticeship

The hidden ingredient in “hire for attributes” (vs skills)…. a drum that I beat constantly…is cultural apprenticeship.

You can’t just hire someone smart, hungry, and coachable, toss them into chaos, and expect magic.

That works once in a while.

Mostly it creates confusion.

The real version is slower….but more powerful.

You find someone with the raw material. Then you let them get close enough to the real decision loop that they start absorbing judgment.

What does “good” look like here?
When do we move fast?
When do we slow down?
When do we ask?
When do we just handle it?
What is a serious answer?
What kind of excuse gets culturally rejected?

None of that lives cleanly in a training doc or an SOP.

It gets transmitted through proximity, correction, debriefs, standards, stories, and watching senior people make decisions under pressure, quickly.

You need to let them in the room!

That’s why your middle managers matter so much - they are carrying culture!

The people who become truly dangerous are not just smart/hungry/coachable…. that's the price of admission! That’s gold in the mountain… needing to be mined!

The right people have spent enough time around the operating system as “cultural apprentices” to internalize the whole SHEBANG.

(my favorite way to know this is happening, is when my team go ahead and ask me a question, and they say, "I already know what you're gonna say.")

They know what we mean when we say “do the thing.”

That is cultural apprenticeship.

And if you want to build a company full of high-agency people, you need to take that seriously.

Attributes are the raw material.

Apprenticeship is how you turn them into judgment.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon