Culture Isn't a Soft Metric. It's the Growth Lever.

"You almost got poo-pooed out of the room," she recalls. "Well, that's you can't monetise that. I've never agreed with that. I always think the core of people is what gets you growth. Great people get you growth."

It's a view Jenny has built three businesses on, from turning around a struggling confectionery company ahead of its sale to Nestlé, to co-founding two successful recruitment and search brands with fellow Tribe co-founder James Brooke. Today, her focus has shifted further up the org chart: getting more diversity of thought into boardrooms and C-suites, and making the case that culture fit at the executive level isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a hire performing and a hire quietly underperforming for years.

You can get everything else right and still lose

Ask Jenny what actually determines whether an executive hire works out, and the answer isn't the CV.

"You can get every other piece right in the recruitment process, the technical capability, the skill sets, the experience, and if you get the fit wrong, it doesn't matter how great all of those things are, you'll never get the full potential out of your person."

That's a direct challenge to how most executive searches are still run: define the competencies, screen for them, hire the best match on paper. Jenny's argument is that competency screening tells you almost nothing about whether someone will thrive inside a specific culture, and a mismatch there quietly caps performance regardless of how qualified the person is.

Understanding culture means being in it, not being told about it

So how do you actually assess fit rather than guess at it? Jenny's answer is blunt: you have to spend time in the business.

"The best way you can truly understand a culture is to play in it a little bit," she says. "That doesn't mean we have to be in your business all of the time. It means we can walk along the hallway and just observe the conversations and the chat that's going on in the interactions going on with the different teams. That's gold. It's way more important than you telling me what you're looking for in terms of your competency."

This is a meaningfully different model to a transactional search process, and it demands something from the client too: honesty about what the culture actually is, not what it's supposed to look like on paper.

"Whatever your culture is, don't shy away from it," Jenny says. "If it's not great at the moment, awesome, here's an opportunity. Own that, because otherwise we'll put the wrong people in your business again. So don't sell it to us."

Diversity of thought at the top isn't a box to tick

The other thread running through Jenny's work is a direct challenge to boards and C-suites on diversity of thought, and it goes further than representation targets.

"What questions are you asking as a board of yourselves in terms of what you want sitting around your exec table, and how are you going to get that diversity of thought?" she asks. "When you say you want a female around that board table or at your exec level, how serious are you about that, and why do you want that?"

Her challenge cuts both ways. To leaders bringing more women into senior roles, she's clear that authenticity matters more than fitting an existing mould: "Stop trying to be a man. Sit in the discomfort of genuinely being the beautiful self you are. Because it shows through when you're not trying to be something that makes you uncomfortable."

To hiring managers and boards more broadly, particularly those navigating executives returning from time out of the workforce, her guidance is to ask better questions, not fewer of them: "What support do you get at home? How can we perhaps play a part in that? What do you need from us so that you can be your best version of yourself while you're at work?" The point isn't to interrogate someone's ability to do the job. It's to genuinely set them up to succeed in it, and to have that conversation honestly rather than avoiding it.

The takeaway for boards and C-suites

Executive hiring that stops at skills and competencies is only doing half the job. The businesses getting the most out of their senior appointments are the ones treating culture fit and diversity of thought as seriously as capability, and doing the harder work of actually understanding their own culture well enough to know who will thrive in it.

Bringing a new executive or board member into your organisation? Talk to the Tribe Executive team about what genuine culture fit looks like before you write the job description. With offices in Auckland and Wellington, and recruiting nationwide, the team can help you find your people.

This article draws on Tribe Group's Find Your People podcast, featuring co-founder Jenny Jones. Listen to the full conversation here.