Finding Fit

So I have the cutest three year old daughter. She is the biggest character and has so much personality. Since working at home her and I have gotten really close. Its been fun to be so close to the child rearing action these last few years because I have such a pulse on the important family issues. Like blue shoes.

My three year old has a pair of blue shoes that she thinks, no, that she knows are the most beautiful pair of shoes ever to be created. She saw them at a garage sale and was sold. Even after we tried them on (her not me) and they didn't really fit still they had to be hers.

They were a  bit too tight, but still a little doable, that no mans land where a smart dad would just say no and go to the next garage. But we do have a special connection so I got them. In the car we squeezed her small feet into the even smaller shoes. Her feet looked like bloated sausages that were overpacked. She didn't care. So neither did I. At least for a while.

Soon the shoes there were so blue and so beautiful were proving to be more trouble then they were worth, even at garage sale prices. Every time she wanted to wear them (always) I had to spend 10 minute prying her feet into them, only to have her come crying to me to take them off 7 minuets later because they were cutting off piggy circulation.

I am sure that there are lessons aplenty that we could find in this wee story of woe but the one we are going with today is FIT within shoes is the same within an office place. Being able to hire a person to a job is so much more these days. Not only do they have to be able to complete the duties of the position but are they the right fit for the organization, its culture, and the people within.

Fit within the workplace is not the newest line of research for I/O psychologists but it is a crazy important one. One such psychologist who has made a very good name for herself focusing on fit is Dr. Natalie Baumgartner. I had recently found her TED talk in which she spends a very entertaining and enlightening 9:49 speaking on todays subject.