I hope part one of this article was useful to you as you think about assembling your organization’s dream team.
Let’s continue with the second half of team hiring lessons I’ve learned the hard way.
5. Thou shalt hire slowly (and fire quickly)
Long ago, someone told me that the number one rule and mistake in HR is this: people hire too quickly, and they fire too slowly.
Turns out old clichés are clichés for a reason. Now that I’ve been at this for the better part of two decades, I would agree that this is a cardinal sin of hiring, and it happens far too often.
Sometimes that’s because we wait too long to do talent development or enter the hiring process. We get our backs against the wall and have to make a decision, and then we just decide too soon.
Sometimes it’s because we’re rushed. Pastors know all too well that “Hiring 101” is not a class that’s offered in seminary and that time management is almost impossible in pastoral ministry.
Take it for me, because I’ve made this mistake. Plenty of times. Hiring quickly ends poorly.
We’ve done a lot of work over the years for my friend Dave Ramsey. He’s notorious for interviewing people many many many times, like more than a dozen. One time I said to Dave, “Dave, I could place somebody in the CIA before I could get them approved by your process.”
He looked at me and said, “William, even a donkey can act like a thoroughbred for three interviews.” I’ll never forget that quote, and I quote it a lot.
How many interviews are you doing before hiring? Add a few. How many team members are you including in the process? Add a few more. Obviously, you can’t let the entire staff interview and decide who the next staff member will be, but adding a number of voices allows for so much more wisdom.
Start the interview process with yourself, then spread the circle out to your closest advisors. Then, as you get down to a finalist, let your candidate interview with people who will work for them, alongside them, and that they will work for.
It sounds tedious, but I guarantee you if you take more time on this end of things, you’ll have more hiring success.
My good friend and former colleague Tim Stevens says it this way: “we like long hellos and short goodbyes.”
6. Thou shalt not mistake an organization’s growth for an individual’s capacity
When I first started doing searches, the third client I ever had and I made a mistake together. It was a good size church that had come to the place of needing an executive pastor. So off we went looking.
We identified a candidate who had been the head of a department of a very, very large successful church. It was in the same general geographic region of the country. The church had a stellar reputation and had grown like wildfire for quite a while.
I interviewed the candidate, and felt good about things. I interviewed the candidate’s executive pastor, and he felt good about this, too. In fact, he knew the client I was working for and felt like the two might be a good fit. Everything looked great.
It turned into one of the worst hires I’ve ever overseen. Not because the candidate misbehaved. Not because they weren’t a culture fit. It was because they couldn’t get anything done.
What was the mistake I had made? I mistook this person’s participation on a growing team with his ability to lead growth on a team. This is a mistake I see played out over and over, even today. I’ve learned my lesson, but it’s a lesson that a whole lot of people still make.
I’ve made the same mistake in hiring for my own organization. In our search work, we have grown every single year we’ve been in existence (except 2020, the pandemic year). So I’m always looking for candidates that have talent in larger organizations.
But I’ve come to realize that we are a team of just under 50 employees. And hiring someone who’s worked for a fortune 200 company almost never works when they have to move to a team our size. So now I look for people that are just a little bit ahead of us, or people who have shown the ability to work in a team our size before their work at a very large place.
I wonder if you’ve ever had the thought, “If we could just get a team member from that growing church down the road.” Have you ever looked at a really successful organization and just wished you could have someone from that team? I’m here to tell you it’s not always a good idea. After making this mistake for a client and for myself, I’m realizing that I should never mistake being on a growing team with being able to grow an organization.
If you’re interviewing someone from a much larger organization, be sure to make sure that candidate can catalyze growth. Not just ride the coattails of it.
7. Thou shalt hire for culture over competency
For a long time, people have talked about the various C’s of hiring. Character, competency, chemistry, culture, and many others have been added to the list.
The longer I do executive search, the more I’m convinced that everyone is a character. As our client and friend who is now with Jesus, Mark Beeson, used to say, “You won’t find people without a past. Just make sure you find people whose past is actually in the past.”
Character really does matter, but don’t look for someone completely without sin, because that person is in Heaven with His father.
Maybe the biggest mistake I’ve made in hiring is overvaluing competence. There are a few jobs where competence really, really matters. If your worship leader cannot carry a tune, that’s a problem. If my brain surgeon is great at brain surgery, but doesn’t get along with other people, I really don’t care.
But for the most part, in church work, ministry is about getting along with and leading people. That competency can be learned. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the 12 that Jesus chose as His apostles: not much to work with, but he taught them well.
Culture, on the other hand, cannot be taught. I’ve tried to find ways to teach it, and just can’t.
So when hiring, make sure you understand the culture of your team. Maybe take a look at our assessment for culture to start identifying your team’s values. When I wrote the book Culture Wins, we outlined a process for identifying those values. Now almost eight years later, thousands of organizations have followed that roadmap and better understand what their culture is.
Knowing your culture gives people a huge lead in hiring. For instance, we value speed of responsiveness as a culture here at Vanderbloemen. There are plenty of super talented people who love Jesus dearly–and who will have a nicer place and heaven than I will–that just don’t respond quickly. As nice as they are, they would be miserable working for us.
If you can find a way to teach culture and train it, good for you. Write a book about it. But every expert I’ve talked to over the years has told me culture fit is something that people either have or don’t.
So make sure you know exactly what your culture is for your unique team, and then hire around those habits when you’re interviewing candidates.
8. Thou shalt not compare your team to others
As a younger leader, I had team envy. It was almost like this commandment is a cousin of the 10th Commandment in the book of Exodus. I was coveting other people’s teams. I was trying to be like the great big churches that I’ve seen and come to admire.
Now, many years later, I’m realizing that I need to build my team for my culture and my situation. And if I start to try and mimic other teams, or even try to hire someone from one of those great teams, thinking that our team can be like theirs, it almost always ends in disaster. God wired your team uniquely.
When we hire new people here at Vanderbloemen, I often tell the new recruits, ”We have worked with well over 5,000 churches over the years. We’ve worked with over 200 different kinds of denominations and tribes of churches. And let me just tell you, if you’ve seen one church…you’ve seen about one church.”
King David says in the Psalms, “Behold, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
That was about one person. Imagine how much more complex we are when we are a group of people, a church. A school. A nonprofit. A team of many and not just an individual.
Your team is unique. Don’t compare your team to others. Don’t covet staff members of other churches. Don’t fall prey to the temptation of thinking that if you just had a team member from one of those super organizations you would become one yourself.
I hope you can learn from my mistakes, and some of the things I’ve learned along the way in helping all these churches and organizations over the years.
Building your dream team may be one of your most important assignments as a leader. Take it slow. Get to know yourself. Get to know where you are and where you’re going.
And follow these Eight Commandments. I’m betting they put you on the path to a team that can achieve the dream God has put inside you.
