The leader will take counsel from his people, but he will act on what his mind tells him is right. He has trained himself out of the fear of making mistakes.
The secret of any organization’s success is choosing the right people to play key roles.
I read recently about business executive Bernard Tapie, who became famous in France by taking over failing corporations (often for one symbolic franc) and turning them into successful money makers. Tapie developed an empire of forty-five companies, including Look ski bindings and Terraillon, a weight scale manufacturer. His secret? Whenever he assumed control of a corporation, he immediately brought in his fifteen-member management team to reorganize. They worked so well together that they salvaged many a corporation.
One of the most important aspects of successful leadership is putting together a group of people to carry out the mission. Great athletic coaches know they must have talent to win, and therefore they take an active part in choosing players. Teams that just happen get happenstance results.
Much of this chapter will deal specifically with building a church staff. I recognize that many pastors will never be in a position to hire professional associates. But every pastor will, like Jesus, gather a group of committed followers—disciples—who will carry out the vision. These key individuals may be paid staff or committed volunteers, but they are the ones who see that ministry happens. Thus, the pastor’s “inner circle” is perhaps the most important part of the organization. It is this group I mean when I henceforth refer to “staff.”
Staffing is a vexation in the church, partly because it is innately difficult and partly because church leaders get so little practice. But it remains extremely important. Small organizations such as churches often make the mistake of thinking they can get by with inferior workers because they are small. The opposite is true. In a firm of one hundred employees, if one is inferior, the loss is only 1 percent. But if a church has a staff of three, and one is inferior, the loss is 33 percent.
The bright side, however, is that it’s much easier to pick one excellent person than a hundred.
Attracting quality people, first of all, means you must enthusiastically sell your organization to quality people. Julian Price, the builder of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company, surprised many by his ability to get outstanding people to join his organization when it was still tiny. He did it with his optimism, telling prospective workers, “We’re going to build a mighty company here; don’t you want to be a part of it?” The challenge of growth has brought many great talents to small organizations.
Church leaders needn’t be timid in going for the most effective people. We believe what we’re doing is the most important of all endeavors.
Perhaps the more difficult part of recruiting is recognizing the quality people. Here are seven qualities I look for.
Qualities for the Core
The first thing I want is character. I used to put intelligence first, but I changed my mind. I found I could buttress a person’s intelligence, but I could not buttress character.
A job applicant with a weak character will do a lot to hide it, of course. Many people have told me they had a lot to learn about the job I was trying to fill, but no one ever admitted to having a weak character and needing help.
Statistically, however, most management failures come from lack of character rather than lack of intelligence. You can do many things to help a person intellectually, but you are completely vulnerable to the person with a weak character. The weakness will show up at the moment of highest stress, at the very time you need the person to stand.
I have found that adults seldom correct their character faults. Personalities may change, but character rarely does. After doing something wrong, they may be sincerely sorry, but then they trip again over the same stumbling block. If I know the person’s weakness, I may be able to structure around it, but often it’s too late when I find it.
As Christians, we want to help the weak, but the church staff—the inner circle—is no halfway house for character problems. I warn new managers against trying to do social reclamation in administration.
Character is not homogeneous, like a quart of milk. It is sectional, like a grapefruit. Everyone has good sections and bad. One person may be strongly loyal to the boss, for example, but irresponsible in the job. Another person may be loyal and responsible until he gets a chance to enhance his ego. Ego will weaken character as much as anything I know. Willie Sutton, the bank robber, loved his work but cried when he had to lie to his mother about where he had been. You can’t say he had a totally bad character; you can only say some sections were bad.
As a manager you must evaluate all the sections, build on the good ones, and avoid the weak ones. If you have trouble evaluating character, get someone with good insight to help you.
Second, a person must have enough intelligence to do the job and also be a possibility for promotion. I am never afraid of gathering too much intelligence in any organization.
This is particularly true in the church, which has no real limit on its possibilities for growth. A business might have capital or territorial limits, but there are few limits on a church that the right staff cannot break through. So pastors should insist on above-average job competence.
Third, I want a person who is flexible—and who doesn’t confuse flexibility with lack of integrity. Some people accuse others at times of lacking integrity, when the issue has nothing to do with that. The only thing at stake is flexibility.
One of the things that indicates a healthy flexibility is optimism. Positive people look upon change as challenge, and they go for it without hesitation.
Some people have a magnetism for iron; no matter who they deal with, they are always attracted to whatever good is in the person. Others have an allergy for day; they break out in hives over whatever is bad in the people they meet.
Church members, of course, sometimes have a great deal of clay, and people who have the allergy can’t even sit next to them in church. They keep wondering why the pastor doesn’t preach against the clay. The pastor, meanwhile, has a magnetism for iron; he is constantly finding the good in people and encouraging it. The clay hardly bothers him.
Churches need to be staffed with flexible people who go for the iron and aren’t bothered by the clay.
Those with an allergy to clay are perhaps better off in an evangelistic organization, where they can proclaim their faith to large numbers of people they see only once. But those who have to work with the same people fifty-two weeks a year had better be magnetized to iron.
As far as integrity is concerned, I am more anxious that a person be consistent than that he or she always be minutely right. Sometimes a baseball broadcaster will say, “The pitcher’s establishing the strike zone,” meaning he’s throwing the ball high, low, in, and out, trying to find out what this particular umpire considers the zone to be. What’s important is how he’s going to rule throughout the game. Once I establish what a staff member will consistently do, I know how to work with the person and in what areas I can trust him.
Fourth, I like to have people around me who are excited about learning. Their rates of learning change over time, of course, but if they are not oriented to growth, if they prefer instead to protect the status quo, I will have a stagnant organization.
Nothing helps a staff grow more than a leader who wants to grow. I like to watch Leonard Bernstein conduct a symphony. He lets the musicians see what great music does to him. He inspires them while he conducts, and that’s what every executive should do. The orchestra enjoys pleasing Bernstein.
Fifth, as soon as the number of staff members begins to increase, I must pick team players. A true team player does not poach on other people’s responsibility but is available to help at their request. When he sits in a meeting, he is open in his remarks; he does not go around making comments privately, either suggestions or criticisms. He speaks up in the meeting.
A team player, however, is not the same as a yes man. Some managers have a hard time knowing the difference. A yes man gets along with the boss, but the other team members ostracize him. And whenever the boss points him out as exemplary, the rest get sick at their stomachs. They lose respect for both the boss and the yes man.
Sixth, the inner circle must be willing and able to confront in a healthy manner. This means the leader must be willing to listen to those who differ.
I was with a pastor recently who had built a five-thousand-member church, but he was resigning to go into politics. His followers said God was moving him on; they had no criticism of him at all. And yet he’s leaving the church $4.5 million in debt, which it may never be able to pay off. His charisma is tremendous, but his management is not. And apparently there was no one on the inner circle who was able to say early enough, “Hey, we’re creating a debt structure we can’t handle.”
One of the church members told me, “Nobody is able to stop him from doing anything he wants. He’s so strong.” Well, for his own protection he should have somebody to prevent those kinds of mistakes.
When I was with Genesco, we had several individuals I called “corporate cockleburs.” Their function was to irritate us. One by the name of Lou got me so angry in a board meeting that afterward I said to Maxey Jarman, our president, “You can’t pay me enough to sit in a meeting with that guy.”
Maxey said, “Does he irritate you? Then he’s earning his salary, because his greatest function is to irritate.” I recognized later that Lou was also basically right in what he had said. He regularly took the devil’s-advocate position to test our proposals. He kept us from making mistakes.
If your inner circle is always in agreement, you run the risk of blind spots and letting your mistakes get outside your control. This is what happened in the Nixon White House. No one inside the circle blew the whistle on Watergate, so the whole administration tumbled. The ability to confront with integrity and correct with care is a valuable quality.
Finally, I want a person who is comfortable being reviewed. In business, of course, we do this regularly; we even have departments that specialize in reviewing procedure. Job descriptions tell us what the person should have been doing, and periodically we assess the performance.
But in a Christian setting, many workers seem to resist review. They feel they have been called by God, and therefore the pastor, board, or department head is not really their supervisor—God is. If their concept of what God wants them to do (which is usually what they happen to enjoy doing) conflicts with what the organization expects of them, it’s too bad for the organization.
Such an attitude brings havoc into the work of the kingdom. Extended prayer time in the morning is no excuse for showing up late for work. Good managers have to make these things clear. I want persons in my organization who are subject to review, who receive it willingly, and who profit from it.
Seeking and Finding
How can we find and recruit such people? One of the first things to realize is that we are not hiring friends. We are gathering assistants and associates—capable people who are able to do what we cannot do, perhaps able to do things better than we ever could.
I do not have to be chummy with the person, and he or she does not have to like me. But we must respect each other. A lot of leaders make the mistake of hiring people they like rather than people they respect. They end up choosing individuals just like themselves, duplicating their own strengths and weaknesses, which does not advance the overall organization.
Hiring is often a disagreeable chore because it comes at a bad time. We are disappointed that someone has just left, we’re short-handed and anxious to fill a vacancy before the roof falls in. So we do not select carefully; we rush things.
Actually, the higher the position to be filled, the more time we should spend filling it. We have a responsibility to the persons we choose, because if they don’t work out, we will have to replace them.
Quick interviews simply do not tell enough. What often happens is that the interviewer is something of a salesman and, instead of making the person prove his ability, he wastes time selling the job. If the person leaves having not accepted, the interviewer feels as if he failed.
The opposite should be happening: The hiring person should be the customer, not the salesman. I refuse to hire a person who does not say something along the way that makes me hire him. I assume this person will not make it until I am convinced otherwise. When it comes to hiring, I am not trying to be benevolent; I am on a search for outstanding qualities.
And the search takes time. The right person may not convince me in the first twenty minutes. That is why, if I am hiring a man, I like to travel with him. You can find out so much on a three-day trip. You gain insight into the person’s physical energy. You find out whether he has a large intellectual cup or a small one. A person with a small intellectual cup is quickly satisfied; he listens to a ten-minute sermon or presentation, and he’s set for the week. No curious questions, no asking for proof of your statements, no ongoing dialogue; his cup is already full.
Such a person may be exactly the one you want—for certain jobs. Some work is very monotonous, and you do not want people with too much curiosity in such a position. But for other jobs, you need an individual with large intellectual thirst.
As I travel, I watch the person read a newspaper. I notice what sections he turns to quickly and what stories he reads. I also watch how he dresses for various occasions. One of the finest Christians I know is entirely too casual about his dress. He does not realize how this creates disrespect for his leadership. He feels it shouldn’t, and perhaps he is right—but it does. This is one of the tests of leadership: that you recognize what affects people, not what should affect people.
On the road, I also notice how courteous a person is. I watch how he treats doormen, taxi drivers, waitresses. How he tips is a big indicator for me. I see how careful the person is about being on time. I simply cannot work with someone who does not respect a schedule. Some are not offended by this, but I am.
Perhaps I learn the most by riding with the person, letting him or her drive. An automobile magnifies the average person’s sense of power. I find out how this person watches the pattern of events. If he drives in a constant state of emergency, slamming on his brakes, speeding up to get out of somebody’s way, or wandering from lane to lane, I make a mental note that this person is not a good planner. He doesn’t look ahead and watch the patterns form in advance.
If he berates other drivers for creating a problem, or if he constantly harps against the city for how it maintains the streets, this tells me something else. It tells me this person has a hard time accepting problems and circumstances beyond his control. Successful people work within the limits of what they can control and don’t waste their energy on other things.
In the car, I also notice the person’s respect for property. The way he or she treats an automobile tells me how he will treat my company’s typewriters, computers, and other equipment in the future. I’m amazed at the people who will run right over a chuckhole; either they are not watching the roadway, or they don’t want to make the effort to avoid the hole. Again, this is not a good managerial mentality.
Do you think I am too exacting? I simply want to know what to watch out for. My philosophy is to utilize a person’s strengths and buttress his weaknesses. But until I know the weaknesses, I cannot do anything to buttress them.
Personnel evaluation is not the time for extending Christian tolerance. The whole idea of evaluation is to be objective. Hence, prejudice is out—but so is tolerance. The art of good management is to avoid being surprised. If I do not evaluate people to the best of my ability, I will face constant surprises.
The reason why references are so useless in Christian circles is that they are usually sabotaged by tolerance. No one wants to blow the whistle. I think it is my Christian responsibility to be as objective as I can when giving a reference. This has gotten me into trouble; I’ve been on several boards where I ended up being the bearer of bad news, simply because the rest of the members knew I would do it. They all rationalized that I must enjoy this kind of thing, and they saved their popularity in the process.
A law firm once told me they paid almost no attention to references anymore; they could learn everything they wanted to know by studying the person’s history instead. Their belief was that successful people will be successful in the future, and failures will be failures. They also found that most failures are very adept at explaining their failures, and when you start buying failure stories, you are only presenting an opportunity to fail again.
There is a lot of wisdom here. I believe in going all the way back to check school records, because winners start winning very early. They form good habits, they show a sense of responsibility, they respond well to authority, they are able to organize themselves.
A Harvard study of business people showed that, actually, there are very few late bloomers. The things that make for professional success are usually apparent in student days.
I also believe in running a credit check. I’m very interested in whether a person pays bills promptly or not.
Furthermore, I have learned I cannot ferret out everything about the person myself. That is why I arrange multiple interviews, using other people who have good intuition. Some people have a knack for asking very clear questions that seem to plumb the depths of a person.
For example, my wife is one of the finest judges of character I’ve ever known. When she says she likes somebody, I have learned to expect good character—a person who is trustworthy, friendly, kind, and has integrity. She’s almost infallible.
I never question her evaluations, and I never make her defend them. That’s one of the worst things you can do to intuitive people. They can no more prove their intuitions than they can prove their faith. But they will still be right most of the time.
I also want the immediate supervisor and colleagues to interview the prospect. Some dictators will disagree with me here, because they don’t want to give the impression the hiring is being done by a group. But if a person is going to work with certain people, they should help make the decision—and it is good to get them on record recommending the newcomer. They will accept him or her with a great deal more grace; they will help him along and create a good environment, because they have a stake in his success.
When a new person starts having problems, I have been known to challenge those who helped me interview as to why—and then watch them work very hard to get him out of his problems!
When someone came to apply for a machine job in my plant, I often asked, “Who do you know in this plant?” He would name two or three people on the shop floor, and then I’d go see them.
“Your friend came in and wanted a job,” I’d say. “If you were me, would you hire him?”
If something was wrong, the employee would invariably say, “Well, let’s not overdo that ‘friend’ business: I know him, but he’s not really what you’d call a friend.” He didn’t want me coming around a month later saying, “Look, you recommended this guy, and he’s no good.”
We must always be careful, and we must not be arrogant about our own ability to choose people. Most of us can be conned. Most of us tend to want to sell the job and make everyone happy. We must force ourselves to be deliberate and objective.
When You Make a Hiring Mistake
No one wants a reputation as a hatchet man. But as a last resort, you must be willing to fire people or relieve them of a particular responsibility. It is more important for the staff to know that you will than that you do. It shows you are committed to your mission and are willing to prune those who will not contribute to it.
How should a person be dismissed? It depends on the reason for dismissal:
1. Character problems. In such a case, there is no reason to delay. You may not always need to make the person a public example, but you should move swiftly.
2. Personality conflicts. First of all, consider whether this person might work out in a different spot in the organization. I have moved troublemakers who happened to be very capable people, because it seemed they would have been fine working alone. So I have talked to them straight, told them exactly what was wrong, and given them another chance in a new assignment.
Some have straightened up; more have not. I had to keep watching the problem and not consider it solved, of course, as time went on. And in many cases, the only final solution was to let them go.
3. Irresponsibility, shoddy work. A manager begins by documenting, gathering enough specific information about errors or bad judgments to support the charge. If I am convinced a person has gotten into a mental state of “I’m going to do as little as I can get by with,” then I try to inject a good, hot spark of fear. There is something in all of us that profits from that occasionally. I need to get scared every once in a while myself. It helps my humility, it boosts my effort, and it focuses my concentration tremendously.
Whenever I am tempted not to act in a difficult personnel situation, I ask myself, “Am I holding back for my personal comfort or for the good of the organization?” If I am doing what makes me comfortable, I am embezzling. If doing what is good for the organization also happens to make me comfortable, that’s wonderful. But if I am treating irresponsibility irresponsibly, I must remember that two wrongs do not make a right.
When Not to Fire
If, however, a staff member is failing because of inadequate training, that is a different story. We must be patient and provide training; that is part of our Christian duty as leaders.
The long view will serve us well in all matters of hiring and staffing. Part of leadership is anticipating problems before they fester. We must sit down occasionally and ask, “What is going to be the result of what we’re doing now? How will the relationships among these people look in two years, in five years? Who is growing? Who is not growing? Who is accepting responsibility and doing a good job? Who isn’t?” Pastors are wise to have a formal or informal review committee with whom they can sit and assess personnel strengths and weaknesses confidentially. From this they can project together what kind of church they will have down the road.
If they want to grow in a certain ministry, and they see the individual in charge of that area cannot carry it where they want to go, they can deal with that problem in a prudent and thoughtful way. Can the person be trained, or must he be replaced?
The well-run organization is not a place of high drama, with many sudden elevations to power and heart-rending lurches into the street. It is a place where people are carefully chosen and guided to work together to fulfill goals bigger than all of them.
Copyright © 1986 by Christianity Today
