What do you do when your church is growing and your responsibilities are increasing?
The first thing that you should always do is to delegate the peripheral aspects of your role – those things that others can easily do. You then need to build up teams of volunteers to do the work of ministry. As you do this, there will come a point where your responsibilities of leading and delegating will max you out, it’s then that you need to hire another staff member, assuming that your weekly offering can support it.
The point of this post isn’t to tell you what role to hire next, how much to pay them, or how many hours to hire them for. Those are details for another time.
The point of this post is to determine whether or not you should hire for potential or for past performance.
Should you hire for past performance?
Hiring for past performance seems like the wiser and easier thing to do. After all, you can see if they have direct experience in what you need them to do, and how they performed. The flaw with this is that you are hiring that individual, not their previous context nor their team. This is the problem when organizations lure superstars from other organizations – it’s a gamble. Even if you were to give that person the same job as they had in their previous organization, they wouldn’t perform the same.
If past performance is a big deal for you, instead of just looking at their job role, why not look for the way that individual approached their job? In other words, were they a self-starter or did they wait to receive their next assignment? Did they have a posture towards learning or towards stagnation? Were they more of a team-player or an individual contributor? You get the point.
Looking for these types of traits will tell you more about their potential fit and ability to perform than merely past experience.
What about hiring for potential?
The beauty of hiring for potential is that you’re able to mould and shape them to fit the culture of your organization. After all, most tasks can be learned on the job. The danger, though, is possibly overlooking a quiet spoken individual, or over believing a smooth talker.
So during the interview, ask them what their first 90 days would look like. Ask them what their aspirations for life and work are. If they can come up with that on the spot, then ask them to write it out and email it to you. If you find them stumbling in their thoughts, then ask them to email you their plan (not everyone can think quickly on the spot…especially in an interview).
By doing this, you’ll quickly see the individual’s ability to execute and follow up. When, or if, you get their first 90 days, don’t judge them for their ideas or a lack of strategy (unless the role you’re hiring them for requires them to be strategic). Instead, see whether or not they have a posture of learning, and if they’re using language from your website and from your conversations. That will tell you more about them then any 90 day plan, and that will give you a clearer picture on capacity and potential.
What are your thoughts on this? Which way do you lean? Past performance or potential? How were you hired into your current role?
Click here for part two, and to learn a different way to maximize the growth of your church.