I’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of groups over the years as they try to assemble their dream team. I’ve run a fairly large church with a large team, and I’ve run a normal size church with a much smaller team.
And for many years now, I’ve been building our team here at Vanderbloemen. The longer I do this, the more I realize that, except for casting vision, building a dream team is a leader’s top priority.
I’ve learned valuable lessons about the right and wrong way to assemble your best team. Most of these lessons I’ve learned the hard way, aka by making costly mistakes.
While experience is a powerful teacher, sometimes it’s nice to not have to suffer. I hope you can learn from me instead of the hard way. Here are my Eight Commandments for Building Your Dream Team. (My marketing team tells me I wrote too much for it to be one post, so be sure to check out part two next week as well!)
1. Thou shalt know thyself
I am convinced that there may be nothing more important to building a dream team than knowing yourself. Here’s why.
Plato formed a lot of the basis for how the Western world thinks, but he never wrote anything down. The one thing he did commit to writing? “Know thyself.”
The best thing you can do when building your dream team is know who you are (and who you are not). As a young leader, I had an amazing chance to build out a dream team. I made four critical hires in the first year. All four were talented. All four have gone on to be successful. But all four were a mistake of a hire. Why? They were all like me.
I replicated that mistake several more times in hiring farther down the org chart. Then one day, we were all doing personality assessments as a team. When the session leader got to my personality type, most of the other people on the team were there with me in the same section. It was a visual reveal of my big mistake: I hired people that were like me.
I didn’t take the time to realize what I wasn’t good at, and build a team that was really good at those things. Why not? Probably because at 31 years old I was pretty sure I knew everything. But more fundamentally, I like me. Most of us like ourselves to some extent. And when we see someone like us, we’re irrationally drawn toward hiring them.
Smart leaders, take the time to realize what they’re good at, and what they’re not good at. And then they build a team full of people that complement their strengths and shore up their weaknesses.
We’ve done this many ways in the last several years, but my current favorite is to have a chart of Patrick Lencinoi’s Working Genius plastered on the wall. People’s names are in the sections of their working genius. And we can see where we have too much of one kind of person and too little of another. Whatever method you choose, find a way to make sure you’re not just hiring yourself.
Maybe the best most recent example I’ve seen of this is my friend Dave Dummitt at Willow Creek. We had the honor of conducting the search that led to Dave getting hired five years ago. He inherited a giant mess of a situation, during a pandemic. But he took time in building his team. When he named Shawn Williams as the campus pastor for the main campus, he named someone that is incredibly gifted–and wildly different from Dave himself. Now that Dave’s five year contract has come to a close and he has chosen to step aside, Shawn replacing him may be the most brilliant leadership move I’ve seen in a long time.
Dave served so well during the time he was at Willow. He pulled them out of a really dark time and got them on a much better path. And once that work was done, he knew he needed someone different to take the helm. The genius Dave showed was in hiring that different someone many years before. I have no doubt that Shawn will lead the church to even greater heights in their next chapter.
2. Thou shalt know thy organization
Building a team means building both for the present and for the future. But as my friend John Maxwell says, “If you’re leading and nobody is following, you’re not leading. You’re just taking a walk.”
Critical to building for the future is understanding the change tolerance your organization can take.
About 15 years ago, I was conducting a search for a senior minister at a large church in New England. It was a congregational church that was fully egalitarian in their theology. When asking questions about what kind of pastor they wanted, I asked if they would prefer us looking for a man or a woman for the position, or if it didn’t matter. The chair of the search committee said to me, “I think it’d be a fine idea for us to have a female senior pastor.”
I asked him to give me a list of former associate pastors who were female because that would be a good place to start. He couldn’t remember if they’d ever have one. In that church, they have a lecture series in the fall (which was something like a preaching series or revival in the South). I asked him to give me a list of females that had spoken at that event over the years. They’ve never had one.
I changed the questions and asked, “When was the last time you all had a really good church fight, what was it over, and how did it go?” One committee person raised their hand and said, “Well, a few years ago, we tried to change the hymnal. It didn’t go well. We lost a whole lot of people.”
The chair of the committee then looked at me and said, “I understand now. I think we would like to think we are ready for a woman senior pastor, but we might not be ready for that much change all at once.”
The church was totally in favor of female senior pastors. But they were wise enough to realize that the rate of change they could tolerate was not high enough for their first woman team member to be the senior pastor.
Have you taken time to study how much change your organization can take at one time? It’s different for everyone. Only you will be able to realize how much change can happen at the time that you’re hiring. Have you taken time to look at the most successful hires in the history of your organization? See what’s worked before. See what it looks like it would work and didn’t. Study your organization, where it is, how stressed it currently is, and what has worked and not worked over the years. That will keep you from hiring a really talented person that brings in too much change at once and wrecks your dream team.
3. Thou shalt not only hire from within
After doing executive search for almost 20 years, and overseeing 3,500 searches, the single best metaphor I have for what a search is like is an organ transplant. Adding a team member means finding someone from outside your body, to bring inside the body, and run a major system.
Question: If you needed a new kidney, where would you look first? Nearly everybody knows the answer. You would go to your brother, not your brother-in-law. You would go to a family member, not a stranger. The same is true many many times for staffing.
If you need to build your dream team, take a look first at the people right around you. Chances are if they’re already in your church, school, or nonprofit, they will know the DNA of your team better than an outsider. They will know the culture better than an outsider. Whether or not they have the skill to drive the organization forward is a different matter, but they certainly deserve a look.
However, the smartest organizations don’t just hire from within. Hiring is a venture into the unknown. It’s as scary as an organ transplant. And when we are afraid, we humans tend to look for things that are known instead of unknown. That gives us a disproportionate bias toward hiring from within. While it might be the right answer, it’s not always the right answer.
If you’re old enough to remember the film, Deliverance, that’s where I grew up. If you’re not old enough to know, just google it. One lesson I’ve learned from growing up deep in the mountains of North Carolina is this: constant inbreeding does not end well.
That’s a bit of hyperbole, but it’s true in hiring. If you only hire from within, you will only have one point of view. Everyone will have layers of interconnection. Firing becomes much more difficult. But most of all, you’ll be missing out on the fresh perspective and expertise of someone who has worked outside of your organization and in another part of the world.
The very large churches that we’ve served over the years, and we have served most of them, often have a ratio that they follow for how many outside hires versus how many inside hires makes for a good balance. The value of someone from inside is that they have institutional knowledge. The value of someone from outside is their fresh eyes. So while there is always value in looking at people from within your organization, I have found the greatest value is in looking at those people and weighing them against all of the other options outside the organization.
Roughly half of the searches that we do involve assessing a candidate from inside the organization in addition to candidates outside the organization.
We did a search several years ago for a very, very large multi-site church. They had four internal candidates and were almost certain that one of those would be the next senior pastor. They literally hired us as an insurance policy just in case there was someone else out there that they hadn’t thought of. We assessed all the internal candidates and they were all fabulous.
But a very long story short: they ended up hiring a candidate from outside the organization, who had never lived in the area, and on paper didn’t look like it made sense at all. Since then, the church has risen to even greater heights. It may be one of the most successful searches we’ve ever done. The wisdom that client showed in looking outside the people they already knew proved to be The catalyst for the beginning of one of the best chapters in the church’s history.
4. Thou shalt carefully weigh your friend’s suggestions
As I mentioned before, hiring is a venture into the unknown. And when you don’t know what’s ahead, we as people look for anything that’s known. This doesn’t just apply to hiring from within. It often turns into listening to the suggestion of a friend. And too many times, I’ve seen people take the advice of a friend as if it were written in red in the New Testament.
I know I’ve done that myself in hiring. I had an older, smarter mentor one time tell me this person would be great in your church. So I hired them almost immediately, and it turned into an incredibly painful misfit. The candidate wasn’t happy, the church board wasn’t happy, and I was way less than happy. All because I chose to trust a friend’s uninformed advice. I’m sure we all have wise friends, but nearly none of my friends have worked in the organizations I’m working in.
If hiring is an organ transplant, remember that the real art of an organ transplant is the tissue match. Your friend might have a candidate who would be a great prospect for you. But that’s like picking a donor for an organ transplant off a donor list because of what your friend said. Successful searches and successful hires require a careful tissue match.
Be sure to listen to your friend’s advice. Take a look at the people that they suggest. But don’t make the error that I’ve made of believing that just because your friend knows you, they know what’s best for your organization.
I hope you’ll sit with these lessons for a bit and incorporate them into your hiring practices. Mistakes in hiring can cost you time, money, and perhaps more important of all, trust.
Be sure to check out part two of this list next week to learn more and be well on your way to building your best team yet.
