Hiring for leadership roles can be a pressured and stressful responsibility that can lead to hasty decisions and bad choices. The impact of that, on a small or medium sized charity especially, can be catastrophic and loaded with risk, which makes no sense as the risk can be easily mitigated.
Peter Neal, founder of The Experience Bank Group, specialises in finding the right people for charity executive and non-executive roles in the North East. Here he talks about the risks of not investing in a professional search to find the ideal candidate.
“Having the right leader in any organisation is essential for success, but even more so in the charitable sector when resources can be limited, agility is needed and you are seeking people with purpose-driven motivations and a heap of goodwill – either for donations, to volunteer, or for working for a salary significantly less that they could command in the private sector
“It is crucial that a charity leader has a variety of skills, including communication, adaptability, and strategic planning. They should also be able to build relationships, motivate people, make effective decisions, think ahead and lead by example. This is a combination of qualities that can be hard to find in one person.
“Many organisations rush to find someone to have in the CEO, Chair, Trustee etc role quickly, but actually that really can be to the detriment of the charity. It is much better to be aware of the risk of losing key personnel and work with a specialist recruiter on a regular basis to ensure you have a strategy for succession recruitment as and when the need arises.
“By not having a recruitment partner with whom you strategically plan in advance will mean at some stage the team having to jump into role filling, knee jerk recruiting mode, which brings some very tangible risks including:
“By not considering your candidates properly or just fishing in a small pond, the resulting recruitment can create an unpredictable future, an unsettled team and a poor match up. This will lead to a mismatch between expectation and reality, resulting in unexpected costs on training, using numerous external consultants or interims to fill skills gaps in management and potentially having to recruit other managers to the leadership team to ensure there is the knowledge needed to be successful and bring back team synergy.
“The wrong candidate will also cause confusion and disengagement amongst the existing team and board members which can lead to long term performance issues. If new leader does not have the right people skills, conflict can ensue, which can lead to the entire team feeling disjointed. Morale, engagement, passion, job satisfaction and enjoyment of their roles will dwindle, impacting on the performance of the charity as a whole.
“Ultimately, it may mean that the person has to be removed from the role, or realises themselves it isn’t right for them and leaves, leaving you in a worse position that before they started the role. Not only does this cause upset with the team internally but reputationally it can be damaging with stakeholders and in the wider community.
“By investing in a process to recruit leaders the right way into the right roles your organisation will not only avoid these pitfalls but will also reap the rewards such as increased productivity, creativity, innovation, strategic thinking and problem-solving.
“If you think you may need to recruit leaders in your executive and non-executive function in the short or medium term, why not give me a call and we can look at a strategy to make it all as pain free and successful as possible! In my next article I will talk about what that strategy should include and how my retained clients benefit!”
You can contact Peter at peter@theexperiencebank.co.uk or connect with him on LinkedIn where his Banking On People soundbites from some of the region’s charity leaders will be shared soon.
