Today I want to talk about when to hire someone externally. Now if you follow Lifeway Leadership, you know that I advocate for development of all people within your church’s leadership pipeline. But the reality is sometimes you need to look outside the church to fill a position. To start, you must create or revise the job description to ensure that you find the right character, chemistry, and competency needed for that role. Let’s take a look.
First, you may not always have someone internally equipped to do the job. Maybe you haven’t practiced leadership development and you don’t have someone to fill the gap. Maybe this is a new position and because your church has grown so quickly and it’s in need of more help and oversight, you just don’t have that person. You need to look for someone who has the competency needed, and the character and chemistry to fit your church’s culture.
You may also need to hire someone externally if you are looking for a specialized skill like accounting or graphic design or some professional role in your church. While you can develop that person in their leadership capacity to someday oversee a team of people with that same specialized skill, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to raise someone up from within that has that specific expertise. So again, look for someone with competency, character, and chemistry that aligns with your church.
Sometimes you actually want to hire externally to change the culture. Someone from the outside will provide different DNA, fresh blood, and new eyes to get perspective to your current challenges and obstacles that you don’t currently have. You have to be aware though that keepers of the status quo will resist this move. To combat this, you want to involve others in the search and interview process to gain their support so that they will actually advocate for this outside person. Now this is only going to happen if you have a strong pipeline. If you have a strong pipeline in place, people are going to be used to being raised up and grown from within to seek new positions. It’s only when you want to change the culture that you employ this tactic.
Now that you understand the situations of when to hire someone externally, what are you going to do about it?
Leave a Reply