twenty-seven
Known and Needed
In the highly competitive world of college football recruiting, coaches will do just about anything to sign top prospects. That includes showing up to high school games in helicopters to impress potential recruits, creating custom comic books or fake Sports Illustrated covers starring the players they are courting, and just about any other stunt you can think of.1 And it’s not just high school players being scouted, either. In California, a ten-year-old was reportedly offered a scholarship by more than one college—despite the fact he couldn’t sign a letter of intent for ten more years.2 Many of the crazier tactics coaches have tried have subsequently been outlawed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), but that doesn’t keep recruiters from looking for loopholes and new tactics to encourage recruitment. Coaches are always aware of who is about to leave the team and who could potentially join, which is why they invest so much research, money, and effort into the recruitment process.
Creative recruiting tactics may get a lot of attention, but I recently watched a sports channel interview that demonstrated a tactic that was even more effective. The interview was with one of the top high school players in the nation, a young man who had just announced his college choice. He was accompanied by his father and the coach of the team he had chosen. After the young man finished, the coach stepped up to the mic and began talking about the qualities, character, and talents of the new recruit. The coach clearly had a knowledge not just of the player’s stats, but an understanding of who he was as a person and how he would flourish on his new team. Once the coach was done, the young man’s father said, “And that is why my son chose this school. The coach knows him so well, he described him better than I could have myself.”
The coach was Dabo Swinney of Clemson University in South Carolina. Swinney has become a recruiting legend. Sports Illustrated called the program Swinney created “the pre-eminent recruiting program in America.”3 I believe the key to Swinney’s success was revealed in the comment from the young man’s father: not tricks, stunts, or loopholes, but genuinely knowing his players and making them feel needed on the team.
The effectiveness of any team, business, or organization is directly correlated to the people and the systems that run it.
As Dabo Swinney’s recruitment strategy illustrates, a key to attracting the right people is to help them feel known and needed. We will look at those two things in more detail below, but first, it’s important to recognize why recruiting is so important for leaders.
Leaders Are Recruiters
Just as football coaches are in constant recruitment mode, leaders must always be recruiting the best talent for their team and organization. In business, that means attracting highly qualified employees to fill key positions as well as building out effective teams throughout the company. In churches and other nonprofit organizations, it means motivating people to volunteer their time and talents. You need to be in constant recruitment mode for two reasons: turnover and growth.
Turnover: People Come and People Go
Turnover is a natural part of any organization. Teams are made of people, and people change, grow, get bored, get mad, get sick, go back to school, move away, have kids, start their own business, take other jobs, retire, and any other number of things that can affect their involvement in your team. Remember, you don’t control people: you serve people. If you truly love those you lead, you’ll want the best for them, which might mean letting them go.
Letting them go is not easy if you’ve worked together heart and soul—if you’ve invested in them, loved them, mentored them, and come to depend on them—only to have them move on. But you have to be okay with that. On the flipside, you will also be able to receive the benefit of hiring people who were mentored and trained by others. This coming and going is the organizational equivalent of cross-pollination in the plant world: organizations are strengthened by the ideas and experiences people bring with them from organizations they served before.
No one is dispensable, but everyone can be replaced. Instead of panicking when a key person leaves, view it as a chance to rethink roles and systems. Changing up roles is often a positive step because it jump-starts healthy reorganization. Keep a positive outlook: choose to believe the perfect person for the job is about to submit a résumé, and you will continue to move forward as a team.
When people leave, be grateful for the contributions and investments they made. Your organization is better because they were there. Gratitude goes a long way toward smoothing over transitions. Plus, if you keep the transition positive, they may end up returning to your organization down the road.
Whenever possible, look first within your own ranks to fill the role because current team members already have knowledge and relationships that will ease the transition. But don’t lock yourself into that either, since talent can come from anywhere.
Growth: You’ll Never Outgrow Your Team
Your team defines your reach and your effectiveness, both as a leader and as an organization. The organization might begin to grow beyond what your team is able to handle, but if you don’t quickly adjust and expand, your growth will slow or stop until you build a team capable of sustaining continued growth.
Jim Collins is a business management expert and author of the bestselling book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t. He and his teams studied a wide array of companies and leaders to determine what qualities carried companies to greatness. He writes, “Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people.”4
If you want to grow your organization, you need to continually be recruiting new talent. You might not know exactly how people will fit in or what they’ll do, but if you identify the right people for your team, you’ll have access to the human resources you need to build better teams and a better future. Collins calls this getting the right people on the bus:
We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats—and then they figured out where to drive it.5
That means one of your primary tasks as a leader is not to set vision but to gather and guide people. Vision is vital, as we saw earlier, but people are the first and most important component of leadership. Never assume you have a big enough team; never lose the capacity to befriend and believe in new people; and never grow so enamored with where you are going that you overlook the team that is taking you there.
Known and Needed
How do you recruit the right people? The first step is what we discussed earlier: by becoming followable. If you learn to lead yourself—if you become the leader you would want to follow—then others will follow you too. That doesn’t mean they will appear out of thin air, though. Often the best talent won’t come to you. They’ll wait for you to find them, to invite them, to encourage them, to show them they are known and needed.
Everyone wants to be known, even the most introverted among us. To be known is to be recognized and to be valued. To be known helps us feel like we are more than a number or a face in a crowd: we are individuals with recognized strengths, characteristics, and contributions.
As a leader, don’t just spend time with your immediate team. Look two or three circles past your inner circle. Get to know the up-and-coming leaders, the young people rising through the ranks, the newcomers who are just getting settled, the quiet people who rarely make a splash but are always there, the loud people others might write off as immature. Find the geniuses and the creatives, the warriors and the marathoners. Make it your goal to know as many people as possible, both within your organization and outside it, because people need to believe that they are known and that they matter.
You can’t fake genuine interest, but you shouldn’t need to if you care about people. Sometimes the craziness of leadership and the weird dynamics of power and fame can combine to isolate leaders, and you need to fight against that. Never forget the early days, when you were happy to have anyone follow you or work alongside you, even if they had a few quirks. If you find yourself increasingly isolated—in your office, your boardroom, or your greenroom—get out for a while. Go meet someone new. Show genuine interest in people who might never imagine you knew they existed. Ask people what they enjoy about their job; ask about their family, about their dreams, about their needs. This is one of the most refreshing things you can do as a leader because it reminds you why you do what you do (it’s for people) and how you got where you are (it was with people).
Needed
Not only do people need to be known, they need to be needed. They need to see that their contribution matters, that they are making a difference. They need to feel that their role is part of something bigger and that the future will be better because of the part they are playing now.
One of the simplest ways to help people feel needed is to express gratitude. Say thank you—a lot. As a leader, your gratitude affirms not just the value of what was done but the significance of the people who did it. Gratitude says, “I see you, I recognize you, and I depend on you. You are needed.” That’s more than good manners, which we mentioned earlier; it’s also an acknowledgment: “I am not a lone ranger. I couldn’t do what I do without your contribution. What you do is integral to the success of the team.”
Another effective way to help people feel needed is to ask for help. Even if people are volunteers, they are there because they want to make a difference. Whether staff or volunteers, people tend to rise to the level of the needs set before them and the expectations placed upon them. If they’ve bought into the vision of the team or organization, they will usually be happy to help.
When we first launched our church in Los Angeles, I met a young couple one Sunday after services had ended. They told me that they were from Australia but were living in L.A., and that in Australia they had attended Hillsong Church. I was intrigued. Maybe their experience and background could help us with our fledgling church plant. I invited them to a party we were hosting at my house that night and introduced them to a few people. That same night, I asked if they would be interested in volunteering with us in a minor capacity as we got to know each other better. They quickly became very involved in our church community and were a huge asset, and one of them eventually came on staff and worked with us for three years. I wonder what would have happened if, that first day after church, I would have just said, “It’s so nice to meet you, I hope you feel welcome here.” That’s not wrong, of course—but people need to be needed. What attracted that couple to our team was the fact that there was a place for them to contribute.
Being known and being needed are connected.
People should know that they are important to the team not just because a role is filled, but because they are filling that role. Maybe someone else could do what they do, but no one could replace who they are. One of the most discouraging things people could believe is that they are not noticed, not known, and not needed; that their contribution doesn’t matter, and no one would even realize if they left. When people feel that way for very long, they start making side deals and exit plans, because no one wants to stay where they aren’t known and needed.
A leader’s job responsibilities include creating a culture that affirms people, involves people, and celebrates people. People aren’t anonymous or disposable, and they should never be treated that way. They are visible and valuable, known and needed, accepted and appreciated.
Recruit through relationship and grow with gratitude, and you’ll never lack for loyalty. You’ll find the best talent and retain it. You’ll build teams that don’t just work hard but truly value one another and bring out the best in each other. You’ll find yourself leading a team that you love, not because you engaged in some flashy recruitment techniques, but because you know each other and need each other.