Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

HR

Why You Should Hire Your Next Boss (according to Mark Zuckerberg)

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Only hire someone that you’d be okay working for.

In one of the podcasts I listen to frequently (Masters of Scale), Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was interviewed on his hiring best practices. This is what he said,

So the single most important thing is to get the best people you can around you. When I look at my friends who were running other good companies, the single biggest difference that I see in whether the companies end up becoming really great and reaching their potential, or just pretty good, is whether they’re comfortable and really self-confident enough to have people who are stronger than them around them. I’ve adopted this hiring rule, which is that you should never hire someone to work for you, unless you would work for them in an alternate universe.

“Never hire someone to work for you, unless you would work for them.” – Mark Zuckerberg

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Which doesn’t mean that you should give them your job, but just if the tables were turned and you were looking for a job, would you be comfortable working for this person? I basically think that if the answer to that is “no,” then you’re doing something expedient by hiring them, but you’re not doing as well as you can on that.

There are all these things that Sheryl, for example, is just much stronger than me at, and that makes me better and makes Facebook better. And I am not afraid or threatened by that—I value that. That’s what makes Facebook good.[1]

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Hiring for Potential or Past Performance?

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Credit - Garrett Coakley
Garrett Coakley – Flickr

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.

A different culture and context affect job performance significantly.

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How To Determine Your Next Staff Ministry Hire

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In every growing organization, the order in which you hire your next staff member is critical to your growth trajectory. Resources are limited and every staff hour counts. How much more true is this in a non-profit organization like a church? Especially when it’s primarily a volunteer movement?

Is your next hire an administrator or a children’s pastor? Is it a youth worker? A worship leader? A groups pastor?

Peter Drucker, in his book The Effective Executive, gives us timely advice for this question:

One should only have on a team the knowledges and skills that are needed day in and day out for the bulk of the work. Specialists that may be needed once in a while, or that may have to be consulted on this or on that, should always remain outside. It is infinitely cheaper to go to them and consult them against a fee than to have them in the group to say nothing of the impact an underemployed but overskilled man has on the effectiveness of the entire group. All he can do is mischief. (Location 673)

What a great framework to determine who your next hire should be!

After all, “contracting out” various aspects of your ministry is now easier than ever. For example:

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