When building a team, what talents should you look for?

Leadership Straight from Bill Hybels When building a team, what talents should you look for? Choosing talent. Talent matters as you recognize. Whenever you are choosing high-level staff, there are risks involved. You know from my writings and lectures I look for people with character, competency, chemistry, that fit our culture, that are called by God. The 5 "C's," I run through that grid consistently. Some of you who are veterans in leadership, you know that with an airtight screening process you do not know what you have with a new staff member until they have been on the job for about 2 years. Then you know what you have. I have been upwardly surprised. I have been downwardly surprised. I have been, "Oh, that is about what I thought." But you really do not know. All your screening, interviewing, and testing... all of these things give you clues and your intuition. All of these things matter. You have to make a choice at a certain point in time. Hopefully throughout your career your processes get better for choosing the right talent for the right era. I am the first one to say that I have made a series of brilliant choices. I have made some choices that wound up being heart breaking. But nobody gets it all right. I do not beat myself up for the rest of my life for realizing I made a choice that did not work out. I say, "D a r n, that did not work out. I was sure it was going to work out." But I do not live with a bad situation forever. As soon as you find someone you are pretty sure will not work out, bless that individual, yourself, your organization, their family. Move them on. We give extraordinarily gracious severance packages when we hire someone wrongly and we have to move them on. We say, "We thought it was going to work out. You did. You moved your family. It is heart breaking. We are so sorry. We are going to let you go." We complete a long careful process. But when we get to the end if we feel we had to own quite a bit of it I am glad you do not know how generous some of our severance packages have been because we say, "It is our fault. We missed it. We are going to give you a long time of support so you can find the next job and hopefully you can be at a church where you fit better. I used to be resentful about gracious severance packages. I have had a total conversion. I think it is one of the most gracious things you can do is to take the full responsibility and be ridiculously generous and that person will go out and tell a wonderful story about you and your church for the rest of their life. Every time you send someone out without being gracious, they will tell a horrible story about you and your church the rest of their life to everyone who will listen. So, why not build the Kingdom. At the end of the day, it is only "x" amount of dollars. You are going to raise "x" amount of dollars anyway. Be gracious if you make a mistake.