People represent the potential of a business.  High-growth companies need high-growth employees. Employee development is the key ingredient in breaking through to the next level of growth. Employees have to develop new skills that allow them to perform at higher levels so that they can quickly deliver on the potential of the strategy and the company itself.   

There are two main ways to assess people and their development: skills and spirit.

Skills are things that can be trained. A leader can be coached on how to become more influential and engage their team to achieve great results. An employee can be trained technical skills such as engineering, accounting, and marketing that they need to do their jobs really, really well.

Spirit refers to the "soft" skills that can't be trained effectively. You have to hire for them. These are hard to find but are necessary for a company to function smoothly.

One of these skills is teamwork--the ability to put the needs of the group ahead of personal desires. Another is heart, as in "put your heart into it." This describes true commitment and passionate engagement. Employees with heart take ownership of their jobs and go the extra mile.

Too often, companies hire for skills without enough consideration for spirit. When that happens, you end up with employees who can't work together. There needs to be a balance between skills and spirit across the entire company.

This same balance needs to exist within individual senior managers.

Problem: A Senior Manager had great skills and was a decent leader, but wasn't showing any heart--he just didn't seem to care about the company. The Manager's bad attitude was starting to wear off on his entire team.

Solution: If the manager's heart isn't in the job, there were two options:

1. Move him into a purely technical position

2. Let him go.

Senior managers are a microcosm of your company. They are the role models for other employees. As such, they need to have both skills and spirit.   

Source: Edited from an article written by Michael Randall for FastCompany 2011   

We retained The Batten Group to launch two  searches for Community Health Charities-NY, that of Chief Executive Officer and Vice President for Corporate Development.

Jim took the time to meet as needed with our search committee, listen to the critical elements of the talent we needed to achieve our goals, create the materials for our launch and then recruit top level talent very quickly.  The Batten Group has a team of expert recruiters who are in sync with nonprofit executives, boards and stakeholders.  They intimately understand our unique industry needs, challenges, and are able to provide strategic counsel and direction that takes much of the risk out of making the wrong hire.    I would recommend Jim Batten and The Batten Group to any hiring authority in nonprofit who seeks a proven search partner who delivers on what is promised, and works with the highest level of trust and integrity.

Thomas G. Bognanno

President & CEO

Community Health Charities of America