Carnelian Search | What I learned in my first 8 months of search

I joined Carnelian Search at Easter and I'm relatively new to the industry. I was approached by Allan to join the team at Carnelian because they wanted a researcher to come on board and help to bear the weight of searches. The last eight months have involved coming to understand search, the charity sector, charity governance and getting to know a new team. All of these things have been rewarding, and encouraged by my colleagues to reflect on what I’ve learned since joining, here are three observations, offered from a recent outsider on recruitment, leadership and the charity world. None of them are new, but I hope they offer insight into the inner workings of our search practice and the excellence in people we pursue for our clients.

In leadership, emotional intelligence is imperative

The importance of EQ as well as, or above, IQ is now widely acknowledged, but it is worth repeating because it would be impossible to over-emphasise its power in leadership and people management. In the last eight months, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing people for all kinds of executive level and board positions. Those who standout in my mind as I think back are not those who had the most impressive CVs, but the ones who most obviously loved – that is served and honoured – the people they worked with, and who read myself and my colleagues in the interview most effectively. I think most of us, when entering an interview, instinctively are focussing on ourselves and on demonstrating our talents, but the best candidates, whilst still doing this, engage us as interviewers. They are happy to laugh at themselves. They talk about their weaknesses with fluidity and grace. They earnestly desire the best appointment for the sake of the organisation in question, even if it’s not them. But most of all, when they talk about the teams they have led, the people they have hired, they glow. Each in their own way of course, but they just can’t wait to talk about what they’ve learnt from those younger than them, or those older than them, how they’ve seen someone flourish, how they’ve handled difficult people situations. You might be a very impressive person, but if you don’t love and serve your people, you won’t stand out in interview, and it will be much harder to drive change.

For more on this see Jonathan’s blog, Gentleness in Leadership

In interviews, detail is everything

This point was made to me by my colleagues very early on in my induction process, and we remind each other of it regularly. Anyone can claim to be successful, anyone can use buzz words and reflect back the language of the job description. Only a truly successful candidate can provide evidence readily for each point that they make. Having the detail to hand isn’t only evidence to us of success, it’s how we prove success to our clients. Search firms exist to find the very best candidates for a role, but we also exist to champion those candidates to the client and explain why we have longlisted each one. The more detail provided to us in an interview, the easier it is to persuade a client to agree with our assessment. Knowing details like the size of team, how much fundraising grew, exactly what changes you made and how you made them – these kinds of details may seem mundane, but they point to a mind of clarity, analysis and strategy – the kind of mind you want running a charity.

For more on this see Jonathan’s blog, Interviews: Getting them right

In a team, diverse points of view are gold dust

This goes not only for building strong teams for our clients, but it’s true in house as well. Sometimes we disagree over a candidate. One of us thinks they’re not of sufficient quality to be included in our longlist, another person thinks that there’s a glimmer of potential. One of us thinks that candidate X should be shortlisted by the client, another thinks candidate Y is better. These disagreements on our team are fruitful for us – they force each of us to justify our opinions, and they can be valuable when clients ask for our opinion. They also show that we engage with people as people – not everyone clicks with everyone, and this is why we will go to great lengths to ensure that at least two of us are present for every interview. The same is true of decisions taken by executives and boards generally – unity and agreement are not the same thing. We recently spent some time thinking about governance models, in particular the Carver model. John Carver describes that boards should have ‘impassioned discussions about the changes they can produce’ whilst also being clear that the board should speak with one voice. In other words, they should sometimes disagree, bump heads, and yet be unified. This requires cognitively diverse boards and executive teams – if everyone thinks the same, you’ll miss out on perspectives and insights that are invaluable and lead to stronger, wiser decisions, all for the sake of the mission.

Being on the team at Carnelian has opened my eyes to the complexity of charities, but also the joy of making good appointments and decisions. It’s helped me in my own thinking in various areas, including how I serve UCCF as a trustee. I look forward to seeing more charities blessed by excellent leaders who prize empathy, have a firm grasp of detail, and foster diverse ways of thinking.

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This piece was written by Abi, our Research Associate.