Hello First name / community member,
I know it is only mid-July, but it seems like we've been running at a pretty fast pace with both personal and professional demands on our time. When we sat down at our staff meeting and talked about what has been happening with our clients, here's what we heard from each other:
- Everyone is so busy that it is hard to get people to concentrate on the work at hand. We haven't made space for the complexities of having a search, interim, or temp in place, and we're feeling challenged to get meaningful feedback throughout the process.
- It is hard to make a decision because the risk of making a poor decision seems higher than ever. As a result, we keep asking for more information and delaying decisions.
- What organizations say they need and what we hear in one-on-one phone calls don't always match.
- Everyone tells us they believe in transparency, but we aren't seeing it.
- How do we explain that there is no "perfect" candidate? How do we explain that the current person in the role isn't "perfect"? How do we build a job description around "perfect"?
Do any of these comments sound familiar?
Part of the reason a search takes time is to provide people with the opportunity to process change. When we invited
Erica Barnhart to speak, we were focused on what happens during a change process. Who gets communication? How do we communicate? What do we say out loud, and what do we say to ourselves? The search process gives boards and senior leadership a chance to begin processing that change is coming. The weekly meetings with the search lead are set up to help the committee process, review, and consider priorities and measures of success.
Interims help with this process because they are a visible indication of change at all levels of an organization. We aren't just talking about the fact that things will be different—we're experiencing that.
The onboarding process is primarily focused on how the new team manages change as they re-establish patterns of decision-making and priorities. The entire process is based on the idea that we need time, we need support, and we need acknowledgment of how difficult this can be.
For our part, the NPN team works through these conversations with every new client. We don't get to jump ahead to "congratulations" before our clients are ready. We listen, we ask questions, we pause, and we work through the process alongside them.
