I truly believe that to succeed you need passion and not just from yourself, but from your team. I have learned over the past few years that no matter if I am working with a non-profit or a for profit corporation, to succeed you need people with passion. I have made a few hiring mistakes in my career and when I look back I realize that when I hired those individuals I was only looking at the skill set and not whether the individual had the passion or the drive to succeed. It is hard to make a hiring decision based on just a couple of hours of interviews and a personality test. So you usually look for the skills set of the candidates . What does this person know, can he do the job? However, I have come to realize that in most cases if the basic education is there, you can teach the specific skills, but you can’t teach desire. Does this person want this job? Is she going to work with you or against you? Can she catch the vision and buy into the goals of the company?
I recently had two employees who had skills, could do the job, but didn’t have the desire. They didn’t buy into the goals of the company or the direction of the department. So, every thing was a conflict. They were more concerned with their position and status then how the team was doing and were we achieving our goals. Eventually, even they saw the problem and moved on to other things. In finding replacements, I really focused on finding people who 1) really wanted to work for this company, 2) seemed like they were a good fit for the company culture and could grasp our goals. Finally, I made sure they had the skill set to do the job.
This seems to be working and the team as a whole is already functioning at a higher level because we are all working in the same direction trying to achieve the same goals. It makes a huge difference going to work everyday with a group of people who want to be there and all want to succeed.