Essential One: We must be passion driven rather than task driven.

At the foundation of recruiting is passion. I was facilitating a strategic planning retreat for a national environmental organization recently, and the leaders were talking about how they have many members who are interested in animals but are not passionate about the environment. Therefore recruiting for leadership becomes very difficult. This is a major problem in many organizations.

Each of us have an internal engine that is driven by passion. For the most part, that internal engine falls into one of three drives. For some people that engine is a cause (the environment, the industry), for others it is relationships (the people who are members of the organization), and others are driven by processes (planning, organizing). The key to recruiting is to tap into that passion. Executive directors and board members often see the task that is before them such as raising money or passing legislation, but the fuel of that task is passion. People will be committed to their passion. They don't mind giving time if they are passionate about the mission of the organization. When we recruit, we have to match the engine to the task.

Essential Two: Leadership must have a passion for the cause.

Committee members can be passionate about process and relationships. They can join committees because they love being with the group or love their duties (bookkeeping, phoning). However, leadership, boards and committee chairs, must be passionate about the mission of the organization. Cause-driven people get things done.

What you are reading is not just theory. The information that we have taught to such organizations and associations as National Audubon Society, Ducks Unlimited, The California Dental Society, California Association of Homes and Services for the Aging and The Recreational Vehicle Association of America comes out of 30 years experience in recruiting, training and motivating volunteers. Perhaps the most significant and successful experience was when I was in my early 30's when I decided to go to seminary.

When I entered seminary, I had a vision for a church that was unique. I felt that large and growing churches had an untapped resource of talent that was often overlooked because recruiting and training volunteers was much more difficult than just hiring a staff member to do the job. During my seminary days I wrote a business plan on how to start a church that would be based on the principle of never allowing more than 30% of your church budget to be spent for staff (most large churches spend from 60-90% of their income on staff salaries). When I graduated from seminary, I started a church with about 30 people. In eight years we had over 3000 regular constituents and over 1000 of them were active members serving in active roles in the congregation. Not only was 30% low for most large churches, but we only had six full-time ministers. Most church specialists recommend having about one full-time minister for every 250 constituents.

Our success was based on one very important ingredient: leaders who were passionate for the cause. Every staff member, board member, and department head was passionate about their department. And they gave a high priority to recruiting leaders who were articulate about the mission of their department as well as the organization. Passionate leaders are able to excite passion in others. They don't even have to work at it. Each of us on staff would spend a majority of our time recruiting passionate leaders in the areas of work we were responsible for. Recruiting passionate leadership was our highest priority.

Essential Three: The organization must have a well defined mission.

An organization that has lost its cause will never grow and make an impact. The same is true for any organization. I have our leadership team answer these questions each year as we constantly redefine our mission:

• What are we?
• What do we do?
• Who is our customer?
• What makes us unique?
• What is our service?
• How will we market our services?

The process of answering these six questions not only helps to define the cause, but also awakens the passion within each leader who is involved in the exercise. Leadership must keep the cause alive.

Essential Four: Recruit teams rather than individuals.

This method is particularly effective with younger volunteers (20-30 year olds). Many people are afraid of getting tied into a job for a lifetime and never being able to get out of it. They get burned out and then quit the organization as a way to quit.

There is a paradox to this essential. I always recruited a leader who would recruit his or her team. The leader must be passionate about the cause of that team, whether it is a strategic planning team or a fund-drive team or a special campaign team. In that sense I was recruiting an individual; but that individual was to be the leader of a team. I accomplished three objectives with this kind of recruiting. Objective one: People said yes to a short term commitment with an end-date in sight. Objective two: People had the opportunity to catch the vision of the organization because they were working with a passionate leader. Objective three: Leaders became mentors for future passion driven teams. We were always looking for new leadership.

Am I afraid of the changes in society? No. I am excited because self-employed people are passionate visionaries. They are people who want to make a difference. In the 60's, we used to hear, "If you want a job to be done, recruit a busy person and they will get it done." In the first decade of the 21st Century, we will hear, "If you want to get a job done, recruit a passionate person, they will get the job done." And those people will probably be very busy running their own self-employed businesses.

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