How Strategic is your Recruitment?

When developing a leadership program one of the most important decisions to make is who to recruit to the program. Yet too many are tempted to first rush into program design. Deciding who to serve requires a thorough understanding of the problem being addressed, what has limited progress on the problem to date, how work with a specific target population will make a difference, and what kind of support the participants will need to produce the results you are hoping to achieve. This may seem like common sense but it can be far more complex than we realize. To demonstrate this complexity we want to share two examples: one that defies conventional wisdom about who can mobilize resources; the second, an example showing how different programs working on the same problem have different ideas about who they need to recruit.

Some programs assume that highly-positioned individuals will have more authority and resources at their disposal and are therefore better able to mobilize resources and exert influence on problems like health access, food systems or school readiness. A leadership program focused on malnutrition in India run by the Synergos Institute took such an approach and targeted senior government and NGO officials. However, they found during the program that these highly-qualified individuals were not able to devote sufficient time and attention to studying the problem and prototyping possible solutions. The Annie E. Casey Foundation found that mid-management leaders had sufficient access to resources and the time and energy to move forward an agenda of change, especially with some coaching on how to lead from the middle. These two cases illustrate the importance of thoroughly investigating, testing and revising (if needed) your assumptions about who should participate in your leadership program.

Over the past decades a number of programs have focused on getting more people of color into leadership positions. Providing skills to people of color to increase access and opportunity is sound logic when you look at the lack of diversity in non-profit leadership. Still, it is important to dig deeper into why people of color do not have more access to leadership positions and ask why a pipeline program would have the greatest impact on the problem. There is no doubt that pipeline programs are valuable and that they can and should give a leg up to groups that have not had opportunities to attend good schools, advance to college or land in good careers because of their race or socioeconomic status. But if structural barriers, like growing up in a low income neighborhood with poor performing schools or employment discrimination by boards and executives who hire people that look like themselves, are more responsible than lack of skills, we need to ask if a pipeline strategy is the most strategic approach to getting more people of color into leadership positions.

To be strategic it would be helpful to compare the results of different recruitment strategies that want to tackle the exclusion of people of color, e.g. programs specifically for people of color; programs focused on working with current boards or Executive Directors around inclusion; programs that recruit racially mixed cohorts that create new networks and relationships that can increase access; or programs that are focused on helping people of color gain policy skills to change structural barriers. There are many programs using each of these strategies, all of those strategies share the goal of increasing opportunity for people of color – yet, they work with different target populations based on their mission, values, assumptions, goals and research. Most likely we need all of these approaches to make progress, but these programs often occur in isolation from one another. The programs are left without an opportunity to learn about the impact of working with different target populations or without being proactive about how to leverage these different approaches as part of an orchestrated effort to take on exclusion and structural racism.

Below are a few questions that could guide program recruitment decisions:

• Who are the different people or combinations of people/organizations you could support and why do you believe your efforts will have the greatest impact by working with the target population you have chosen?
• What evidence do you have that supporting this specific target group will make a difference?
• What do you know about the type of support this group needs and how do you know?
• What has been the involvement of this group in your decision?
• What do you know about leadership programs that are tackling the same issue/problem: who they are working with, what have they learned, and what impact have they had?