Mission and Talent
For anyone perusing the Mission Advantage digital presence, there is a theme that is noticeable throughout all our materials. Whether you look at our website, our LinkedIn page, or our email footers, the phrase “aligning mission with talent” is imprinted explicitly throughout. So often that it may seem like overkill to write a blog to showcase this theme. What makes it so important? Why is this the drum that we have and will continue to beat from the rooftops?
The answer to this question comes from the inspiration for this post. Last week I was talking to a friend who I train with at the gym. He began to talk to me about his work as a high school baseball coach, and about his crusade to persuade schools to hire coaches who are coaches first. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I asked him to tell me more. “This school appoints teachers as head coaches. For some sports that might work, but when you have a science teacher who is the head football coach, a history teacher coaching basketball, because ‘they were already there,’ it doesn’t work. You have well-meaning individuals googling practice drills in the hours before practice, and ultimately, you have kids with enormous potential who are not being formed to be as good as they could.
These kids are missing out on scholarships to universities that would save their family between $15,000 and $100,000. Those are real numbers.”
I was amazed to realize that he was talking about aligning mission and talent at the high school level. He was illustrating the fact that the gap between hiring the right person and hiring the wrong person is not a stone’s throw; it’s a chasm. It’s the difference between reaching something great and being completely ineffective. As someone with a background in education, I understand that there are valid limitations that some organizations face with hiring, but if there is a workable solution to hire the right person, is it not worth the effort?
Our work is built on this notion, this belief in the front-end investments in people that pay dividends two, five, tenfold down the road. So yes, we will continue to beat the drum: the key difference-maker in any organization’s impact is directly related to their prioritization of aligning mission and talent.