Hiring Executives for Nonprofits with Raj Vinnakota

Intro: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend Raj Vinnakota. Raj is the CEO of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, a nonprofit focused on strengthening democracy by driving civic preparedness, education and engagement in 14 to twenty- four- year- Olds. Raj has been a multi- time founder. He scaled lots of businesses in the nonprofit space. He served on for- profit boards, as well as non- for- profit boards, and is one of my oldest professional and personal friends. Raj, good to see you.

Rajiv Vinnakota: Glad to be here. Thank you so much.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, so my question for you, part of the podcast series, sometimes I just like to talk about interviewing and hiring senior executives. And although you've hired many more senior executives in the nonprofit world than the for- profit world, there's a ton of crossover. You're still hiring a head of marketing, you're still hiring a CFO. So my question for you is, what is your framework, or your formula, or secret sauce when you are interviewing candidates for executive roles?

Rajiv Vinnakota: When I share this list of four items, two of them will sound very familiar to you. The first one of course is do their skills and experience align to the job description that you're actually trying to have them achieve? And to some extent, that's the easy one. A second one is mission fit, and usually you can get at that as well. In the nonprofit world, I would argue it's a larger part of the conversation. It's not any more or less important. You want to make sure that there's alignment there. It's the other two that I spend actually most of my time and where I find the true differentiation. The third is their judgment. What we learn is that so often with senior executives, they're making decisions without you in the room and with not a full deck, right? They've got a certain set of information. It's not everything that they'd want to have, and they need to make the call. And so I spent a lot of time figuring out, what's the process that they go about making that call? How did they come to that decision? And spending very little time on whether or not that decision was the right decision or the wrong decision. I want to understand that they're bringing clarity of thought, deep thinking, and their best selves to try to make the decision with whatever information they have in the moment. Fourth and finally is, they've got to be fun to work with. We spend way too much time in our life in the workspace, and if I'm not looking forward to spending time with them, if I can't have a good joke or a conversation or talk about life in some way, that actually adds to my energy, it's just not worth it.

Matt Blumberg: That's certainly true. I actually really liked the very end of that one, which is, it's not so much that they have to be a comedian or you have to want to go have a beer with them. It's that, do they bring you positive energy? Right? Do they create kind of a virtual cycle in your interactions?

Rajiv Vinnakota: There's enough stuff that takes energy out of our system.

Matt Blumberg: Yes.

Rajiv Vinnakota: We need to make sure our colleagues are giving us energy.

Matt Blumberg: Yes. No, that's great, and that's a really interesting approach to getting at the judgment topic. Obviously, you only want to hire senior executives who have great judgment, but even the smartest senior executives are going to make bad decisions from time to time, but really getting under three layers deep on, how do you approach problems and decisions just to make sure that they at least have a solid process, which raises the odds of good decisions.

Rajiv Vinnakota: Exactly.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. All right. Raj Vinnakota, thank you so much for your advice on interviewing senior executives.

Rajiv Vinnakota: Glad to do it. Thanks for having me.