David Capes
I was impressed with how many times you were the person going out and doing the searches.
Nathan Hatch
It can’t be done just by process, just by a search consultant.
David Capes
You’ve got to get out there and do it yourself.
Nathan Hatch
I’ll tell you about Carolyn Woo, one of the magnificent leaders. She was a senior person at Purdue University. She’s working for the president. She loves it. There had no reason to leave. And I just started to recruit her. I would drive to West Lafayette, Indiana. My sales pitch was this. She’s a wonderful professional in strategic planning, and she is a very devout Catholic. My pitch to her was, come to Notre Dame, and you can really put those two things together for the first time.
David Capes
Ah, that was smart.
Nathan Hatch
You know, after several months, she called and she said, you’re right, and entertained the job. And she came to Notre Dame, and for a decade, was a magnificent leader. She took Notre Dame’s undergraduate business program to number one in the nation. And then went on. She had been on the board of Catholic World Relief, which is a huge relief organization and she became CEO of that.
David Capes
Wow! There’s an [acronym] line that John Stott used to use: “B.W.W.” These are in his vernacular from London, “Blokes Worth Watching.” We say “people worth watching,” “P.W.W. “It sounds like to me you were always on the lookout for people, talented people in other places. You were connecting, and you were networking even among other people of other schools and organizations, not necessarily saying, well, we have a search process. We have to follow it to the letter etc, etc. Sometimes that’s not necessarily going to give the best result.
Nathan Hatch
I was fortunate enough to start some new programs where we could do that. Our program in leadership and character, led by a young academic. He had been a Rhodes scholar. He had degree from Oxford, PhD from Princeton. He was back at Oxford, working on something called the Oxford Character Project, working with graduate students. Someone introduced me to him, and I just said we were very interested in character issues at Wake Forest. So, we brought him in to start a scholarship program and a whole program, and in the last eight years, that program has raised more than $100 million.
It’s become a national leading program. It’s significantly supported by the Lilly Endowment and by the Kern Family Foundation. They have an external program where they give out grants to other institutions working on character development. That’s wonderful to see. It had to do with Michael Lamb, who is just a wonderful young leader. He grew up on a farm in Tennessee. He has no pretension, though he went to Oxford, and Princeton. He can relate to anyone. He’s smart. He has a brilliant book on Augustine but just is deeply interested in how we form students, not just intellectually, but so that their whole character
has changed.
David Capes
Yes, ultimately, that was the job of the university but somewhere along the line we became only a placed to find a job or a place to get trained to do a job. And I know professional education is very important, but there’s also a part, particularly in undergraduate education, or even graduate education, where the whole person needs to be taken into consideration.
Nathan Hatch
Yes. It’s not that one should diminish other things. You need to be excellent, but it’s a question is like Emerson asked, do you have intellect and character? Of course, Emerson said in the end, character was greater than intellect. But modern universities have tended to give very short shrift to character.
David Capes
Yes. I hear a lot about enneagrams and Myers and Briggs and those kinds of things. I wonder, as you interacted with gifted leaders, did you ever find any significance or help in those kinds of assessments?
Nathan Hatch
Yes, I mean, somewhat. Our senior team at Wake Forest would do a retreat twice a year, and we had a wonderful consultant. We would spend half our time on how we work as a team, and not just the work to be done. And we took a lot of those tests, and some of them are helpful. It’s very helpful to know if someone is an introvert or an extrovert. How they process. Some people process by talking. They’ll give you an immediate reaction. Other people don’t want to talk until they’ve got it all wrapped up in their minds. It’s helpful for understanding, but putting people in boxes, in the end, I find frustrating. I
think individuals are unique. The most helpful process I ever went through asks you to reflect on two simple things in your life. One is, what were you pretty good at. And what did you love. When you can find that intersection, you will understand a lot about yourself.
David Capes
What were you pretty good at, and what did you love?
Nathan Hatch
I did this after I was already involved in administration. And what mine showed, was I had very high standards, and I loved to work on goals, moving things forward in teams.
David Capes
Those two characteristics really helped you push things forward to make Notre Dame and Wake Forest more excellent universities.
Nathan Hatch
And that happened by hiring such talented people, in their own sphere. What Steve Reinerman did with our business school was just amazing to watch. We hired a woman who’s just stepping down now, named Julie Freischlag to run our whole medical center. She’s a very distinguished surgeon, and the way she enlivened that whole organization with 20,000 employees. I mean, wow, it was just wonderful to behold. And she took people seriously. She had very high standards, but she listened to people, and people just loved to work for her.
David Capes
If there’s a leader out there, if there’s a CEO who’s trying to put together a team, what would be your best advice.
Nathan Hatch
In some ways, don’t delegate that responsibility. When you’re hiring key people, you’ve got to be involved. Now, granted, I always use search consultants, and we would scour the country for the best person. And get to know them. And often really good people are hard to recruit, so the best person probably may not be someone applying for the job.
David Capes
I was surprised as I read your book, how often people you were interested in, were happy with where they were. They weren’t looking to move.
Nathan Hatch
You had to give them a reason. I guess I’d say two things. Always be on the lookout for talent, and then when you have an opportunity, do everything you can to recruit them. I feel a little guilty about this, but one time, I was recruiting a woman who became our provost. We were trying to impress her and her husband. She was at Colgate. I had a trustee who lived in Canada, and he was coming this way, so I had him pick her up on a private plane to bring her down.
David Capes
That’s pretty impressive.
Nathan Hatch
It is! You want to say, you’re important! And you can be important here.
David Capes
That’s the message. The title of the book is The Gift of Transformative Leaders, written by Nathan Hatch. Nathan, thanks for being with us today on “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
Nathan Hatch
Thank you, David, wonderful to be with you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
