Don Sull's blog

The first Jesuits, as portrayed by Professor John W. O’Malley, S.J. in his book of the same name, excelled at seizing unexpected opportunities to fulfill their mission of saving souls. In its first two decades, the Society of Jesus spread throughout Europe, and expanded into Brazil, India, Ethiopia, and Japan, grew from nine founders to over three thousand members, and exerted influence disproportionate to its size by educating children of the ruling elites.

The Society of Jesus relied on highly-trained priests to staff the order’s various ministries. The geographical distribution of the early Jesuits and the slow pace of communication in the Sixteenth century (a letter and response from Rome to Jesuit missions in India or Japan could take three years) meant left missionaries with great autonomy. The diversity of contexts in which Jesuits operated demanded judgment in assessing a novel situation and flexibility in responding to circumstances. The order’s success depended on how well it identified, attracted, and retained promising candidates for priesthood, and put them to their best use.

Viewed in organizational terms, the early Society of Jesus was a precursor to the modern professional service firm–in fields including accounting, law, consulting, or investment banking–where highly trained professionals exercise great latitude in carrying out their work. In these settings, agility depends to a large extent on how well the organization can assemble talented people and deploy them against promising opportunities as they arise.  The Jesuit’s early success illustrates some broader principles professional service firms can use to enhance their agility.

• Distill in words what the ideal candidate looks like. The first step in hiring employees (or novices) is articulating the attributes of an attractive candidate. The Jesuits valued intensity, seeking out “two extremes” of people who had been either very holy or very bad in their life prior to the order, and the order as a matter of policy avoided recruiting the “simple and the good” (74). A decade after the Society’s official foundation, Juan de Polanco, the secretary to the general Ignatius Loyola, listed the qualities demonstrated by the ideal candidate (82). “Flexibility” was third on the list, and defined as the ability to adapt to different situations or circumstances, accommodate the specific idiosyncrasies of people, and learn from one’s mistakes. Flexibility was particularly important, as O’Malley notes, because the Jesuit “would often find himself on his own, far removed from his brethren and his superiors, and in new, strange, and difficult situations” (81).
• Seek out the most promising candidates. The Jesuits’ rapid growth created a demand for outstanding priests. Monastic orders waited for candidates to knock on the monastery door, but the Jesuits sought out promising recruits. Each local community had a promotor, charged with actively seeking out good candidates (55). The Jesuits used their schools and colleges to identify promising candidates, observe them closely over time, and recruit the best. In their search for talent, the Jesuits recruited from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds, admitting children of small merchants, artisans, professionals, and peasants (60). The early Society of Jesus not a complete meritocracy, to be sure, but compared to other social institutions at the time was much more open to talent from outside the wealthy and aristocratic classes.
• Weed out candidates who do not fit.  Initial hiring screens can weed out candidates who would clearly fail, but cannot ensure those who make the cut will succeed. To minimize the risk of promoting the wrong people, leaders should build in multiple reviews to evaluate employees for promotion with the benefit of years of close observation. Professional service organizations do just this by scrutinizing associates before making them junior partners, and junior partners before promoting them to full partnership. O’Malley finds that on average, 35% of recruits left or were dismissed, a number that rose to 44% for novices who joined before the age of eighteen (56). Of those who left, one-fifth did so in their first two year period as novices, one-half left during the next seven years, and thirty per cent left after nine years. Like all new organizations enjoying rapid growth, the early Jesuits had their share of hiring mistakes, but continued to improve the selection processes by screening novices more thoroughly and dismissing unsuitable candidates earlier (61).
• Maintain mobility.  In professional service organizations, agility requires redeploying people from one activity to another. Geographic distribution and professional autonomy can breed an atomistic organizational culture, where individuals are unwilling to sacrifice their personal utility for the greater good. To maintain flexibility, an organization should ensure that employees keep their “bags packed,” and reamain ready to move as new opportunities arise. The Jesuits required priests to take a special vow on ordination that they would travel anywhere in the world in service of the order’s mission.  The early Jesuits forged a shared sense of identity among the community of priests to reinforce that they belonged to a global order not a local mission. Polanco created a circular letter, sent several times each year to all Jesuits, that collected and summarized reports from ministries around the world. The letters, O’Malley reports, were “filled with concrete details about what the Jesuits were doing, how they were received, how they dealt with problems they faced” (10).
• Allocate the most talented professionals to institution building. In many firms, the best professionals stick to practicing their profession, and leave management to less capable peers or outsiders, who lack credibility within the firm.  By putting weak people in management positions, firms cannot build and manage the organization for long-term vitality. Polanco and Jerónimo Nadal were among the most promising recruits Ignatius attracted to the Jesuits. Despite the pressing need for priests to staff the order’s ministries, Ignatius assigned both to management positions, where they clarified the order’s mission, developed mechanisms like the circular letter to build cohesion, and refined recruiting and promotion processes. The Jesuit’s long-term success owes as much to the management of Nadel and Polanco as to the inspiration of Ignatius.