It’s better to care about success than to care about animals
Almost all animal advocacy NGOs hire people from “within the fold”. Almost everyone who works at org’s working for farm animals is themselves vegan. Almost everyone working at more general/multi-issue animal protection organizations is someone who cares alot about animals. This is so standard it is rarely reflected on.
This insularity can and does cause a lot of negative outcomes for animals. One area is around quality of work per staffer.
There are upsides to hiring someone how cares about the issue. Caring a lot about something can drive one to work harder, think through things at greater length (and therefore make better decisions), etc. But emphasis here on the “can”.
Yes, caring about something can make one work harder/smarter/be more motivated. However it can also lead to a lot of negative outcomes that is quite visible in many advocates — a focus on purity instead of outcome; group think in various areas; making decisions based on short term thinking driven by emotion rather than long term thinking driven by what will produce the best outcome for animals; etc.
But even leaving all that aside and just thinking about the positive side…consider two job applicants. One is “animal-driven”, someone who cares about animals and wants to help them. Another doesn’t have a particular concern for animals but is “success-driven.” They have very strong internal motivation to achieve success in their work. They have a higher work ethic (willing to work longer hours), are willing to self-sacrifice more, and are consistently looking to reach the next level of achievement.
Ideal applicants would be both, and the best animal advocates I know are both (in addition to having other certain qualities). But the reality is there aren’t a huge number of “animal driven” people, there aren’t a huge number of “success driven” people, and so the overlap of people who are both is going to be very small.
Most people who work at NGOs are animal driven but not success driven. That’s a problem. NGOs that erred on the side of hiring for success driven rather than animal driven could be more effective.
Even if you leave aside the negatives of hiring animal-driven folks, just comparing positives to positives, success driven folks may well achieve significantly more success because, well, that is their primary drive. You can satisfy an animal-driven nature by doing *something* that helps animals. But a success-driven person will be driven not to do something but to do better, more.
Also, since being success-driven is to a large extent a collection of personality traits, it’s extremely unlikely that an animal-driven person will become success driven. But it seems not unlikely that a success-driven person will come to care to some extent about animals through doing work that helps them (given how our minds work, cognitive dissonance, etc).
But even if they don’t, who cares. Most extremely successful companies were not built by people who had a unique and lifelong ethical concern for the industry they work in. Sure there are exceptions (ex, Elon Musk I assume does care about sustainability). But most were built by people who were success driven, and so their personality traits all drove them to try to be the best at what they were doing, with passion-based ethical concerns not a motivating factor at all. (Ex, Jeff Bezos; but also literally hundreds of thousands of additional examples of folks doing a very good job in demanding roles in the for-profit sector.)
Its probably better to hire for success driven with paying only moderate attention to if someone is animal-driven or not. Yes there are downsides to not really caring about animals if one works at an animal charity. But there are likely bigger downsides to not being really success driven.
