The opportunity to walk the walk with new team members
Just a few weeks ago, we welcomed Lori Press to our team as our new Administrative Coordinator. This is an exciting evolution for the CCI team as it’s a new role, and while we have benefitted for years from administrative support from Janice Dalager and her team, we are more than ready to have someone full time in this role.
In fact, Janice’s team will continue to do what they’ve been doing, aside from some more recent responsibilities they took on temporarily until we had an Admin Coordinator in place. Much of what Lori will be taking over will actually be things that I have been carrying out as far as scheduling, tracking scope, formatting decks and other documents etc. This was not a big deal when we were smaller but, especially as we have continued to do more and more DEI and leadership 1:1 coaching for our organizational clients, the administrative workload has ballooned and I am beyond excited to bring Lori on board and hand it all over to her.
Lori will be client facing as far as scheduling and coordination, so those of you who are working with us will likely be interacting with her soon if you haven’t already.
Meanwhile, this will free me and the rest of the team up to do more of the strategic level work that will help keep us on a path towards increased impact for our clients as well as for us.
It has been important to us however that we bring someone onto the team who isn’t just here to support us, but that is someone we can support in their career and professional development as well as with a supportive work environment in general, something that was clear was not the norm for many of the candidates for this position.
Lori is our first hire who didn’t have some previous connection to one of our team members, and so it has and continues to be an opportunity for us to walk the walk as far as equitable and inclusive recruiting, hiring, onboarding and team building. We are not perfect by any means, but it actually gives me great satisfaction to work towards creating the kind of work environment I always wished I had, which is not to say that it is based solely on my needs, but is based on the premise of giving everyone what they need to do their best work, which is exactly our mission for our clients as well.
This is not just an individual endeavor either, it’s also about working as a team to meet the needs of the team as a community. With a team our size, every new team member changes the team - at least for us, we don’t want it to be about the team member fitting into existing team culture, but about the team culture evolving and expanding, to the benefit of us all. Even for a big firm or organization, every new hire is likely joining a small team with opportunities for shifts in team culture if not org culture.
The timing of this hire has been very intentional. With August as our designated month for strategic planning, professional development and self-care, we have the space (just a little bit!) to reimagine the team now that both LaVoya and Lori have joined us. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings!
How do you approach bringing in new team members?
Banner photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash
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