C1S3: Including Your Team
The Employment Partner may be one person, but it often takes a team to further increase this process’ success rate.
Early Involvement
Depending on the size and structure of your company, we recommend involving your business’ leadership team (if applicable) as early on in this Employment Partnership process as possible and continue to include them throughout. Sharing your excitement and a positive vision for why you want to pursue partnership with us is a profound way of gaining “buy in” from other key stakeholders. You want them to feel a part of this process not apart from it. Having the support of others will help you support your Mentee better.
Starting with “Why?”
Looking for some inspiration to get your team excited about embarking on this mentoring/employment journey? Leadership author and thought leader Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on”Why?” is a great place to start.
Navigating Negativity
In an ideal world, you would share your vision with your team detailing the mentoring of someone incarcerated with the intent to potentially hire them and it’d be met with unanimous support. However, that may not always be the case.
Members of your team may have strong reservations and opinions against hiring someone formerly incarcerated. This is understandable and to be expected. When dialoguing with these individuals, we advise listening thoughtfully to their concerns and offering calm, positive responses that focus on the benefits you see and the slow, controlled nature of our process. Our website, social media accounts, and even this Guide can be good sources of information to respectively offer a new perspective for their consideration. Additionally, we can recommend or provide additional sources of information and even come out to speak with your team, if needed.
A New Rallying Point?
Despite the potential for pushback, figuring out how you want to include your team can actually be fun. More than ever before, our culture is aware of and dialoguing about large social justice issues. Who knows, maybe Employment Partnership with us will become a new rallying point for you and your business.