Meeting everyone on a new team : Anna Shipman

Reflections from Shipman on the process she used to meet with every person on her team when starting a new role.

The first was getting an idea of what change was needed. These meetings gave me a brilliant insight that wasn’t available elsewhere. Patterns started emerging very quickly, and formed the basis of our tech strategy.

The second was building relationships. A lot of the people I had 1:1s with I would not have come into contact with during the course of the ordinary working week. It would have taken time to meet everyone at socials, and it wouldn’t have been the same quality of conversation. I still feel, two years on, that I know a bit about all the people I had those conversations with, which has felt to me like a good foundation for our subsequent conversations.

Maintaining direct relationships with your team is important, even as your team scales in size. There are multiple ways to do it.