How To Successfully Transition Your New Staff Into Your Current Staff Culture

I must say that acquiring a new location with existing staff can be challenging, and I remember I went through that process at one point. I knew I needed to have a bigger space. And I had like two centers, but I was operating out of capacity and I needed a larger space. So at the time, one of my foster moms owned a childcare program. And so I got with my current team and I said, “Okay, this is the assessment that I need to do with this location. So I went through a location and I decided everything I wanted to do with the building, with the marketing, with the whole layout and then I met with her team, and I met with her and that was giving them my thoughts on what it was that we needed to do. But lo and behold, this moment in this situation taught me a lot, although I was really excited about having a larger space and not being caught by the State for being out of capacity. There was still more than I needed to do to make this transition successful. End of the story, the transition was not successful because I didn’t apply strategy. And we ended up cutting ties and going the opposite way. So I learned a lot from that and what I’m going to train you on today is going to help you because hopefully before you make the mistakes I made you learn from this blog. 

1. Assessing the skill set of the team is essential even when it comes to culture, because you may have to retrain individuals.
2.  We talked about creating your yearly operating plan, but what’s included in the yearly operating plan is the sauce. The sauce is you want to have a leadership academy in your program. Now, your leadership academy can exist before this new acquire program, or it can be something that you get to develop. But if you don’t have any you’ve already acquired that location, honey, let me tell you, you’re about to start working day and night to become like Nehemiah. You’re going to have to build and battle at the same time, and there’s no way around it. You just got to be with it. You have to be willing to do what it takes so that you can take your corporation to the next level. 

So when you want to have that leadership program, which is to take the form of culture, culture is training, culture is created. So the Leadership Program is the technical part of culture and then you have the next part, which is building trust and rapport. So this is essential because, of course, you want to position yourself as a professional, but there are certain techniques that’s going to help you build trust and foster a positive work environment like making sure that you have a process in place to recognize talent. 

So back to my story, after I did all of the hard work which was to clean up the building and set it up with systems to improve the office, I set things up, painted it, and ball in new equipment. I thought that I was doing the right thing by making it look good, but I was wrong. I should have sat down first with the staff and asked what is it about the program that they wanted to keep and what about their program that they would like to see change. That would have fostered trust and that would have fostered communication. So you want to do that. You want to figure out how you can ask the right questions that will foster trust and communication. 

And then what you want to do is to make sure that you foster support. Now there’s only so much you can do when it comes to support. But your leadership academy is essential to being able to provide support to your team. 

So back to my story, after talking with her staff, I realized that we weren’t used to using systems. They love the kids, the kids love them, but running it like a business was something they weren’t used to. So then I had to assess how I was going to get a team of people who knew the families better than me, knew the children better than me, knew the operation, knew the location better than me. How’s that going to get them to transition into my mindset? And that’s where my leadership academy became a part of my thought process. It became a part of what I wanted to do. I wanted to train them on my foundation systems. 

So that is where you are, that is what you want to start to think about and do when it comes to transitioning a culture into a new culture. 

I hope that I said something that will power you to go headfirst into this new opportunity or know exactly what to do when you come across this particular opportunity. If you like what you’ve read, and there’s more, trust me there’s more. And there’s a list of other things that I want to make sure that you have in place. So be sure to register now and meet me at the webinar, www.learnnewsystems.com