Why CIS Promotes from Within

When a company expands, it grows in many ways. Yes, it gains more clients, does more business, and adds more employees, but the firm also changes in other ways. The company mission evolves. The culture shifts. The org chart adjusts.

These changes inevitably happen during growth spurts, regardless of whether they’re closely managed. Sometimes shifts in mission and culture are well-reasoned and deliberate. Other times they just “happen,” without much thought or planning.

Unmanaged change can throw a company off course. So how does a fast-growing firm keep core values and processes in place, even when everything else is shifting? CIS had to figure this out. We’ve experienced a series of growth spurts. Sometimes our contracts grew. Other times, we absorbed additional agencies. So we had to find ways to protect the integrity of our approach and our services.

Promoting From Within is an Anchor

As a human services organization, CIS takes the care of our clients seriously, but we also take the care of our?employees?seriously. Our mission is to provide better lives for our clients and our employees. And one of the best ways to do that is to promote from within.

Promoting from within gives employees motivation to stay longer. It increases continuity and expands corporate memory. Many of our most senior employees have been promoted from entry-level positions, moving up the ladder, and eventually landing in company management positions.

The staff who has moved up through the ranks has an exceptional understanding of the mission, care requirements, and culture. This shared memory is an anchor for CIS. It has helped us stay true to who we are and who we want to be. While importing senior people from other agencies can bring a fresh perspective, it is more of a challenge to maintain consistency and continuity. I am not saying that you shouldn’t do this but be mindful of training differences you will encounter.

HR has a Clear Mission

Promoting from within offers obvious benefits to employees, but it also gives HR a clear mission. By committing to promoting from within, CIS empowers HR to hire people based on a fit with our core values and culture. Instead of looking for people based on resumes or experience, our recruiting team can focus on an individual's approach to caring for others. That means they can spend more time finding people who are a good fit for social services careers. As a result, our potential employee base grows much broader, and we can recruit from various fields.

The promote-from-within policy also helps our HR department spend less time searching for hard-to-find senior employees. Instead, they focus on hiring foundational positions, filling those jobs with people who are a good fit with our company culture and mission.

A Mentoring Approach Supports Promoting from Within

CIS is committed to mentoring. While our mentoring process is informal, it’s a real part of our culture. Senior staff talk with their teams regularly to assess their strengths and weaknesses. Using this knowledge, they create a well-rounded understanding of their professional needs and goals. Informal mentoring helps us identify our employee’s long-term ambitions, passions, and abilities.

But we don’t rely on managers to uncover career goals. Instead, we train our employees to think about their career paths from day one. Any new employee to the field must complete a 75-hour training and orientation course, including a peer coaching component. After the orientation training, there is ongoing formal and informal training done within departments and technical training in state law and policy.

Promoting From Within Fosters Horizontal Growth

While some organizations think of promotions as vertical, they can also happen between departments. The CIS shadowing program not only helps employees understand the responsibilities of other staff members, supervisors, and departments, but it also introduces them to other positions and placements.

The resulting cooperation among departments also fosters the creation of hybrid positions. As a growing company, we constantly encounter "stretch" periods when the income does not warrant a full-time hire, yet a new area still requires some attention. By creating hybrid positions based partially on business needs and partly on employee skills and preferences, we can cover tasks in a wide range of areas until the company has stretched enough to create a new, full-time position within a department.

Start by Creating Clear Directives

Promoting from within can be challenging, especially when it’s combined with creating new positions. That's why it is so essential to establish clear directives. Even if the new duties are a small part of that person’s overall responsibilities, we create a job description that clarifies expectations for the current role and the new tasks. It is also vital to carefully monitor performance and frequently update the job description as the person and position develop.

At CIS, we usually pair the promoted employee with a senior team member who can monitor progress and assess the need for more training. In addition, the senior team member ensures the person has all the necessary tools to learn and master their new responsibilities.

Flexibility is Key

At CIS, there is no one path to promoting from within. Keeping our promotions program flexible and ongoing encourages our team members to try new roles, often with little personal risk. After all, as long as you excel at CIS’s core competency – compassionate care – we'll find the right place for you in our organization.