Consultant Café: Celebrating One Year of Connecting Colleagues
What started as a passing thought over coffee a year ago has quickly become a full-fledged talent development program with participants all over the country. Kam McPike, a Senior Consultant in People & Change, was having coffee with a Senior Managing Director during a business trip when she came up with the program concept.
She realized that her most significant opportunities had arisen from informal face time with senior colleagues. She also remembered how overwhelming it was to be a new Consultant, unsure of which senior leaders to network with and how to plan around their busy schedules.
The idea behind Consultant Café is straightforward; each month, Consultants are paired with senior-level team members for a coffee meeting to discuss their careers, share learnings and best practices, and generally connect as colleagues. While networking over coffee is not new, Consultant Café takes it to a more strategic level; Program leaders, who are highly-connected across all levels, leverage their knowledge of colleagues’ personal interests, goals, and availability to carefully select monthly pairings. The goal is to connect colleagues of varying levels, practices, and areas of expertise to facilitate new insights and working relationships.
The discussions held over coffee have yielded many benefits including new opportunities in project staffing, mentoring, thought leadership development, best practice sharing and overall increased camaraderie in the office.
“I met with a Senior Director on the Digital & Insights team, and we talked about media monitoring in crisis situations and how we sometimes face blind spots in social media. He showed me how to use some of the more sophisticated capabilities of our monitoring tool, and I was able to bring that skill back to my team to further benefit our clients.” – Kate Pulio, Consultant, Special Situations
In the past year, Consultant Café has emphasized and even augmented, the culture of collaboration, camaraderie and continuous talent development, but the program’s origin story is itself indicative of the unique culture at FTI.
“FTI is a really special place because our early-career talent is incredibly eager to excel, and our senior leaders are truly invested in our development,” Kam shared. “I knew everyone would be enthusiastic about meeting colleagues for coffee, it was just a matter of providing a structure to maintain accountability, create strategic pairings and facilitate scheduling.”
Kam drew up a plan for the program and launched it in her Chicago office a month later. After months of successful operation and positive feedback, Amber Glenn, Helen O’Gorman, Matt Gleason and Julia Madrazo joined as program leaders and launched it in the NYC and D.C. offices. Consultant Café, like many other programs at FTI, is run completely by Consultants and Senior Consultants.
According to Kam, that’s what makes FTI so special: the entrepreneurial spirit. If you see an opportunity for development and want to pursue it, your colleagues will cheer you on and help you do what is needed to cross the finish line.
See if a career at FTI Consulting is right for you.
The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of FTI Consulting LLP, its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, or its other professionals, members or employees.
