[2023-03-07] Origin of Take Me With You

In June 2014, I took part in a breakfast that the Young Professionals Network at Natural Resources Canada had organized with the department's executives. It was a popular event, held annually during National Public Service Week.

On that occasion, the young public servants I sat with described a number of challenges they faced:
  • They were not always given the context they needed to do their work effectively.
  • They rarely received feedback on why their work had been changed, which made it difficult to improve.
  • They didn't consistently hear back on how their work was used and whether it had hit or missed the mark.
  • They were excluded from meetings where their files were being discussed and saw this as a missed opportunity.
One solution to these challenges, they felt, would be to go to meetings with their bosses.

It wasn't the first time that I had heard young employees ask for an opportunity to take part in meetings. However, the fact that it was coming up again suggested to me that it was time to do more than simply nod and say, "Hmm, good point." Instead I said, "It sounds like we need a Take Me With You campaign." I imagined the young professionals wearing "Take Me With You" buttons as a way of reminding their managers to include them in meetings about their files or even just meetings that would expose them to information that would help them to better do their jobs.

In the weeks that followed the breakfast, I chatted with a member of the Young Professionals Network, who wisely suggested a sticker, rather than a button, that young professionals could put on their notebooks.

In a Café Jen blog post in July 2014, I shared the idea for a Take Me With You campaign, suggesting that it could be a week-long campaign where managers would be challenged to take a young public servant—or anyone junior to them, including their subordinate managers—to at least one meeting to which they might not have previously thought to invite them. It could be a meeting with the Deputy Minister or a briefing with the Minister’s Office. It could be a conference targeted at senior managers. Or it could be a management team meeting. Moreover, managers and employees could be encouraged to share their stories of the meeting and how it had helped them.

I acknowledged that it wasn't possible to open up all meetings, whether to young officers or experienced managers. But I also pointed out that it was easy to miss the opportunity to bring someone else along who would truly benefit from the experience. "If we can do it once a year when many managers are shadowed by employees," I asked, "why can’t we do it throughout the year?"

I put the idea out for others to run with, which is exactly what happened. The Young Professionals Network and NRCan's Innovation Hub turned the idea into reality, developing Take Me With You stickers for employees and complementary Exec with Entourage badges for executives.

At the 2015 Young Professionals Network breakfast, I had the honour of launching the campaign.

A year later, a young public servant would hear about Take Me With You at a federal government Career Boot Camp. In her recent post (Take Me With You for a New Era), Steph Percival describes hearing about the initiative and wondering how she could bring it to her organization. In June 2016, during National Public Service Week, she and others launched the campaign at Health Canada.

In the years since, the idea has been implemented in many federal departments and agencies. As Steph writes in her post, it isn’t about encouraging people to attend more meetings; it's about encouraging them to attend the right meetings. Moreover, Take Me With You can be a way to promote inclusion, says Steph, both to ensure that employees from diverse backgrounds have a voice at the table and to take advantage of the talent the federal government has across Canada.

Take Me With You is often described as grassroots, which is fitting as the idea came from young public servants and was ultimately brought to life and sustained by even more young public servants. I simply coined the name and used my blog as a means of sharing the idea. The credit for the initiative ultimately goes to the people who planted the idea and to those who shaped, nurtured and sustained it in the almost 10 years since.