Onboarding a teammate or assistant
Decide team seat or delegated access, what they see on day one, and who owns what.
Bringing someone new into your relationships, an assistant, a coworker, a new hire, goes badly when access is either too narrow to do the job or too wide and shows them things that were never meant to be shared. Here's how to set it up right the first time.
Why it matters
Getting the access model wrong on day one means walking it back later, which is awkward for everyone and usually happens right when the new person needs to be moving fast, not waiting on a fix. Deciding this up front is a five-minute conversation. Undoing it isn't.
How it works
Two different models for two different situations. A team seat is for someone who's genuinely part of the shared workspace going forward, working the same contacts alongside everyone else. Delegated access is for someone managing your account specifically, an assistant handling your outreach and calendar, without a separate workspace of their own. Pick the model before you send an invitation.
How to do it
- Decide the model: a coworker who'll build their own relationships alongside yours gets a team seat; an assistant managing your account specifically gets delegated access.
- For a team seat, invite them, then decide what gets shared with the team versus what stays yours — Share contacts and see what your team is doing.
- Share the specific spheres they need on day one, not your whole database, at read or write access depending on their role — Share a sphere.
- Assign ownership on the contacts they're actually taking over, so it's clear who's on point for each relationship.
- For delegated access, walk them through the account switcher and the banner that shows when they're working inside your account rather than their own.
What good looks like
The new teammate can do their job on day one. They see only what they actually need. Every shared contact makes it clear who owns it, so nobody's guessing who's supposed to follow up.
If you fell off
You added someone months ago and never finished the setup, no ownership assigned, no spheres shared beyond the basics. Normal. It's easy to send an invite and move on to the next thing. Pick the three spheres that person actually touches day to day, share those, and assign ownership on the contacts they've already been working. You don't need to fix everything at once, just the part they're actively using.