Ben Crosby Promoted to Associate Partner
Edgility is pleased to announce the promotion of Ben Crosby to Associate Partner!
What are you most excited to accomplish in your new role?
Our team and firm has grown so much in the last year – I’m excited to expand our impact, continue to refine our internal systems, and continue to to do right by our partners and the communities they serve. Being a leader at Edgility just highlights one of the many advantages of being a remote-only, national firm – you get to collaborate with really smart colleagues and clients across the country and build perspective on issues that you wouldn’t necessarily get from working in a single city or region.
What are 2-3 biggest lessons you’ve learned on your journey to becoming a leader at Edgility?
I have an adaptive leadership style and tend to focus on innovation, problem solving, and experimentation. I thrive in liminal or ambiguous spaces. A lot of our work is grounded in numbers, data analysis, and formulas, but I’ve learned that you have to be able to tell the story and connect your work back to the “bigger picture”. I push my teams to articulate “the why” behind their work and try to hold myself to the same standard. I don’t believe in mantras but I am a big fan of John Cage’s “10 Rules for Students and Teachers”. Rule #6 always made sense to me: “Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.”
How do you hope to advance equity in your new role?
I’m a white cisgender Male living in one of the least diverse (and least densely populated) parts of the country. I talk regularly with my friends and family about how we can contribute and support the national dialogue on racial and social justice while still staying true to our roots in the mountain west. There aren’t easy answers to any of these questions, but my general belief is that racial justice has to be rooted in economic justice. The work we do with clients advances justice in small and large ways, whether it is building more clear and transparent compensation systems, addressing wage gaps, or thinking carefully about how we hire and grow staff that reflect the communities we serve.
What are a few things you love about the communities you serve?
There’s very little ego involved in our partnerships, and I appreciate being able to speak candidly about what we want to accomplish together and then pull up our sleeves to get things done. On the surface, compensation work can seem kind of dry and formulaic, but it actually touches almost every aspect of the “DNA” of an organization – your core values, strategic goals, staffing model, DEI, employee morale, budget, retention, etc. I love unpacking all of that with our partners, then designing systems that truly reflect who they are as an organization.
