blog post due 11/15

This past summer I worked for a Risk and Compliance, data and software company. The company had about 15 summer interns, including myself, and part of the summer internship program included a group project. The group project was assigned and presented equally to the entire group of interns, and it was left up to us, as interns, to divide the work and complete the assigned task at hand. The group project included making new elements for the companies online platform, and also creating to external videos for the company; one video on company culture and the other on the internship program. Throughout this process, of working in such a big group with one assigned task, there were many opportunities were arguing amongst the group took place. 

Each meeting the group would meet collectively for two hours at time, during this time the group of interns would discuss our progress and concerns regarding the internship project with full time employees of the company who were overseeing the group internship project. These meetings were typically rather chaotic and induced various arguments amongst different group members of the internship cohort. In order to create structure for the meetings one of the interns decided that there should be a group leader. This sounds like a good idea, and ultimately would turn out to be a rather good idea, and if given the opportunity to decide and discus together the group may have ultimately came up with a similar, if not the same solution. However, instead of the group deciding collectively that it was a good idea to have a preassigned group leader for each of the meetings, one intern decided this should be done and imposed it on the rest of the group as an order that must be followed. 

This created a lot of controversy, between the one intern girl and the rest of the intern cohort. I think part of the root of the controversy was due to the fact that people did not feel as though it was this interns job to come up with the solution and impose it on the rest of the group. Many of the interns felt as though she was trying to take control and have power over of the rest of the group. Not only did this one intern come up with the idea, but she also hand selected the meeting leaders for each week. This made people even more upset, the rest of the interns did not approve of the amount of autonomy this one intern was trying to have over the rest of the group, through her efforts to implement her group leader solution. 

From the one interns prospective, I would assume, she thought she was just being helpful and implementing a solution that she believed would ultimately better the group’s efforts. She did not however, consider and act on the fact that many people would view her initiative as a move to gain power and take ownership and control of the group’s efforts on the group internship project. Initially the rest of the group responded with resistance and expressed their frustration with the individual who would decide something on behalf of the entire of the group. The resolution that occurred and was eventually implemented to action including keeping the idea of having a group leader for each of the meetings. This group leader would be a rotating position and the last group leader would get to choose the next group leader. At first the girl intern who created the initial controversy acted defensive and passive, but eventually the controversy’s impact slowly dwindled. 

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanNovember 15, 2019 at 7:14 AM

    There is a general idea of seeking buy-in to the group decision. This can be done formally, with a vote. Or it can be done informally with a conversation. In most situations people expect to have the right to buy into the group decision. If that has been denied to them and if the group otherwise pretends to be democratic, there will be some time of breakdown, such as the one you described. Even if there is a boss, who once in a while simply makes a decision on behalf of the group, the boss must nonetheless get buy-in from the other group members on mosts decisions, or risk losing real authority.

    Egotistical people may not understand this need for buy-in and instead think their ideas are superior, so don't need acceptance by other group members. This is true even for people with quite a lot of experience. But an inexperienced person who is trying to demonstrate leadership may fail to seek buy-in from others because the need is not perceived. In this case, the issue is simply lack of experience.

    Rotating the leader of a group meeting can work, I suppose, and is definitely democratic, but only really makes sense as a short-term solution. Most committees I'm aware of do have a committee chairperson. That might last a year and then somebody else rotates into the position. One committee I was on that worked well used to have a past chair, current chair, and chair elect form a subgroup that was able to consult and plan group activities. I think that's a reasonable structure. Then you serve as chair out of a sense of obligation to the group, rather than to satisfy some ego reward.

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    1. Francine Blau Econ 490 Fall 2019November 18, 2019 at 3:17 PM

      I can see how changing group leaders every week may not be a good long term plan in order to maintain group authority and structure over a long period of time. Due to the fact that our internship, and the length of the project, was only a few weeks there wasn't much time for us to develop an organized stucture of authority. I do think that the one indivdual who made the decision for the group on her own was trying to demonstate leadership, however, that is not what she ended up doing. Rather, she just took control and imposed a decison on others.

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