I have had numerous part time jobs
and internships ever since I was sixteen years old, and in most instances I
would say that I got along with all of the people that I worked with. There was
one project, however, when I was an intern at the State Farm Research and
Development Center in Research Park that I found myself in a conflict with a
peer.
I started working for State Farm during January of my sophomore as a Property and Casualty Actuarial Intern. This was obviously when I was still an actuarial science major. During the spring semester there, I worked on pricing projects with another intern who had some experience with the projects and we actually became very good friends through working together. After the spring school semester with State Farm, I stayed there for the summer full-time and was able to work on pricing projects as well as a research project. The team of interns that was put together for this project was across different divisions of the company, basically just meaning that we had different majors or areas of expertise. The interns on the team varied in ages as well. Most of us were rising sophomores and juniors, which wasn’t uncommon for the Research Center, but there was one rising senior who had been working there for over two years.
Overall, I would say that I got along with the five younger interns that I was on this project with, but all of us had conflict with this one older intern, who I will call Ben for the rest of this post. We all felt this conflict on the very first day of our project when he took charge of the project on the first day and assigned us all tasks but never assigned himself anything. I think that Ben acted this way because he was indeed older than us and had worked there much longer than us. Now, I understand that in group projects there is usually one person that takes charge, but the rest of us were looking at this as a collaborative project where we were all equals and would work together, not one where we would have separate tasks and would have to update Ben as if he was a manager. Throughout the summer, tension built between Ben and the rest of us interns in the group.
At first when myself and the other interns realized we were all feeling the same way about Ben, we initially acted somewhat childishly and would complain about him to each other and wouldn’t tell him when some of us were meeting up to discuss the project. I think we were hoping we could just ignore the situation and get on without Ben or at some point make Ben realize that we all believed his behavior and attitude were a problem and force him to change, much like Model I. In our situation, myself and the five fellow younger interns all assumed that Ben was the problem, decided to work privately without him and hope that we could make him change. This situation went on for about half of the summer, or six weeks.
It was this halfway point where myself and the other interns decided we ourselves needed to change. We noticed that there was a disconnect in our group since we weren’t communicating properly with Ben and it was becoming apparent to our corporate contacts that we would report to that something was going on. We didn’t want our feelings about one person to affect our project or our reputations, which I guess you could say was our "breaking point." This is when we decided to change our actions and include Ben in our work and just talk to him about how we had been feeling thus far in the summer. Reflecting upon this, doing so was much like Model II where we put our common goals ahead of everything else, openly communicated with everyone on our team and combined our expertise together to create a great project by the end of the summer. I won’t lie, Ben still wasn’t my favorite person to work with and we didn’t become friends, but we were able to learn to work together effectively.
Looking back, I do think that our team could’ve handled the situation differently, potentially could’ve been more proactive about our feelings towards Ben, to try and combat this conflict earlier; however, I think that the personalities of the interns and Ben just didn’t mesh well which was the root of the conflict; therefore I believe a conflict was inevitable at some point.
I started working for State Farm during January of my sophomore as a Property and Casualty Actuarial Intern. This was obviously when I was still an actuarial science major. During the spring semester there, I worked on pricing projects with another intern who had some experience with the projects and we actually became very good friends through working together. After the spring school semester with State Farm, I stayed there for the summer full-time and was able to work on pricing projects as well as a research project. The team of interns that was put together for this project was across different divisions of the company, basically just meaning that we had different majors or areas of expertise. The interns on the team varied in ages as well. Most of us were rising sophomores and juniors, which wasn’t uncommon for the Research Center, but there was one rising senior who had been working there for over two years.
Overall, I would say that I got along with the five younger interns that I was on this project with, but all of us had conflict with this one older intern, who I will call Ben for the rest of this post. We all felt this conflict on the very first day of our project when he took charge of the project on the first day and assigned us all tasks but never assigned himself anything. I think that Ben acted this way because he was indeed older than us and had worked there much longer than us. Now, I understand that in group projects there is usually one person that takes charge, but the rest of us were looking at this as a collaborative project where we were all equals and would work together, not one where we would have separate tasks and would have to update Ben as if he was a manager. Throughout the summer, tension built between Ben and the rest of us interns in the group.
At first when myself and the other interns realized we were all feeling the same way about Ben, we initially acted somewhat childishly and would complain about him to each other and wouldn’t tell him when some of us were meeting up to discuss the project. I think we were hoping we could just ignore the situation and get on without Ben or at some point make Ben realize that we all believed his behavior and attitude were a problem and force him to change, much like Model I. In our situation, myself and the five fellow younger interns all assumed that Ben was the problem, decided to work privately without him and hope that we could make him change. This situation went on for about half of the summer, or six weeks.
It was this halfway point where myself and the other interns decided we ourselves needed to change. We noticed that there was a disconnect in our group since we weren’t communicating properly with Ben and it was becoming apparent to our corporate contacts that we would report to that something was going on. We didn’t want our feelings about one person to affect our project or our reputations, which I guess you could say was our "breaking point." This is when we decided to change our actions and include Ben in our work and just talk to him about how we had been feeling thus far in the summer. Reflecting upon this, doing so was much like Model II where we put our common goals ahead of everything else, openly communicated with everyone on our team and combined our expertise together to create a great project by the end of the summer. I won’t lie, Ben still wasn’t my favorite person to work with and we didn’t become friends, but we were able to learn to work together effectively.
Looking back, I do think that our team could’ve handled the situation differently, potentially could’ve been more proactive about our feelings towards Ben, to try and combat this conflict earlier; however, I think that the personalities of the interns and Ben just didn’t mesh well which was the root of the conflict; therefore I believe a conflict was inevitable at some point.
Before getting to the content of this post - you used "myself" multiple times where you should use "I" instead (or in some cases where it is the object rather than the subject it should be "me"). We've talked about this sort of thing being a distraction and I thought you've improved on that. This seems like a return to how it was earlier. I guess that old habits are hard to break.
ReplyDeleteAs to your story, one immediate question I have is about whether the interns had a supervisor who was a full time employee. If so, was the supervisor aware of Ben's behavior? And might you and the rest of the interns gone to the supervisor to complain about Ben? It seems as if that didn't happen.
A different sort of question to ask is about why Ben was still there as a senior. Was that (being a senior) in itself odd?
On the last point - being able to work effectively with people even if you don't otherwise like them - that does seem to be a necessary life skill. So it is good that you and your fellow interns figures out how to do that. That said, my experience is that sometimes you can't get past people's personalties to just focus on the work. Tension remains. In that case, my own experience suggestions somebody should sever from the job, just to clear the air. I don't think issues of this sort always get resolved amicably. Expecting that may be unrealistic. But perhaps they do get resolved amicably some of the time. So, surely, that should be tried and with substantial effort to get it to succeed.
We all had supervisors, but what I think made this difficult was that we had many different people that we reported to. Each division had their own manager who we would talk to, but none of us really had the same one. We had a person that was in charge of our project, but he worked in the corporate office in Bloomington and we worked in Champaign and we didn't want to bother him with our intern "drama."
ReplyDeleteAs for Ben being a senior, it was a bit unique that he was there as a senior and had worked at State Farm for so long. Usually people in his position would work at the corporate office in hopes of landing a full time position, but he wasn't the only senior that worked in the office.
Finally, I agree that working efficiently with people despite personalities is a necessary life skill. I certainly wasn't able to get over that I didn't get along with Ben, but I knew that I had to put my feelings aside as much as I could to make sure that we got the project finished.
I am learning about group communication in one of my classes and it seems that the younger interns were wanting of a Laisez-Faire type leadership, which basically means the leader gives the group a lot of freedom to make decisions on their own. What ben seemed to be employing is a Autocratic style of leadership where he was bossy and not allowing the group to do what it wanted. Usually this leads to high turnover and unhappy group members, and this is exactly what happened.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that the group deferred to his style of leadership and went on to work without him. I think it speaks to the intelligence of your group for realizing that the situation were in was not the most productive, you were able to acknowledge this and act appropriately.
I can compare your story to one of mine when I worked as an intern as an IT Specialist. There were two groups of people that each group wanted to do the best they could. WE both had only one boss and would recieve projects from him. In my group there was an older man that was applying for the position and his age alone led him to believe that he would automatically become the leader of the group. That didn't go along very well with the rest of us because we didn't believe that that was the best way to go about it and since he was older and being around a bunch of college students didn't make us feel very confident. Eventually we ended up working together and giving him the idea that he was the leader but in reality we didn't consider him that but had to work through it in order to advance our group further,
ReplyDelete