Being an Ally to All Employees

You have heard me speak before on being an ally to our colleagues, be they leaders, managers, or fellow team members. I work hard to engage in meaningful ways with my colleagues, to connect with them and to understand them. This helps me to make sure that as employees we have the right skills, that we are satisfied, that we feel that the company is using us to our best possible capacity, that we are engaged with our work, and that we are inspired by what we do. But do we do that for our interns?

Being an Ally to Interns?

The question of facilitating a great internship had crossed my mind recently and I wanted to outline for myself some milestones I believe that go into creating just such an experience. If I sit down with an intern or someone new to the company, I start our discussion by really just asking them to tell me as clearly as they can what their goals are for this internship.?

What do they want for their career, what do they want for their future, and really, for just the little bit of time we were going to be able to spend together, what would they like to accomplish? Are there skills they wanted to develop? Do they feel particularly strong in certain areas??

When I spend some time listening and understanding these things about them, that helps me to begin sketching out a plan for projects that line up with their goals and skills.?

Planning Internship Experience Together

To help interns make the best of their experience with the company, I work with my leaders and colleagues to identify as many projects as we can all think of that we can work on together with them. It is especially important, I feel, to identify activities and other opportunities for the intern to actually take ownership of a task. This way the intern can exercise their own leadership skills and practice engaging, stepping up, and really taking ownership of the task. This will surely test some people more than others but it’s a great way to find whether this candidate is ready to take on projects of their own and work independently or whether they still require a lot of oversight and guidance.?

Bringing it Full Circle with Interns

To round out the intern experience, I think it’s important to take the time to circle back with the intern or a new employee and talk about what they learned and accomplished. How did it go? What could have been done differently? At this time I also ask for their honest feedback. Did they like what they were doing? Would they like more of that? Or perhaps that was not their cup of tea, and they would like to do something very different next time.?

As a leader, I feel I should be open to all versions of outcome, the good, the bad, and indifferent. Either the positive, they were excited and they want to do more, or here's their idea for what they want to do differently next time.?

Let me know how you use your interns and how you keep them engaged. Even though there is such a short time to engage with these young people, I think we should do that very constructively. So let me know if you have ideas. Let's engage in the comments.