Help us empower Interns to achieve more

I work at the company that once envisioned a computer on every desk and in every home, and that three years ago redefined its mission as nothing less than empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Now that I've demonstrated that I’ve learned the company's mission by heart, I must admit that I'd never really asked myself how to turn this into a guide for my actions as a manager until we started re-thinking our internship program.

Being in touch with waves of interns each summer makes it harder to ignore the fact that the new generations, with their new ways of thinking, are a reality. How could we improve the internship program to stay relevant?

The task seemed complex, because it was all about changing something that the company had been doing in an epic fashion for decades. We decided to hold a brainstorming session with my team. Deep down, some of us suspected the efforts would be fruitless until the following question occurred to us: Are we empowering? To answer this, we first had to go to the dictionary and look up the meaning of empowerment. Thus, we learned that empowerment means:

OK. So… were we empowering the interns or not?

Well, the truth is that we were giving them the best of ourselves, not leaving a single detail left to chance to ensure that they experienced a truly epic summer. But it's also true that, in trying to control the internship program so much, we were not giving them the space, the freedom, or the resources necessary for them to create their own experience.

-But isn't that supposed to be our job? someone asked.

-Well ... that depends- answered another- It depends on whether our objective is to delight them or to develop them...

This was starting to become interesting because, what if they could create something that works much better for them? At first it seemed absurd for them to build their own experience and suddenly it started to make sense. Of course, it should be them. Right?

And we shouldn’t forget that we are talking about the brightest minds (and hearts). These are the Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos of the future.

That meeting woke us up, reminding us once again that companies aren’t created out of thin air. No. Companies arise from people who, quite often, until that moment nobody had bet on.

Then, we saw it clearly:

We believe that the greatest gift that can be given to somebody is to provide them the opportunity to be what they want to be. But what does exactly mean to bet on the interns?

Well, for that it was necessary to listen to what the interns wanted and, based on what we learned, we decided to experiment by giving them the opportunity to use their intelligence, their skills and Microsoft's platform to experiment with building something valuable that improves their experience and that of the other interns.

But why should one intern care about making the experience better for the entire intern class?

Because this is the fundamental skill of every entrepreneur and the empathetic leadership we seek to develop in them and at Microsoft:

And so we started to suspect that if -instead of just being consumers of the internship experience- we wanted to wake up their “co-producer side” we would need to practice seeing them bigger, believing much more in them -even more than they believed in themselves- and that if we wanted to see them grow, instead of solving more of life's problems for them, shouldn’t perhaps we be solving less?

So, what would be the effect of instead of giving them as much as possible served on a plate, we gave them the necessary resources and freedom so that they could be co-producers of their own Microsoft experience?

And I believe that what perhaps helped us most to experiment with this new way of thinking was precisely the magic that some of the interns had shown us during the last summer. Like Michael Bervell, who created and spread the idea of running the Lunch & Learn program, where fifteen interns at a time meet face to face with a company executive during lunch break. The topic? Whatever the interns want to ask. The number of Lunch & Learns carried out during the 12 weeks of the internship? 141. Number of unique participants? 1,050.

Or Patrick Lyons who, without asking permission, created the Tree House Talks taking advantage of the beautiful tree house we have on the Microsoft campus; Or LaJay Norvell with her Program Manager Panels so that Interns can really understand more about what the PM role is; Or Daniel Holliday with his Hoop for the Homeless basketball tournament that enabled the intern class to do good while having fun, or like Marquis Ware, Liam Mc Gregor and Allison Chou, who through selfie videos told their own story about what it’s like to live an internship experience at Microsoft. And there are many more interns who also decided to be co-producers of their internship over the summer.

Maybe that's why Bill George's phrase resonates so much:

.. And this is the quest we are currently on: to create an environment in which the interns -and employees- are encouraged to practice being that version of themselves they always dreamed of being.

Therefore, if you are the future manager of one of the selected interns to do an Microsoft internship next summer, we invite you to be a co-producer of this quest for empowerment by contributing your ideas and your experience from leading interns in previous summers.

If, on the other side, you are one of the interns selected to come to Microsoft next summer, we encourage you to tell us who you would like to be during those 12 weeks because we will look for ways to give you the space you need for you can make it come true.

Written by Diego Rejtman and Guillermo Echevarria

I want to dedicate this chapter to all the interns that inspired us this summer by giving us the best version of themselves. And to a team of brave Microsoft employees in University Recruiting who are encouraging themselves to explore, listen and ask what needs to happen to make Microsoft that place where people can achieve more because they feel empowered: Anne, Ayo, Fumie, Jill, Karola, Mike, Sacha, Shelly, Therasa, Valerie, and also to our coach Guillermo who is training us to challenge our “it’s not possibles” throughout this process.