Leader/Follower Relationship at The Broad

After four weeks of working at The Broad, I have gotten used to the full swing of how things are run. Ali and I now understand each other more, and now we each know how the other works. Since it is a small start-up, the leadership team is small with only Ali and a few other part-time interns. Thus, the leadership style of Ali is quite informal. As an operations intern, I do all that is expected of an intern with that title, but there is a bit of room for flexibility since the leadership team is so small. I help on a variety of tasks when needed, which is even better because I get to learn so much more and experience the different sides to running a small business, such as marketing.

After the first week, Ali asked me what I was really interested in after working for a week, which I responded with business development and the financial aspect of The Broad. Once I said that, she asked me to create a fixed assets schedule (which I had no clue what it was!) and come up with ideas for expanding membership options (noted about this task in a previous blog). Needless to say, I am learning a lot.

Ali uses Asana, a task management tool, to assign tasks to herself and the interns. Despite being a small business where we can all talk to each other and communicate face to face, I think this tool is very useful in that it keeps everything organized and everyone can see everything that needs to be done. Since Ali is the only permanent leader in her own company, she has to do everything – from accounting, to programming, to outreach, to membership, etc. Asana allows her to keep this organized and assign tasks to interns whenever needed. It is a really cool task management tool.

At work, I am always busy working on my tasks and meeting with her one-on-one when needed. I often finish my tasks quicker than she expects (I think because I am her first full-time intern, and I would say that I am quite efficient in my work), so I try to think of other tasks to do. It is quite evident that the work is directed in the sense that Ali has definite tasks she wants you to do, but she also wants interns to be self-directed and come up with tasks on their own. For example, this week when I finished everything she assigned, I remembered her saying that she wanted a better, more official press page for the website for any press releases. Additionally, news articles’ links sometimes expire after a period of time, so I also decided to create a digital archive of the articles. I did some research on how to do this, created an archive for the future, and made the new press release page for her website. 

Ali really wants my opinion for many of the tasks she assigns, but I always talk to her before I finalize anything because she has the ultimate say. Thus, in a sense, the business is centralized because Ali has the ultimate say, but it is also quite decentralized in that she expects me to do things as I see fitting of the task and there is a lot of room for innovation and individual thought processes.