Week 1: Organizational Culture
After my first week at AlphaSights, there is still a ton about my job that I do not know. While I learned a lot and met some awesome people throughout my first week, we spent the entirety of the week in training, separate from the rest of the company. While I anticipate that a lot of my questions will be answered once we start doing actual work tomorrow, as of now I have many unanswered questions about the organization culture of the company. My biggest question revolves around the overall personalities of the employees.
During my interview and through my first week at the office, it is clear that employees at AlphaSights view their peers as a big perk of the job, everyone loves working with each other and I have yet to hear anyone speak negatively about someone at the company. I can honestly say, through five days I have had the exact same experience. People are extremely nice, beyond helpful, and some of the smartest people I have ever worked with.
However, what interests me about this culture is that everyone seems to be extremely extroverted. While this makes sense given that a large part of our job revolves around speaking to strangers on the phone, I have never been surrounded by so many extroverts in my life. In pretty much all of my past experience observing group dynamics I have noticed that a healthy group requires a mix of introverts and extroverts to balance each other out, so I am very interested to see how this all plays out. One thing that is important is that I believe AlphaSights realizes this trend, in our training this week we learned about the ways that different personalities interact with each other. When two extroverts are conversing, there is a tendancy for them to be constantly thinking about their next comment rather than actually listening to what their counterpart has to say. I will be very interested to see how this plays out throughout the summer!
Well it sounds as though Alpha Sights has a structure way in which to bring new employees (including interns) into the organization; I presume that you learned about values, attitudes, norms, etc. during the week-long training. Interesting insights into the (seeming) extrovert-heavy environment; will be interesting to see how this plays out as you continue. A mix is generally considered healthy. Will also be interesting to see how this impacts the ways in which people interact, communicate, etc. I encourage you to include specific examples of behaviors, interactions, etc. as you reflect; the greater specificity will assist you when completing academic assignments this fall.