Problem Solving in Week 2

This week was my second full week at my internship and it did not go nearly as smoothly as the first week. Our main team has weekly goals that are planned over months at a time. The idea of falling behind and falling short of our goals is simply not an option. Working on a small political campaign with only a small staff around you is both a great advantage and disadvantage. Working with a small team means that the orders are direct, the team is personal, and the tasks won’t be completed by anyone else but you. In that way being part of such a small team can be very effective. On the other hand, because the team is so small every task must be completed by your team. If the work is too much or the goals too lofty then there is no other way to lighten you workload. Having such a small team quickly becomes a disadvantage.

This past week my team faced a challenge: we were behind our main weekly goal and behind badly. It was not necessarily anyones fault. In fact, part of the team had to take almost two days off the attend a funeral and another member of the team had a preplanned family vacation that started before the week was out. Nonetheless, we aimed to finish our goals. One of the largest goals facing the group, in my opinion, is both not being totally ineffectively and also setting our goals to be too high. First, our campaign manager seeks to accomplish the work altogether as a team and only has one member do work separately when that work in minimal. While we are very productive together, I wonder if we would be better serve if our leader separated the work between us more and trusted in our abilities to get it done and get it done well. By showing us that he trusts us to do the work well I believe that will be more inspired to act with great effort to prove his trust. Second, I believe that we have set our goals to be too high and this makes it difficult to meet these goals effectively in the time we have each week. It is not a matter of working efficiently, but rather just simply not having enough time in the week.

The problems that we faced this week were both our own faults, our leader’s fault, and out of all of our hands. In the future, I hope that my campaign manager trusts us more to do work and thus inspires us to do well. I also hope that our goals are set just slightly lower so as to be more manageable. It isn’t that he is a bad leader, but in fact my boss is a great leader. But every great leader there are faults. His main ones that became problems for our team this week was his mistrust in us to do the job well without his direct supervision and his extremely high standards. With that said, he has made strides to improve his leadership and problem solving in my second week was slow, but existent. Hopefully the next time problems need to be solved, they can be done with trust, reason, and teamwork. This was a big week for me and was a very eye opening experience. Solving problems is not only difficult work, but the most important work.