Week 7 – Making an Impact and Stepping Up as a Leader

This past week has been incredibly exciting for the company and especially myself as an intern. I have really been able to see how my work has impacted the company in multiple ways. To start, our company got feedback from our RFP response that we submitted a few weeks ago (which I mentioned in my earlier blogs). The company was incredibly impressed with our product and our company and asked us to visit their many headquarters in London to give a presentation to their executives. This news was so excited for our division in the UK as this deal would allow our division to grow immensely here in the UK. More importantly, this news was incredibly exciting for me as I had a large impact on creating the RFP response. I received many compliments from my coworkers for my hard work and especially from our team leader Andrew. Once again, this showed his use of relationship-oriented leadership. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, we will have landed the deal with this customer. I look forward to hearing from my coworkers if we do. Another impact I made was through the B2B email marketing campaigns I was working on during the earlier parts of my internships. Although starting leads with potential customers, is incredibly hard I ended up actually starting a lead with a customer. My work has led to even more growth in the company and even more respect from my coworkers. It is exciting to see the impact I am making.

In addition to making an impact on the company, I was asked during the week to truly step up as a leader. Through email, I was asked by the prior customer who I was helping with their devise malfunction issue to visit their site and take a look at the issue in person. I was sent to talk to the company and inform them about potential reasons why they could be breaking their headsets or scanners. I was really nervous about this at first, as I am just an intern, but I knew I was confident enough with the product that I could visit the site and talk to the company. I went with one of my coworkers and when we got there it wasn’t even brought up that I was an intern. I was not looked down upon and I was treated with full respect, just like my coworker. The engineers and managers of the company asked me questions and I was confident in answering them due to what I learned during my internship. Not only was the company impressed with my knowledge, but so was my coworker. It really showed him how much I had been learning about the company and our product. He also appreciated how I stepped up as a leader in the situation. It allowed me to be confident and successful when talking to the customer. This experience taught me the importance of stepping up as a leader even when you’re an intern. Without being knowledgeable in the area of leadership, I definitely would have lacked the skills to take care of this situation.