AlphaLeadership may be effective leadership

AlphaSights is structured into four segments with approximately six teams working within each segment. Each team is lead by a manager and all teams within the segment are led by a Vice President. It’s very interesting because the age of the managers are typically around 24 or 25 years old. AlphaSights is a very young-faced company and it seems there is no one in the office over the age of 40 with the exception of the co-founder. This relatively homogenous age group is very interesting to evaluate because there is so much informal leadership at play. Managers are hardly senior to their team members in that they only have about two years more experience than the people they are leading. Employees are pretty autonomous and there is a clear understanding of their responsibilities for the day. The manager’s role is to make sure everyone is clear and to identify team wide goals and evaluate performance of the team on a weekly and monthly basis.

The way decisions are made in AlphaSights is, in my opinion, very decentralized. Our co-founder is a very innovative person with a vision that he reflects onto all employees. For that reason, innovation comes from the employees themselves and the office is a very conducive environment to generate and implement new ideas. For example, a manager experimented with a new strategy to offer clients she knew competitors were using. After sitting with the co-founder, she began to run her own small team that only dealt with those types of projects. She has been working on this project for the last couple of months and now will be on-boarding the entire New York office to implement it.

The relationship between leaders and followers is extremely important within AlphaSights. They do not hire any employee who does not fit their standard criteria of personality types. The qualities they look for during hiring include drive, humility, emotional intelligence, adaptability and result-orientation. These qualities are evident in each team dynamic and the relationships built between team members and managers is very important to day-to-day work in the office. There are regular team events to boost relationships and build trust within members. For this reason, team members respect their managers and recognize their purpose. Managers take on desk responsibilities when the team is overwhelmed and acknowledges when people are overstretched and need help. They manage the projects that come in and take on a more client-based role without seeming superior to the members of the team.

In terms of strengths and challenges, I have been pleasantly surprised that I have not seen many challenges to the leader/follower relationships. Every effort is made to ensure that team members are happy and productive on their teams and that segments in general are proving to be successful. AlphaSights is doing a great job organizing team events as well as office wide events to make sure employee quality of life is above par. The only thing I could potentially see in the coming weeks I think is that people who have been on a team for many years and not promoted to managers find the lack of additional responsibility dull and decide to leave the company.