Organized to Thrive

AlphaSights was founded in 2008 and has experienced about 25% growth in revenue every year since. Because the company is so high growth, the way the company is organized and led is extremely fast paced. In addition, there are only three major players in the expert network industry. The differentiation between the companies has to be enough so that our clients use our services more than our competitors. This is hard because the deals and strategy our clients are seeking is so high in demand and so time dependent that often they use all three companies at once. The fast paced, competitive nature of the company is reflected in who is hired and how teams are led. Like I’ve noted before, it isn’t common to find someone over the age of 30 in the company. This is because the company values being able to offer its employees opportunities to grow and be promoted at a young age. They also realize that the job is one that is very conducive to branch out after and move into different industries. They offer a program called AlphaNext that is basically a 3 month paid time off when the employee decides to leave the company to pursue and research their next opportunity. For these reasons, leadership within AlphaSights is centered around meeting company-wide goals by way of very high internal team goals. Managers’ keep the team on track to meet lofty goals and will take on more of an associate role if the team is overwhelmed.

Communication is another part of AlphaSights that’s very telling if its organizational culture. Communication is key to every team’s success and it occurs constantly whether that be verbally three times during the day (morning board, midday checkin in, and evening board) or through Slack, the messaging app everyone in the offices uses to communicate about projects. People regularly reserve meeting rooms even if it is to discuss something for 5 minutes. Additionally, there are weekly checkins that occur between an intern and her trainer and more often than not, managers make an effort to be present also. Clear communication throughout the internship is important so that the intern can focus on growth areas and know where she is at for the larger picture of receiving an offer.

The formal and informal interactions between people has been very interesting to observe since starting. Despite the closeness in age of everyone on a team, the manager is clearly trusted to handle more responsibility and handle large accounts. People give managers respect and there is a clear separation of leader and follower at most times. The only instance I can think of when this is different is in informal settings like lunches  or team events. Managers are more casual and more interested in personal conversations as opposed to work related.  My manager does a good job maintaining his seriousness while also being a likable team member. The same goes for people higher up