Wandering from the Nest

During my time at Miramar Traffic & Parking Signs, LLC, I found a larger issue for me was that there was a lot of items we had worked on together when we necessarily didn’t have to be together. Having a lot of interaction with my boss and working together with him was not my problem, but I felt that I was possibly receiving too much training, in a sense that the work was being done together so constantly that we were actually losing out on productivity potential. I understood there were certainly topics, tasks, and projects that it was beneficial to walk me through and that there were many items on the list that my boss’ supervision or opinion required, the latter which I think was the driving force behind us working together more constantly than I had expected.

Since I am only working over the summer as an intern, my contributions to the set-up of the business were certainly valuable, but I would not be the one who would operating the internal systems once the summer is over, my boss will be. I believed that he had a larger “fear” or rather concern that I would organize a spreadsheet or program we used in a way that he would rather have done another way or would have been harder for him to understand and easily pick up, so we spent a lot of time working together to organize different pages, which I will admit taught us both something as we shared our opinions about how to organize items for efficient reading and browsing. I thought that this was a misuse of leadership though, as I was being micro-managed with working on different tasks and did not receive too much freedom to work on my own.

I finally reached a point in which I thought I simply had to talk to my boss about working alone on more things regarding the building of some of the internal systems like our contact list, certain sales spreadsheets, and some QuickBooks accounting pages. He was receptive to my argument and gave me more freedom to organize as I wished, and we reached the compromise that I would need to go through and explain my reasoning for specific organization I chose. If he did not agree or prefer the way I had set up an item, we decided that it was on him to edit the sheet in order to achieve his satisfaction regarding those more personal preferences.