How Workplace Skills Translate to Valuable Life Skills
My internship with Holston Medical Group was just as rewarding as I imagined. Each day I was assigned with new tasks while being given creative freedom on fundraisers, community outreach, and the Kidney Walk. These projects all demonstrated to me that marketing positions require many skills also desired in nursing: creativity, quick thinking, clear communication, and strong relationships. As I ruminate on my internship with HMG, I begin to understand this internship provided me with skills beyond my original expectation. Although I was able to enhance skills I already possessed, I also developed competencies I never knew I would gain through an internship in the marketing department. These skills were learned through my ability to apply valuable theories and lessons from my leadership studies courses, which provided me with an outsider’s view into HMG and its goals, such as developing personal relationships with patients while also encouraging providers to reach out to the community. After reflecting on my internship with Holston Medical Group, I not only enhanced skills I already had, but also developed new and surprising abilities while simultaneously applying prosocial behaviors, intergroup competition, and reactions to the Double Bind Theory in my daily work.
As noted many times, the main purpose of my internship was to organize a Kidney Walk for the Tri Cities area for the new nephrologist hired through HMG. Through this walk, I expected to develop essential organization skills, such as the value of building personal relationships through community engagement, how to mold myself to different situations, and experience with networking and planning. Although I thought my community engagement skills were already proficient, I found they developed so much more through the Kidney Walk. As the intern, it was my job to develop teams for the walk, which included finding team captains, having weekly meetings with them, and reaching out to the HMG family to encourage participation. To encourage participation from the Tri CIties area as a whole, HMG partnered with the local baseball team and hosted Dunk a Doc at the event, where attendees could “pay to throw” and dunk their favorite doctor. It was through this event that I learned about community engagement the most. I not only understood how to mold myself to a new work environment that was no longer an office setting, but also saw how much the community loves their physicians, people I could learn from. After each doctor got out of the dunk tank, I was able to network with them and comment on the personal relationships they have with their patients, which dove into my planning skills. This event and these physicians provided me with confidence knowing that so long as I was able to get the doctors to be present at the Kidney Walk, the community would be, as well.
Although I expected to enhance these skills through this experience, there were many things I learned through HMG that I was not anticipating. This includes understanding how much can occur in a matter of minutes, how to act quickly on change, and how to react to different leadership styles. This pushed my forward thinking skills to the next level, allowing me to grasp just how much can happen in one morning. One day, around 10 AM, I received a call from one of HMG’s three team captains for the Kidney Walk. During our conversation, the captain informed me that the information she was receiving from the National Kidney Foundation had a different date for the walk than what we were sending out. Thankful that she reached out, I contacted our regional representative for the walk, only for her to tell me they changed both the date and location without telling us. This now made the Kidney Walk less than one week apart from another walk HMG is sponsoring, potentially dropping participation. In addition, the doctor who brought this walk to the Tri Cities is out of town that weekend, and now does not get to experience it with his new office. While I was sad to hear this news knowing how dedicated he is to the cause, it pushed me to learn to act quickly on change. All this was discovered from 10 AM to 10:10 AM, proving everything that can happen in one morning, did. In addition, I now had to reach out to each captain to inform them of such, forcing me to react to different leadership styles. While Captain 1 consistently treated me as the leader, Captain 2 acted as the leader herself, with Captain 3 keeping a peer-like relationship. These styles required me to mold myself to different leadership styles, which will be highly beneficial in the world of nursing. Overall, the skills I developed through this internship allowed me to apply my leadership studies to real world examples, which is the best skill of all.
As an intern in the marketing department for HMG, my supervisor was wonderful at granting me independence on tasks, which encouraged me to use my leadership studies to approach the assignments. The leadership studies and theories I found myself most familiar with through this internship included the benefits of prosocial behaviors, how intergroup competition can be used as a source of motivation, and the Double Bind Theory. After meeting with the regional representative for the Kidney Walk, my supervisor assigned me to the task of developing creative ways for the offices of HMG to have fun competition amongst each other to increase donations for HMG as a whole, which prompted my thinking on prosocial leadership and behaviors. In Theories and Models, we often discussed the differences between prosocial and proself theories. Given by their names, prosocial members act in favor of the group, while proself members act for the individual. In nearly every case, it is better to have prosocial behaviors within a group. Prosocial groups are found to be more successful overall than proself groups. Although this seems obvious, prosocial leadership can be difficult to find and easy to overlook. This is especially true is larger organizations with CEOs who are separated from the group. Reflecting on this, I realized this saliency to group, a key component of group identity formation, is the most beneficial form of competition among HMG’s community. If everyone in the community has their own group, or team, to identify with for the Kidney Walk, a group identity will form and thus encourage prosocial behaviors to raise team membership, donations, and awareness for the Kidney Walk as a whole.
Often through prosocial behaviors, intergroup competition forms. This competition between groups (not within) is fundamental to success and prosocial behaviors, and thus I realized the necessity for teams within the company of HMG. When a large group, such as HMG, has smaller groups within it, intergroup competition occurs, which is highly beneficial to the overall productivity to each group, not harmful. In Theories and Models, it was learned that only intragroup conflict, such as within and not between each team, is dangerous. Thus, through this internship, I found a core opportunity to implement a theory learned from my leadership classes into a real-world situation. By having three teams within HMG for the Kidney Walk and dividing these teams by their location in the Tri-Cities (Bristol, Kingsport, and Johnson City), friendly competition was formed and thus generated more community engagement in the walk and eagerness to have the most donations. It was very interesting to watch this theory play out as the intern because I was able to witness each city coming together by planning fundraising events, such as spaghetti dinners and bake sales, and also ensuring utmost secrecy against other teams. These actions reassured me that I was learning more than I thought in my leadership classes and allowed me to understand the organization even better.
Although the benefits of prosocial behavior and intergroup competition were positive applications of my leadership studies into my internship, I also found that the Double Bind Theory for women helped me navigate the negatives of the internship. Like many workplaces, there was evidence of this theory during my internship. The Double Bind theory is deeply rooted in our American culture and explains the implicit assumptions many people, not only men, have about women in leadership. On one hand, women are expected to be kind and sympathetic, while on the other, leaders are expected to be assertive and outspoken. This places women in a paradox in the workplace, where they are trapped between being nice and friendly, as women should, or decisive, as leaders should. Within this paradox, they will either be too kind for a leadership role and thus weak, or too qualified for a woman and thus unlikable. The side I experienced most was the “too emotional” side. Within the first two weeks of my internship, my supervisor, who is a woman, described to me how her counterpart at another company refused to speak with her because she was “bringing too many emotions into the conversation.” Although I was disheartened to hear that she was placed in this situation, I was grateful that I already knew of the Double Bind theory and was able to explain it to her, comforting her that she was not alone and that it was so relevant there was a theory for it. This allowed not only me to navigate the situation better, but also my supervisor to be prepared for future unfortunate encounters.
Through these reflections on my internship with HMG, I realize that I not only enhanced skills I already had, but also developed new and surprising abilities that allowed me to navigate the internship by applying prosocial behaviors, intergroup competition, and reactions to the Double Bind Theory. Each day, my supervisor assigned me with new tasks that provided me with creative freedom on fundraising ideas, community outreach, and the Kidney Walk. These projects all demonstrated to me that marketing positions require many skills also desired in nursing: creativity, quick thinking, clear communication, and strong relationships. As I ruminate on my internship with HMG, I begin to understand that this internship provided me with skills beyond my original expectation. While I was able to thoroughly enhance skills I already had under my belt, I also developed competencies I never knew I would gain through an internship in the marketing department. These skills were learned through my ability to apply valuable theories and lessons from my leadership studies courses, which provided me with an outsider’s view into HMG and its goals, such as developing personal relationships with patients while also encouraging providers to reach out to the community. Above all, HMG proved to me that workplace skills are also highly valuable life skills, tools to navigate even the smallest daily occurrences.