Situational Leadership in a Remote Start-up

Throughout my internship with Cavi Consulting, the importance of flexibility in leadership has become very apparent, especially as a start-up during the tumultuous experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even Cavi’s traditional business model was altered from more of a traditional consulting services firm before the pandemic to producing online training content and focusing on developing their process mapping software. My two bosses and co-founders of the firm, Sam and Hassan, have also displayed flexibility in their leadership styles during the internship.

First off, they understood that our knowledge of the subject matter and work they do was limited and they used that to set reasonable expectations for our work. Instead of overly monitoring us during our projects, they made it clear that they expected and wanted us to ask questions while giving us the freedom to tackle projects on our own. This allowed us to develop skills and knowledge at our own pace while accounting for the different needs and skillsets of each individual intern.

A second way that Sam and Hassan displayed their situational leadership was by allowing us to choose which projects we wanted to sign up for and undertake. By using Monday.com, a website that allows companies to have dashboards with different projects and tasks listed, we interns were allowed to pick projects that we were truly interested in and applied to our future career endeavors. Additionally, Sam and Hassan developed a training program where every few weeks they gave a presentation on a different business topic that the interns had voted on, so they directly applied to things we were interested in learning more about. This ability to guide our own internship experience in a way made us more interested and passionate about our work and made the experience more meaningful, enriching, and fulfilling.

A third way that flexibility and situational leadership was that there was no prescribed hours of working or overly controlling regulations. If people preferred to sleep in late and work late at night, that was perfectly fine with them. I know that a few of my fellow interns held other jobs as well and Sam and Hassan worked with them to develop a schedule that was best for the individual intern so that they could do both. Their flexibility in allowing each intern to work in ways that best suited them, especially as people were in different time zones and working at home, made us all a little more comfortable and I know it helped with my productivity levels.

During such a difficult and irregular time, Sam and Hassan’s flexibility and ability to adapt to a new situation allowed the interns to have a deeply enriching learning and internship experience without placing too much pressure, work, or difficulty on us.