Week 1: Leader/Follower Relationships

Within the first week of my internship at the National Academy of Public Administration, also known as “the Academy”, I was able to grasp a strong understanding of how the staff of the Academy has adapted to the changes that COVID-19 inflicted on their work environment. In an entirely remote work environment, the staff is dedicated to staying engaged with one another through mandatory weekly staff meetings held over Zoom. With a relatively small staff of approximately 50 people, the necessary communication and collaboration could easily be accomplished through smaller Zoom meetings or emails, but the Academy is dedicated to maintaining a close and familiar work environment, especially as interns join the staff. These meetings begin and end with a five minute period in which small groups of staff members discuss icebreaker questions to socialize and recreate small talk that might have taken place in an office environment. Although a seemingly small effort, this routine has allowed me to meet at least ten staff members in a social setting within my first week, contributing to my comfort level with the Academy. The majority of the meetings consist of the senior staff members updating President and CEO Terry Gerton and other staff members about reports being completed under their leadership as well as additional staff members making announcements. The announcements and reminders are helpful for me to understand what kinds of engagement events the Academy hosts and how I will be able to participate in them. For example, I learned that the Social Equity Leadership Conference, a four day Academy conference that hosts a variety of scholars and experts in the field of public administration, equity, social justice and inclusion in hourly long engaging panels, was occurring during my first week. This announcement gave me the information necessary to ensure I was able to attend the panels and participate in them in order to enrich my experience.
As previously stated, the Academy staff is relatively small, and the work and leadership positions are mainly divided by teams. The senior staff, such as the CEO, Project Director, Strategic Initiatives Director, Director of Academy Studies and the Director of Development and Philanthropy, serve as the overall leaders of their departments. The members that work in their departments, such as the Academy Studies, are assigned to teams based on the current studies the Academy is assigned to. Members of teams interact the most with each other out of all staff members, meeting weekly or more to check in and update one another on their progress. As an intern for the Philanthropy department, I am not assigned to a team as the department is a recent addition to the Academy. Therefore, I have less interaction with other interns or staff members as much as I do with the CEO and the Director of Development and Philanthropy. With this follower/leadership dynamic, I have noticed that the Academy values a familiar and somewhat casual leadership style. Senior staff prefer to be addressed by their first name and are more than happy to meet in a casual and quick Zoom meeting to review assignments or answer questions. They are also open to hearing ideas and suggestions and provide high praise and encouragement for the work one contributes to the projects.
The greatest strength of the Academy leader and follower dynamic is the positive and casual attitude around it. I believe that it works so well because each member is aware of their individual responsibilities and does not take advantage of the senior staffs’ hands-off nature. I believe in a setting in which employees slacked off on their assignments, this form of leadership would be problematic. However because everyone seems to do their part, meetings and interaction with Academy leaders often involve respectful and instructive criticism and advice as well as humor and encouragement. The greatest challenge of the leader and follower dynamic, from my perspective, is the lack of natural opportunity to meet and interact with one another. This challenge has grown from COVID-19 and will likely improve with time as the work environment transitions to a hybrid model, but for the time being it is up to the individual/follower to reach out to schedule “coffee chats” and deal with the insecurity that they are bothering the leader. In my opinion, the best way to handle this challenge is for each individual or follower to openly communicate his or her concerns and plan out a structured schedule of meetings in order to ensure a solid relationship is being built between the follower and leader.