Solving Problems/Improving Leadership – CBRE

While working as an intern with my team at CBRE, I have witnessed the leadership and follower relationships (discussed previously) and overall structure of how the team works. Through my observations and conversations with different people on my team, there are definitely areas people agree need to be improved upon. During my time here, my team had two people leave and two new people join the team during my time here. Through these transitions, it has come clear to me that although my team relies on collaboration in their work, there is little to no collaboration resulting in relationships outside the office. I think this results in people being less close or trusting of each other, sometimes creating tension in the workplace. Because it is considered a large team with close to 20 people, it is hard to get everyone together, so it makes it more important when someone on the team tries to plan something, that people go and collaborate socially. Members of the team have discussed this and have noted that it’s the leaders that always push collaboration, but they are the ones least involved. I think this type of social collaboration would help the team become closer and know each other better, resulting in better teamwork while working.

As I mentioned my team needs to be very collaborative, with at least 3-4 working on one project. My team works with companies with real estate internationally, so working on such a large scale requires the team to be highly organized. Everyone keeps track of their work differently (maybe in excel or on Salesforce or Asana… ). And although everyone has their own style, I think my team would really benefit by having one really uniform organizational standard. As I have helped a variety of people out, I have understood it is hard to keep everyone involved and often have trouble finding things within the shared folders, but this is really important especially when not everyone is in the office everyday. By making it mandatory for everyone to update on one platform would really help. I have talked to some on my team about this (the women are mainly the ones who are frustrated) and they have said they will say ‘everyone needs to update Salesforce,’ but then not everyone does and there isn’t someone to make sure it’s all under control. One of the partners on my team tries hard to make sure everyone is on the same page and to organize the team, but she thinks if you tell a man to do something, they won’t want to do it. I thought it was interesting she was relating this to genders and leadership and how it affects the organization and structure of the team.