Week 3: Leader/Follower Dynamics at Guidepoint

The work at Guidepoint on the client services teams is broken down by client, either corporate, consulting, institutional investor and private equity. Being on the corporate general team, we work with corporate clients such as technology application companies and speciality chemicals companies. On the corporate general team we are under our Team Leader, Jackson, under him are the project managers and then the research associates & interns. We are one big team of about 16 people who has been working virtually for the year since the pandemic. Each project manager has several clients that they work with specifically and they post the projects they need research associates to recruit on and work on. Research Associates and interns are pretty autonomous but do follow standardized procedures for how to recruit and reach out to new subject matter experts for each project they are on. 

Strengths and challenges of leader/follower dynamics within Guidepoint and recommendations for how to enhance these are certainly things I have picked up on while interning at Guidepoint. On the corporate general team, strengths of the leader/follower dynamics would be the ease of communication, openness to communicate, similar ages, similar goals, encouragement and positivity. Leaders at guidepoint and on my team are all very easy to communicate and approachable, they are also very close in ages so there is no agism or discrimmination based on how old you are, overall all leaders and followers are supportive and encouraging of each other. 

Some challenges would be the remote aspect of the virtual team. Being remote for so long has made it hard for everyone on the team to get to know one another and socialize in way to build a strong team relationship. I felt because there was a divide between employees who had been their for a long time versus those who are joined remotely during the pandemic. 

I think these issues will be solved partly when the in office work resumes in October but I think one way to address these would be to schedule an in person happy hour for team members to get to know one another face to face and not behind a screen.