Personal Contributions

Overall, I think I had a very different perspective from most of those working in the SagePoint office this summer. Although it brought challenges at times, it was also enlightening to learn from other peoples’ perspectives as well as to see other people take my new, different perspective into account. Being the youngest person in the office, and especially when dealing with a client base that was much older than me, I think I brought a more open-minded perspective to the office. For example, the older clients seemed to react pretty differently to me as compared with the older employees in the office. I think these clients reacted well to a younger face rather than someone closer to their age. Especially being someone still in college, it seemed that these clients were especially interested to hear my ideas and what my student view was on the projects they were bringing to us. I think this was helpful because it seems clients like to have multiple views, especially when people are managing their money, so having a diverse set of views really seemed to strengthen the amount of trust the clients had with us. I also had a very different background from most of the employees as I was the only one who had not grown up in Richmond or an area nearby, so in many situations I had different ideas that they had not thought of, possibly because of cultural differences. It was rewarding to see those in leadership positions take my new ideas into account, even though they varied from the norm in many situations, and to see how these ideas actually changed the process of how they chose to interact with clients.

Additionally, I definitely saw my own insights about leadership have an effect on the team’s efforts as a whole. I realized that I have a more task-oriented approach to leadership. So, I tended to focus on the task at hand, constantly asking the leaders what I could do to be most effective in the most efficient way. Multiple times people commented on this task focus of mine. The other people in the office seemed to think it was a sense of “seriousness” that I have, but my leadership classes helped me to realize it is more of a task-focused view of getting work done rather than a personality trait. I actually noticed this affect the people around me as the other employees seemed to be a bit more task-oriented when I was around, so it was very rewarding to see that I could apply what I’ve learned in my leadership classes to a real-world office setting.