Solving Problems/Improving Leadership for FinTech

In terms of leadership/follower processes in the office, I think Mirador employees and managing directors work efficiently together, and I haven’t noticed any behavior that could be categorized as the misuse or abuse of leadership. Since the pandemic minimized the amount of people that were allowed to come into the office, Mirador employees are literally divided into different teams. I have worked with two of them, and both groups demonstrate teamwork, collaboration, and respect for the work/life balance, ensuring that the office is a positive and productive working environment.

As for the issues I have observed in my time here as an intern, I have discussed them with client associate David Alexander, for whom I have completed a variety of projects. Since Mirador was founded just before the pandemic, many of its processes/operation procedures are scattered and unorganized. For example, every time a client is onboarded, the team who handles the client must create a new client onboarding document highlighting Mirador’s procedures and protocols. While Mirador works with clients with different needs (wealth managers v. family offices v. foundations and endowments), David and I agreed that it would be possible for Mirador to construct an overall client onboarding process that could be re-used and updated to fit needs that change across time. Having to create an entire onboarding process for each new client is tedious and takes time that could arguably be spent doing something more productive. In addition to saving each team time and energy, having an overall client onboarding process would unify Mirador employees across the board and ensure that everyone was working in a cohesive fashion, upholding Mirador’s values and recognition of success at both the individual and group level.

In terms of addressing these issues, it is convenient that I am working as an unpaid, unofficial college intern. I started working here in the period Mirador has high school interns, and I will only work with the college interns in my last week here, as my timeline for work this summer is a little skewed due to some personal circumstances. With all of this, it gives me the freedom to reach out to employees whose current projects interest me, and so David and I decided that one of my closing tasks with Mirador could be compiling past onboarding procedural documents and using them to create one master document. As a leadership studies major, I am equipped with the communication and interpersonal skills necessary in collecting all of the information I would need for this project, as well as the confidence to ask questions when I feel lost or confused by the work.

While this issue does not seem very dire in its nature, Mirador is a relatively young firm who is still evolving day-by-day to meet clients’ needs. I believe the managing directors and HR do a good job in leading by example, storing presentations in Mirador’s online database Tetra on trouble-shooting with clients, appropriate correspondence for unhappy clients, etc. The firm as a whole is not afraid to address its weaknesses and makes sure to speak openly and constructively about the ways in which they may overcome such weaknesses.