Week 2: Leader/Follower Relationships

This week, leader/follower dynamics were a lot more clear, both within my direct team and within the larger company. The Hartford has about 19,000 total employees across multiple different offices, so it is certainly a large organization. However, the social media team is 10 people and then the larger “Enterprise Marketing” team that I am on has about 40 members. My manager is the head of the social media team, and he oversees the assignments, though it is mainly self-directed. There are processes in place for most of what we are doing, so he is able to use a more hands off approach and essentially just check in to make sure everyone is taking care of their responsibilities. The decision making process is certainly centralized, as there is a clear hierarchy that is followed. However, it is interesting to analyze the members of my team – while they are all fairly equal in terms of their positions, there are some clear leaders who take charge.  I’m not sure if this happened naturally or if it was “assigned” by our manager, but there are certainly opportunities for leadership and promotion within the organization.  One of my team members, who led the advertising portion of the group, was just promoted and moved to another team, for example.  

Personally, I have really enjoyed working with everyone on the team, including my manager.  However, I’ve been working on a project that I’m presenting to some of the VPs next week, and I have found that he has given me a lot less “freedom” than usual. While he trusts me enough to be giving this presentation to his bosses, he clearly wants to make a good impression. He is picky about the design aspects, having me change colors, font sizes and visual aspects. I have learned that everything must be uniform to their brand standards, even if it is different from what I might be used to/have learned at school. This can be frustrating, as I spend a lot of time making the changes that he requests and then he changes his mind or has me do something different. When I went through it with my mentor, she had some different/conflicting suggestions than Patrick did, so obviously a lot of it comes down to their own ways of doing things. There were times when I didn’t agree with his suggestions, but had to tread lightly when explaining why I thought it was important, or simply go with what he wants, as he is the boss at the end of the day. After multiple drafts, the presentation is now finalized and we are both happy with it. This experience helped me further learn his expectations for presentations, which will be helpful in the future.