Week 4: New Insights Into Leader Follower Relations

This week was a very interesting and insightful week at my internship site. Up to this point, there is no doubt that I have started to learn valuable skills, as well as better understand my role within the organization. While this has certainly been an excellent experience, this week I got a really complete understanding of how work is structured in the organization, especially for my department.

At lunch this week, the president of Resolute Management sat down with the interns and gave us a fantastic overview. Essentially, insurance firms have given out hundreds and hundreds of policies to individual companies, and obviously are required to insure companies when the policy is invoked. When a company faces serious issues and calls on all these policies at once, however, insurance firms are faced with serious financial problems. When faced with these issues, insurance firms will pay my organization a defined sum of money to take on responsibility for these claims, and this money is handed up the chain to Warren Buffett to be invested.

This brief summary eludes to the fact that Resolute Management deals with substantial sums of money and incredibly difficult insurance claims. As a result, different departments are responsible for dealing with different aspects of business dealings. For my department (quantitative analysis), we are primarily responsible for examining past expenses (such as paid out claims), and making future predictions about company expenses so that there is always enough capital available to deal with future expenses. Additionally, other teams such as paralegal deal with things such as sorting through claims that the company has taken on, and investigating each claim to see if it is viable and we are required to pay it out (admittedly, I do not know too much about the LMS department, the only other department I have been introduced too).

While I have just provided a description of the general organizational structure and how my department fits into that structure, this blog would not be sufficient without a discussion of leadership style and influence with regards to members of the organization. Something that I have come to learn from my short time at the company is that Resolute Management promotes the input of ideas, and asking questions among all members of the team. This was made explicitly clear during our lunch with the president, and it is also something I have noticed through interactions with my supervisor. In saying this, I believe that the best way to define leadership within the organization and among my superiors is a transformational leadership style, as the organization and leadership promotes an experience beyond just the basic tasks at hand. I also believe that members of the organization not in leadership roles can certainly influence decisions and outcomes of the organization as a result of this style and structure. Going forward, I am excited to keep analyzing the leadership structure of the organization.