Week 2 – Work Culture at Sephora

I just completed my second week at my Sephora internship, and I am particularly excited on Fridays because all employees get a half day during the summer. This is a small way that Sephora shows its culture that is committed to employee wellbeing.

Every Friday, in our Teams groupchat, my team will wish me and the other members a Happy Summer Friday, and the messages for the whole day are kept lighthearted and casual, showing how excited everyone is even while they are working. The day before, during our weekly team meeting, instead of getting straight to the agenda for the day, we spent a few minutes conversing about how our personal lives had been for the past week, and the team asked how my internship was going in a way to show how much they genuinely cared about how I was feeling. During the meeting, this energy was kept up, and I found that everyone in the virtual “room” was treated as an equal. My boss directly credited me with a project I finished when she accidentally received praise. Although the agenda was led by the person in charge of the team, people were welcome to add things to the agenda and take time to discuss anything relevant. Although I wouldn’t directly call this laissez-faire leadership, it was certainly more team oriented than autocratic.

Although all employees are expected to get their work done and perform well, there is not the same pressure that I experience while working at Amazon. The leadership team at Sephora appears to be confident that people can get the job done, and give trust until there is a reason to not do so. Unless I ask my boss or peers for advice on a project, or we’re in a meeting, I usually won’t hear from my team.

Overall, I think that if the leadership in Sephora were to be more efficient, there would be a bit more of a sense of urgency towards the work that is done, but I also have not experienced a time where things are urgently needed to be completed by a short time deadline. I think that once I experience that, I can come back to this and compare leadership styles when things are going well vs. when they are not, and examine how situation changes leadership style. Until then, I am happy that I am not getting pressured from two different jobs!