Week 3- GRID Theory of Tasks and Relationships

In week 3 of my internship, I have begun to interact with more of my peers and talk with them about meetings we have had with specific speakers who work at Wells Fargo, as well as when we converse about planning our program project. In my virtual meetings with some of the other interns, I have noticed that all of the interns as well as our speakers, have tendencies towards Blake and Mouton’s Leadership GRID Theory, which assumes that leaders have the responsibility of taking care of the people that they lead, and the responsibility of making certain that the group they are leading reaches its goals. In these observations, I could tell when certain people were more relationship oriented, or more task oriented, depending on how they acted or reacted to certain situations or certain discussions. I also was able to observe if Wells Fargo and its employees focus more on relationships or tasks, or if they focus on the mixture of these two tendencies.

In my meetings regarding my program project with some of my fellow interns at the company, I have noticed that some of my group members are more task focused. They talked more about the steps we were going to take as a group to get the project completed and ready for the presentation. These group members usually kept us on track or brought us back to the task at hand if our discussion or conversation began to become sidetracked. In addition, some of my group members are also more relationship oriented, asking everyone how they are doing and how their day has gone so far before getting into the focus of the project. These team members are usually the ones who strive to maintain and promote the social and emotional wellbeing of the group. My direct hiring manager as well as my program managers have not explicitly stated what the best way for leadership to be successful in these areas of tasks and relationships. However, I have gathered that focusing on the task as well as the wellbeing of the people involved in that task is the best way for successful leadership. Not focusing on relationships could derail my team, and not focusing on the task and results could derail the project.