Solving Communication Problems

While I have really enjoyed my time working for the Cade Foundation so far, it is clear that there are some organizational difficulties that if improved would greatly enhance the experience of us as interns. The largest of those is communication. Currently, communication between the interns and our supervisors at the foundation is unclear at best. At the beginning of the internship, we were walked through all of the tasks that we are expected to complete over the course of our 14 weeks with the foundation. However, as the summer has progressed we have been tasked with many more major projects that were never mentioned to us beforehand, including requiring each intern to write an annual report for 2020 for the Cade Foundation and then pitch them in front of the board of directors. Instead of being encouraged to work collaboratively on this very important project, we are being asked to compete with one another as they will select the best annual report to use officially. Over the course of completing this, there have been no instructions given other than their previous reports to use as reference and a series of complicated financial documents that were not explained to us. Even after asking as many questions as we can, all of us as interns are still unsure of exactly what they are looking for and how to find the correct data. It feels as if they are just trying to get as much work out of us as possible by giving us tasks as large as this that don’t necessarily feel appropriate for interns with no experience making annual reports to complete, without the proper communication or instruction. As a leadership studies major, the first strategy I would suggest to remedy this is collaboration. Instead of competing with one another and receiving little instruction on this project, I feel it would be much more effective for us interns to collaborate on a shared document with our supervisors so that they can view and edit our work as we go to eliminate confusion and enhance the quality of the report. That would also create a much more open dialogue between the interns and our supervisors, which is not currently the case as we just have two 30 minute meetings a week and are expected to complete our work for the week without much more communication than that. I feel that by focusing on communication and collaboration, the Cade Foundation could create a more productive and welcoming work environment.