Week One: Organizational Culture

Guidepoint maintains an effective and strong organizational culture to aid the company in achieving its goal helping our clients make better business decisions. Guidepoint does this by breaking down the client service team by client group and hiring individuals who are committed to achieving this goal. As I started my internship with my first week of orientation, I got to immediately learn a lot more about my organization Guidepoint than I knew going in. Due to COVID-19 the internship is remote. As an associate on the client service team I got placed as an intern on the Corporate General team. The structure of our team is senior leadership, followed by the project and research managers and then research associates, which is where I fit in as an intern. At Guidepoint interns are treated as full time research associates for the summer internship and are expected to act and contribute as a full time associate after being trained for about two weeks. Reflecting back, I want to elaborate on the values, attitudes, and expectations at Guidepoint as well as the norms and the process of learning these norms at Guidepoint. The Guidepoint values are intellectual curiosity, integrity, resourcefulness, responsibility and service. The attitude at Guidepoint is to work hard and deliver results to our clients and support our team. As an intern I am expected to uphold these values and attitudes as well as work hard to help my team connect clients with subject matter experts by working to custom recruit subject matter experts on projects assigned to me by project managers. The norms of doing this role include conducting brief research, acting fast but thorough in choosing experts, communicating and bringing in these experts to the Guidepoint network and communicating your process well with your project managers. The process of learning these norms takes place by going through training sessions during onboarding and shadowing and working with a “buddy” or supervisor during the beginning weeks of your internship. The ultimate goal of the associate is to help find the best subject matter experts by recruiting individuals to go on calls with the client to provide insight into a given area the client is researching into. Shadowing my buddy and absorbing the onboarding process was key in learning how to do this successfully. After my first week I was still really trying to figure out how to adapt and absorb as much as I can to become an effective and successful associate on the corporate General team and looking forward to connecting the right subject matter experts with our clients.