Week 6: Personal Contributions

As I reflect on all the work I did at Guidepoint and the feedback I received I think I did contribute a lot to my team this summer. On my last few days at Guidepoint the team leader Jackson, and many project managers I did work for mentioned how much of a help I had been to them this summer which definitely made me feel accomplished and proud of all the hard work and time I put into the job. During my end of the year performance review with our team leader Jackson he read to me the statistics of how many call units I achieved and how many subject matter experts were brought into the network by my efforts. Jackson informed me that I got 9 call units for the summer after my training ended which was on par with the work of a regular associate. Furthermore I brought 49 advisors into the network 35 of which were sent over to the client meaning I understood the types of individuals needed by our client and did a great job of bringing these people in. 

I also worked on a lot of very difficult projects where it wasn’t so easy to bring in subject matter experts on these projects for a number of different reasons. I really made it my goal to keep working on these projects even though they seemed like a deadend and not give up. I used critical thinking skills to find outside of the box ways to recruit subject matter experts like researching who key opinion leaders were in the space and trying to get in contact with them. I certainly hit many roadblocks on these projects this summer but learned a lot about persevering through and trying to find a way around what seemingly looked like a deadend. 

Another huge personal contribution that I think my leadership skills really helped me to achieve was the specific and constant communication with my project managers by sending them daily updates and staying up to date with what was going on on these projects and how I can help to close them. By sending these daily updates, project managers are able to keep the client up to date and informed about what is happening on the project status. I think this intuitiveness, communication skills and eagerness to learn and support my team is a product of all I have learned as a Jepson major when it comes to teamwork, how leaders function and being emotionally intelligent while working with so many different project managers with different personalities.