#Nivriti Chowdhry

[lead150-sme-blog]

Discovering My Authentic Leadership

From the moment my mentors set up my company email address and added me to the on-going office Skype chat, I have been flooded with projects. Some of them are easy, like researching companies and opportunities for EasyBib.com. Others are more daunting, like setting up phone meetings with executives from other start-ups that EasyBib.com could potentially collaborate with. 

My day-to-day strategy at work is to stay calm and take the projects one at a time. Admittedly, I am more cautious and work more slowly on things that I do not have experience with. I have been living and breathing the advice I was given on my first day on the job: relax and get to know everyone in the office so you can always ask someone for help. Getting to know my colleagues is going to be essential to my development as an authentic leader. Not only will it let me incorporate others’ strengths and creativity in my work, it will add to my support group. 

Throughout my childhood, my parents were the only people whose advice I took seriously. They were my initial support group and I have added friends, teachers, and employers to that group as I have grown. All these people provide me with valuable feedback and suggestions for improvement, and adding more people will help me fill more gaps in my self-reflection. My support group gives me the confidence to accept that I will make mistakes and challenge myself to learn from them.

I have been embracing any opportunities that come my way confidently because I know that the process, whether the result is favorable or not, will teach me more about myself and will help me develop new skills. For example, my mentor is sponsoring me to go to a social media marketing event where I will have to mingle with executives from many different companies, professionally represent EasyBib.com, and discover ways for EasyBib.com to expand and improve. I have to take advantage of this opportunity despite my fear of introducing myself to successful professionals.

Reflecting on my internship has been easier than I thought it would be, and I know self-reflection will become a lifelong habit. Just talking to my parents at night and telling them about my day, the things I struggled with, and the moments I was proudest of forces me to extract more from this terrifying experience. After the difficult first few days, I am falling into a daily routine in which I surround work with things I enjoy, like swimming at night and having leisurely breakfasts in the morning. These are small steps to keeping me from cracking under the pressure of becoming the best intern EasyBib.com has ever seen while figuring out how to feed myself and stop ending up on the wrong side of the subway platform when I’m too tired to think.

[managingoneself-blog]

Managing Myself

One of my goals for the summer is to learn more about my strengths, interests, goals, and values. However, Peter Drucker’s article showed me how important it is to also learn about myself in the context of the life that surrounds me and to change when we see my world change. There is a lot that I know about myself, but I am learning how it fits into EasyBib.com and will help me thrive this summer. I am learning how to leverage my strengths to fit more perfectly than I would if I did everything that was asked of me. For example, I can find and analyze data very quickly, so I back up my work at EasyBib with extra research, regardless of whether my mentors ask me to do further research.

I value the friendly atmosphere at EasyBib and have learned more about my work habits. Like me, everyone here gets a boost of energy from being around friendly people and being able to have a casual conversation when they need a break from work. I prefer having conversations with my mentors so I can better explain my work. I know that if I do something once, like making how-to videos, I will remember how to do it; memorizing instructions is not enough. Although I perform well under stress, I prefer starting projects early, working efficiently, and using left-over time to refine my work. I can identify with the other people working at EasyBib because I value achievement. Everyone here wants to see the company succeed and they all work towards making that happen.

Although I can see how my strengths benefit EasyBib, I would rather work more independently in the future. I would be a better fit for the doctoral program I am considering. I am internally driven and can see my work through to the end when I choose my own projects. I have already sifted through a couple different projects and settled on introducing EasyBib to elementary schools. I am interested in education, have experience with elementary school students, and am excited to work on this project.

The greatest challenge I face is learning to work for others. I must mold my aspirations to fit the company’s goals, invest myself in the company, and stand by the product. This isn’t an academic setting where I can tweak my project to pinpoint what I want to work on. Rather, I have to do what is asked of me. Finding personal interest in it will make it easier.

As Peter Drucker says, it’s up to me to carve out my path, understand who I am, and decide who I will be. I can’t afford to get bored, this summer or in the second half of my life, because that will drag me down. Instead I need to keep an eye out for changes and new ideas that I would be interested in. 

[perfectmentor-blog]

No Perfect Mentor

I knew going in to my internship that my mentor may not have as much time for me as I would like. I knew I was going to have to seek out multiple student-mentor relationships. However, I did not expect that my assigned mentor would be someone whose leadership style I could not identify with.

Each of the fourteen members of the full-time in-office EasyBib team is a leader in their own way. They each take complete charge over their project and know their department and role better than even the founders of the company do. The confidence each of them expressed in his or her role assured me that each would be someone I could learn from.

My assigned mentor, Neal, was the first person I worked on projects for. He has a very relaxed demeanor and a permanent smile, which makes it difficult for me to get hints about my work and progress but makes me understand that my leadership style is more formal and professional. I kept my distance because I didn’t know how my actions were being received, especially when he seemed overwhelmed with other things going on in the office. It wasn’t until after my site visit that I actively thought about what it must be like being a mentor. I especially didn’t consider the difficulty of mentoring three unique interns while also running a growing company.

When I came to this realization, I shifted my focus from Neal to other people that I realized I had been working closely with in the office. Emily, the in-house librarian, and I have been working on a project together for the past few weeks. I started seeking feedback from her and have been observing her leadership style. Emry, the head of ad sales, is the point person for interns and, as I later realized, also much more open to discussing my progress and his path from when he was an intern to where he is now.

As I started finding mentors in other people in the company, my relationship with Neal improved as well. I think part of this comes from aspects of being the “perfect protégé”. I had to gain an understanding of the office culture and embrace it before I could begin to fit in comfortably. Although I directly ask Emily and Emry to explain the things they do that I feel make them leaders, I stand back and observe the leadership styles of others in office that I don’t know as well and don’t’ work with directly.

I have come to realize that there is no perfect mentor, and no perfect protégé either. These relationships change and develop as the mentor and protégé learn more about each other and themselves. It is up to me to observe different leadership styles and choose the ones I want to incorporate into my own style.

[successasfailure-blog]

Fail Often, Fail Now

Only a few traits mentioned in the article applied directly to my work this past week, namely zest and grit. I wanted to fully understand what Randolph meant by CPA, so I looked up the remainder of the 24 traits. The ones not included in the article that I think apply to my work at EasyBib are hope, optimism, curiosity, and a love for learning. 

This past week, zest played a role as Emily, the in-house librarian, and I structured the first draft of the EasyBib elementary school product, which kept me energized throughout the week. However, on less exciting and harder projects, I have to exercise more grit than zest. I have been given the task to reach out to IB’s headquarters in Switzerland to set up a meeting with EasyBib. I hadn’t received very positive responses in the past but I had to be persistent, tap into my grittiness, and cold-call people to set the meeting up.

Everyone at EasyBib works hard to make the company better and expand the brand name across the world. Not only do I exude hope and optimism on a daily basis, I have to be especially optimistic when convincing my mentor to let me take on a new project that I think could benefit the company, like I did on Friday when convincing my mentors to develop an educational game for elementary school students.

My curiosity and love of learning help me thrive at EasyBib. I stick myself in any projects around the office that sound interesting and asking for work that could teach me a new skill. This week, I sped through a book about how successfully manage a marketing campaign on Facebook as per my mentors instructions. Putting together a summarizing presentation was easy, and I spent most of my project time understanding how the statistics and algorithms worked and playing with the EasyBib Facebook page to see what drew the most activity from EasyBib’s customers.

My mentor makes an effort to give the interns opportunities to work on projects we��re truly interested in. He sponsors classes, either online or at General Assembly, for us to learn more. I never imagined I would have a mentor who would encourage me to set work aside a few hours each week and immerse myself in my interests. In the past two weeks, he has brought in entrepreneurs to talk to the interns about their experiences. Each of them told us to stop being afraid to fail because no other time in our lives would have a lower risk factor. We can only benefit by making the most of every opportunity we are given. This article reinforced that we are all capable, just scared, of failing and bouncing back stronger than before.

[managingboss-blog]

Managing My Reputation with My Boss

Like Bonnevie and his boss Gibbons, I had unrealistic expectations of my mentor, Neal, and assumed he would be there to make sure my interests were catered to and to provide constant advice and support, even when I was too shy to ask for it. I used be overly dependent on Neal, and therefore ended up frustrated when I didn’t get the guidance I needed or the positive feedback on projects I thought I deserved.

After my second week, I pulled myself out of the situation and looked not only at how my actions and efforts were being received, but also how I was delivering them. I put myself in Neal’s shoes and thought about what he prioritizes over everything else and how those priorities compared to my own.  I came up with a mental list of mutual expectations we could have for each other: I could expect him to prioritize projects if I was able to communicate their importance to EasyBib and he could expect me to always put forth a full effort.

Since then, I have been asking how I can help with the things that I know cause Neal the most stress, whether that be heading the development of a new product or editing a short presentation. I have also been observing Neal’s work style. Previously, my formal work ethic would clash with his casual one. By observing and incorporating aspects of his work style, I have proven we are more compatible than I originally thought. We communicate more easily and frequently, which helps me clarify my project goals quickly and allows him to pull me back on track the moment he sees me heading in the wrong direction with a project.

After six weeks of making sure I understood what was important to Neal, this week I had to explain why a small aspect of EasyBib Elementary, a new product I have been developing, was taking much longer than expected. Though I could have lied and finished the project in the short time he expected, I chose to be honest so as to maintain my dependability and reputation for completing projects within the timeframes I set for myself. I think he appreciated the honesty and surprisingly offered more resources to help me complete the project on my terms.

I also showed good use of time and resources when I took what I learned from a spreadsheet Neal had shown me at the beginning of my internship and created new financial projects in the same format for a partnership he and Darshan, the other Co-CEO, are considering. I also took the new information on the core curriculum I gathered this week and applied it to projects I had completed and turned in earlier this summer. I think Neal really appreciated my effort to refine projects without being asked to because it showed him that I cared about the company as he would want anyone working for him to.

[failuretolerant-blog]

Neal: the Failure-Doesn’t-Exist Leader

The development of EasyBib Elementary (official product name still to be determined) has been my biggest and most trying project and is the best example of Farson and Keyes’ principals on addressing failure..  I sometimes worked in a team with Emily, the in-house librarian at EasyBib, and Neal and Darshan, the Co-CEO’s, and by myself other times. I had to lead some interviews and discussions, while following Emily, Neal, or Darshan in their execution of others.

            The first principle, especially since this project was a partnership between Emily and me, was “collaborate to innovate.” Emily and I interviewed over two-dozen librarians together, but I never felt that we fought for more talk-time during the interview or that we talked our efforts up in front of Neal and Darshan. Rather, we filled the gaps the other left. We would ask the questions the other person forgot to, and never fought to share positive feedback with Neal or Darshan.

            Though we developed a good relationship quickly, building relationships with the librarians and media specialists we were interviewing was more difficult. We had to “get engaged and move beyond success and failure”, staying away from celebrating the interviews that went really well or focusing too much on those we didn’t get at all. I remembered during these instances how my father rarely let me celebrate a single good shot on a golf course, but always insisted that I stay positive until I had putt out the last hole of the entire tournament. All these moments reaffirmed that nothing productive comes of mourning losses or celebrating successes: rather it is the larger picture that determines our success and the learning comes from figuring out why I made even the smallest mistakes. These lessons led me to rewrite the question-list after each interview to help us zone in on what we wanted to learn about the market demand more perfectly.

            Throughout this entire process, I was most inspired by how Neal never praised nor criticized anything Emily or I did. Instead he asked a hundred questions about what we were learning and how we thought the product should be designed. Although I didn’t realize it until I read this article, his questioning forced us to think more deeply about the product and really understand our market demand. Whenever he felt we missed getting a piece of information, like exactly what kind of games educators would want in the product, he would simply ask us as a subtle push to ask the same question in future interviews.

            This article and my many meetings with Neal helped me understand Neal’s leadership style better because he is definitely a leader that doesn’t always praise, but always analyzes to make sure everyone is getting as much as they can out of their tasks. This leadership trait, along with the overall ability to accept and learn from failure, is one that I would like to include in my own unique leadership style.