Conflict
For this blog post I will write about a conflict that I experienced while I was working at my internship last summer. I was an “Operations Intern” assigned to the operations team in the Navy department. The problem was that I wasn’t assigned a specific task or assigned to an individual person. This left the whole team assigning me small projects without communicating with one another. This put me in a bad position because I looked like a slow intern that could not finish a project in a timely manner. It also caused problems between my higher ups because they would want their projects done first, pushing the assignments other people assigned me to the bottom of my pile.
The problem became apparent when I brought the issue up to one of my superiors that I felt close with. They had no idea that I was being used by almost everyone in the office. He quickly sent out an email where he explained what had been going on. When the problem became apparent to the entire office, people stopped assigning me tasks and projects altogether. I then had a few weeks where I had no idea what to do. I’d find myself sitting around waiting for people to assign me tasks while wasting the company’s money.
Looking back at the situation, there are many things that the company should have done to prepare for having an intern. There was a total lack of preparation, planning and structure. This company is very closely tied to the government so it felt very slow and bureaucratic, so in hindsight I am not surprised with the lack of planning that went behind my internship. They should have either assigned me a long project or to a specific person at the office. I came in and was used as a favor man rather than a college educated intern. They also should have laid down some guidelines for the employees in my department so that there was not confusion as to what my function was. If they had done these things, there would not have been conflict between me and my bosses or conflict between the full time workers at the office. So no, the conflict in this situation was avoidable. I think that this is a prime example of how conflict often arises as a result of poor planning or lack of organization.
This doesn't look like conflict so much as simple lack of coordination. You were mis-utilized, no doubt. But it doesn't appear that you were fighting with anyone else or that the people who were assigning small tasks to you were fighting with each other.
ReplyDeleteDid you work at the U.S. Navy? Or was Navy the name of the department within a private company? I was unclear on that. I was also unclear on why they hired you and what you expected to do as an intern. Perhaps you can expand on that somewhat in your response to my comment.
While there was definitely a lack of coordination, I think that there was also conflict within the department about how to utilize me. I worked at a company called SourceAmerica. They help the government fulfill the AbilityOne Act, which has to do with getting people with disabilities employment. The Navy is a huge employer of people with disabilities, so an entire department of my company is dedicated to specifically Navy contracts. That is the department that I worked in. I mostly just cleaned up their database by renaming contracts, and I also compiled excel sheets for account managers so that they had all their contracts in one place. The whole organization had a slow almost DMV-like government pace, so I don't think much thought went into the internship program. If I could make a suggestion to them I would have them eradicate the internship because I feel that it wasted my summer.
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