4 killing Behaviors of Interns!

Before I settled at my current job at the finance department, Palestinian telecommunication, I had the chance to do three internships both paid and unpaid. At that point, I used to judge the employees (trainers) based on  how they should train  and deal with interns. When I sat on the other side of the table and I became the employee, no doubt, it was totally different experience.  I started to understand why such actions have been provocative to the employee. From my experience as a trainer, the interns usually conduct irrational behaviors. For that reason, I thought I should devote sometime to summarize the most critical behaviors that we face in the finance department:

1.    College Books Are The Ultimate Right.

We exert tremendous efforts to teach interns that the college books are right, but also, there are other methods and approaches that are right too. This is the real world; this is not  college where marks are the only evaluation tool. Now, it is the place where our approach is entitled as" All roads lead to Rome"

2.    They know Zilch About Communication Skills

We hold ourselves back from negatively reacting to the actions of the interns. Ironically, they still think, dress, talk, and behave, as if they are still students. They forgot that after 2-5 months they would be released to the real world.

3.    Unnecessary Details. 

The interns assume that in a few days, they are going to  master everything in the finance department. Of course, they will not. From my experience, we should emphasize on the general and broad aspects of the business and try to connect that with their college books. For example, we are recording on the Oracle finance program. In the training, I will not focus on the accounts and the recording on the program. I will only focus on the recording process and the fundamentals; for two prominent reasons:

1. The chart of accounts contains hundreds of accounts. No time for that!!

2. The program and accounts are only designed for our company, if they will work for other companies, it will not add up that much of knowledge to them. However, the recording process will do so since it is going to be very similar.

4.     Immature questions:

I still remember an intern asked my colleague "How much is your Salary?"  They can be smarter and say" what is the salary scale for entry level accountants?"

Please be aware of that if you want to become a trainee.  That is why we encourage every student to look for internships so they can be prepared  for the crucial market.

Let's hear from you now, did you face something similar  at your workplace?

Quintessential Interview Question

Either in the interviews or applications, I often stumbled with this question: "Describe a situation in which you demonstrated your leadership skills to solve a serious problem in professional life”. From my point of view, it is a very important question requiring clarity, precision and concision. The following is my answer.

It had been only three months into my being hired at the Finance Department at Paltel (Palestinian Telecommunications) as an accountant, when the HQ Finance Department assigned me a task for the first time. This task was to be the head of two sales centers’ stock-taking committee; and one of the centers is the largest sales center in the company. By the way, this was my first job after having done three internships. Here are the steps I took:

1. Read the guidelines of stock-taking and the responsibilities of the committee leader and understood them clearly.

2. Researched the profile of the team members.

3. Looked for any documentation related to the task that I had to perform.

4. Had an informal meeting with the key members to go through an overview regarding the activities of the task.

5. Consulted my colleague who has tremendous experience in this area.

After that I discovered the actual challenge: I was leading a team of 3 members, each one of which had at least 5 years of experience in the sales centers, one of them having been the head of a sales center stock-taking committee before. The simple fact was, I was the youngest in age with no previous experience in this job. In addition, the time was limited and I had only one day to finish work at the two centers and send the reports to the HQ finance Department. Moreover, there was pressure on me since the department had assigned me the job, even though there were other skillful employees. Also, I didn't want to let them down, I need to take this chance to prove that they can trust me.

Here is what I did: breaking the ice, as a team leader, was my first action. I am responsible for making everyone feel that he/she is part of the team and is not excluded. I already had a defined plan in my head. However, I asked them about their experiences over the past year, asked them for any suggestions, and asked them what roles they wanted to perform in the plan. By doing that, I made them feel that my plan is their plan and gained their trust. Then, I delegated the tasks to the team as per each one’s experience and skill. 

At the stage of execution, I introduced myself to the employees since I was new in the company; I found that the employees were very nervous, since the report I was making would affect them either positively or negatively. So, even though I didn't want to be the bad guy, at the same time I had to fulfill my duties. For that reason, whenever I found drawbacks and deficiencies, I encouraged them to be open about it; I convinced them that this process is only for evaluation purposes rather than scrutiny. 

All in all, I accomplished the mission successfully: I had demonstrated my leadership skills, along with my delegation and communication skills, my ability to work under pressure, leading a team with differing levels of experience, reporting and social intelligence skills.

Now, what about you, have you ever been in a similar situation? How did you overcome it?