Ask HR Bartender: Impressing the Boss
This installment of Ask HR Bartender involves a situation with an intern, their manager and the department head. Here’s the situation (edited for brevity):
I’m an intern working at my own expense (translation: for free) as a marketer. This is my first time in the real working environment so I am a little inexperienced I suppose. I’ve been asked to do about 10 projects during my time here – 7 or so should be completed, which is more than my bosses could have expected.
I received an email from the department manager regarding the status of my projects that will not be completed, since it’s the end of my internship. The email essentially said, “By XXX date, I want all your unfinished projects delegated to others.” So, being the eager intern and wanting to impress the boss, I started right away to speak to other interns and members of staff about how we could do this and proceeded to delegate everything. I did everything the department manager wanted. Which is fantastic – right?!
My manager went berserk at me for not consulting him prior to doing this. (P.S. He wasn’t even in the office so I couldn’t even ask him for involvement.) Even though the department head is happy; my manager is still mad because I’m not being a team player.
My objective was to impress the boss and get the job done ASAP, I didn’t even stop to think of wasting time in order to get permission from my line manager. Is there another way this situation could have been handled?
This appears to be a huge misunderstanding. There are some things that could have been handled differently, check out my response:
What do you think? What could this intern have done differently? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
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