I think this is a situation a lot of us are familiar with. Say you have a friend named Alex. Alex is a super nice guy, and you two have been friendly with each other for a long, long time. One day you’re out grabbing lunch with him and he talks to you about this super cool project he’s working on. It’s a new web app that leverages AI to summarize weather data. He asks you if you could contribute to the project.

“So what would the compensation look like?”

“Oh, I was just thinking you could just help me out a little, since y’know, we’re tight and all right?”

“Ah okay… sure.”

Being a people pleaser sucks. It really does. You’d think that being selfless and doing as much as possible to help others would be a net positive right? After all, you’re making people feel good all the time. It never ends up working out that way in real life. I have learned over time that I struggle with putting up these boundaries where I need to. I’ve always liked working in the background and being invisible, because (selfishly), I don’t want to be the leader that ends up taking the fall for the rest of the team.

This brings me to my internship. Putting up boundaries has been strictly necessary for my position, as I bring a lot of technical knowledge to the table at a firm dominated by non-technical people. For example, our company founder used to work at a different firm called Zalando. They’re a Dutch clothing brand that does everything from streetwear to designer outfits. If you look at their site, we have borrowed quite a bit from them. The giant mega-menu in the header, the large grey to black footer, and so on. He absolutely loves their website. In all fairness, it’s a great looking and functional site, but we are a Health and Safety company with more of a Business to Business (B2B) relationship than the Business to Customer (B2C) relationship you would expect from a clothing brand.

My manager and I have had meetings with him where we’ve had to push back pretty firmly on these design decisions. As an example, having a ton of animation on a website is great if you’re a startup or freelancer trying to prove your skill, but if you’re working in B2B it’s more likely to look tacky. If you know an idea isn’t going to work, it’s always better to be straightforward and honest upfront so you can avoid wasting your employer’s time and money.

As such, I’ve had to take much more of a leadership role than your average internship, since I have the knowledge to call the shots. It’s a very unique position, and I am very grateful for it. I’ve learned that respectfully pushing back against your superiors is a really important skill, and while I’m not a pro at it just yet, I feel a lot more confident in my ideas and my ability to communicate them than I did before coming to Berlin.

Not that I don’t have any help. I have a data analyst on my team and my manager as mentioned before. They are both very receptive to feedback, and I know they’ll always have my back. We might not agree on everything, but we know each others’ strengths and how to delegate them for the task at hand. We may only have a working relationship, but the way that I speak with them is pretty unfiltered. Much like talking to a good friend that you know you can be open and honest with, they’re not only good teammates, but good people as well.

So I have found leadership to be less about authority, and more about influence. If you’re a manager, you might have the capability to command your team, but they will be reluctant and passive aggressive in actually completing the work. But if you are my manager, you try to convince the team of why the work is worth doing. Why do we need a blog? We need to be found on Google, and the algorithm loves backlinks. Why do we need to refactor the menu layout? Because it sucks so bad that even we don’t even know where to find things. I’ve found that taking this kind of approach to taking charge and problem solving has tangible impacts, whether you’re the intern like me, or the manager that is in charge of assigning the work.

I hope to come out of this experience with a better understanding of what I expect a leader to be, whether it be for myself or others.

Tschüss!