Hola todos! Six weeks in, and this program continues to find new ways to push me in directions I did not see coming. This week’s prompt asks me to reflect on leadership, which is a word I have always felt a little complicated about. Not because I shy away from it, but because I think I came into this summer with a fairly narrow idea of what it actually means, and the past six weeks have done a pretty thorough job of widening that picture in ways I am still processing.
Before this internship, I would have described my leadership style as confident and action oriented. Whether it was being part of the ZBT Beta Phi chapter at Pitt, competing on the men’s club water polo team, or taking the lead on group projects through the American Marketing Association, I have always been someone who moves toward the front of the room when something needs to get done. My instinct has typically been to assess a situation quickly, form a plan, and start executing. In a lot of environments, that approach works really well. You project confidence, people follow, things get done, and everyone moves forward. I came into Bond EMEA with that same energy, ready to contribute and eager to prove myself, and it took me about two weeks to realize that leading in a multinational consulting environment is a fundamentally different exercise than anything I had done before.
The first thing this internship challenged was my assumption that moving fast equals leading well. In consulting, especially across a team that spans multiple countries and cultures, rushing toward a solution without bringing everyone along with you is not leadership, it is just noise. I noticed early on that the most respected people on my team were not necessarily the ones who spoke the most in meetings or had the quickest answers. They were the ones who listened carefully, asked the right questions at the right moment, and made sure that everyone around them had what they needed before the group moved forward. That is a style of leadership that takes a lot more patience than I am naturally wired for, and building that patience has been one of the more honest personal challenges of the summer.
The second big shift has been learning what it means to lead without authority. As an intern, I do not manage anyone, I do not run any meetings, and I am very much the least experienced person in most rooms I walk into. For a long time I think I equated leadership with having a title or a level of seniority that gave you the right to direct other people. What I am realizing here is that leadership, at its core, is really about how you show up. It is about being the person who comes prepared, who follows through on every commitment without needing a reminder, who asks thoughtful questions instead of just nodding along, and who makes the people around them feel supported rather than pressured. Those things have nothing to do with title or tenure, and practicing them every single day in this office has genuinely started to reshape how I think about the kind of professional I want to become.
I have also been learning that leading across cultures requires a kind of humility that takes real effort to develop. There have been moments this summer where my default instincts, the American tendency to be direct, to push for a quick decision, to fill silence with action, have needed to be dialed back significantly in favor of a more deliberate and patient approach. Every time I have had the discipline to slow down and meet my colleagues where they are rather than where I want them to be, the outcome has been noticeably better. That is the kind of lesson no classroom can fully teach you. You have to be in it, get it wrong a few times, and pay close enough attention to understand why.
On the subject of getting outside the classroom, this past weekend I joined a Citylife Madrid group trip down to southern Morocco, and it was without question one of the most extraordinary experiences of my entire life. The itinerary took us from Marrakech through the Atlas Mountains and the ancient mud city of Aït Ben Haddou, which you may recognize if you have ever watched Game of Thrones or Gladiator, before heading out to the edge of the Sahara Desert. Marrakech itself was sensory overload in the absolute best way. The medina, the open air markets, the sounds and smells coming from every direction at once — it was the kind of place that grabs you immediately and does not let go. Walking through the souks with no real plan and no particular destination was one of those rare travel experiences where you stop thinking about what you are supposed to be doing and just let the place wash over you completely.
Aït Ben Haddou stopped me in my tracks in a completely different way. Standing in front of this ancient fortified city built entirely from mud brick, watching the late afternoon light hit the walls in a way that made the whole thing glow, it was genuinely difficult to process that a place like this exists and that I was standing in front of it. Then came the Sahara, which I have been told is something you cannot really prepare yourself for no matter how many photos you have seen, and that turned out to be completely true. We rode camels into the dunes at dusk, watched the sun drop below the horizon from the top of a sand ridge, and spent the night at a Berber style desert camp under more stars than I have ever seen in my life. Waking up in the Sahara and watching the sunrise over the dunes the next morning was the kind of moment where you feel very small and very lucky at the same time, and I think I needed that perspective more than I realized heading into the final stretch of this internship.
Coming back to Madrid on Sunday, I found myself thinking about how much both of those experiences, the leadership lessons inside the office and the humbling vastness of the Moroccan desert, were actually telling me the same thing. The world is bigger, more complex, and more beautiful than any single framework can contain, and the best thing you can do, whether you are leading a team or riding a camel into the Sahara at sunset, is stay curious, stay humble, and keep showing up fully for whatever comes next.
¡Hasta la próxima!