What a week to be watching the World Cup! I caught Spain vs Belgium at an Irish pub here in Prague on Friday and barely sat down for the whole game. The place was packed and loud, and it came down to the wire. It was tied 1-1 late until Merino came off the bench and scored to put Spain up 2-1 in the 88th minute. The whole pub lost it. I’m heading back tonight for Norway vs England, and I’ll admit Erling Haaland is growing on me fast. Seven goals so far and a two-goal night that sent Brazil home. England went in as one of the tournament favorites, and Norway isn’t supposed to win tonight, which is exactly why I’m rooting for them!
But enough about the World Cup for now. I’m in Prague for my internship, and this week I’ve been thinking a lot about how much it’s changed my understanding of leadership.
Before this internship, I would have said leadership was mostly about being dependable. That came from my property management work back home, where I was usually the person who kept everything running. I noticed the small stuff other people let slide, and I picked up whatever needed doing so it actually got finished. If a resident had a problem, I handled it. If an event needed to be set up, I got it done. In my head, being a leader meant carrying more than my share and never letting anything drop, and if I wanted something done right, I usually figured the safest thing was to just do it myself.
That approach worked fine in a job where I could see everything in front of me and fix it directly. It hasn’t worked the same way at Provencelia, and figuring out why has taught me a lot.
My main work here is putting together the company’s financial picture across all the places we sell, which is a lot more than one store. We sell in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, and a few smaller markets, and we do it through a bunch of different channels in addition to our own online store, like Amazon, eBay, Kaufland, Etsy, and ManoMano. My job is to take all of that and turn it into one report that shows how the business is actually doing. I pull in revenue from every channel and country, ad spend from Google and Meta, platform and payment fees, shipping, refunds and returns, product cost, packaging, and overhead from our invoices, and then work it all the way down to net profit. Not just one number for the whole company, but broken out by channel and country, so you can see which markets and channels are making money and which ones only look like they are. Germany is our biggest market by a wide margin, but the report also reveals things you wouldn’t guess from revenue alone, like a channel that brings in decent sales but barely turns a profit once you factor in what we spend on ads to get them.
When I started, I treated this like every other task I’ve had. I did it carefully, got it right, and handed it in, figuring that being reliable was the whole point. It took me less than a week to really understand that this report isn’t something I finish and pass along. It’s what the team looks at when they decide what to do next, whether that’s continuing to spend on a certain ad channel, deciding if a market is actually worth the shipping costs, or seeing where the margins are thinner than everyone assumed. Those calls get made off of what I put in front of them. That also means the report can’t just be right once. It has to stay up to date daily so that whenever someone opens our financial sales report, the numbers they’re looking at are the most current, accurate picture of the business, not something from a few days ago that’s already out of date.
Once that clicked, being dependable stopped feeling like enough on its own. People were going to act on my work, so a mistake, or even just laying the numbers out in a confusing way, doesn’t stay small and private. It walks straight into a decision that costs real money. That’s a heavier kind of responsibility than making sure an apartment got shown, or an event ran smoothly, and it has less to do with how I look and more to do with whether the business makes the right call.
That shifted how I think about what leading even means. I always pictured a leader as someone with a team under them, but I’ve realized you can be leading something without a title and without anyone reporting to you, just by being the one who owns the piece everyone else is standing on. A lot of the time, I end up with the clearest picture of how the business is doing across all these markets and channels, sometimes clearer than people who have been here way longer, simply because I’m the one holding all of it in one place. That came with the work, not with any authority. And it means my job isn’t only to build the report. I also have to explain what the numbers mean, flag anything that looks off before someone builds a plan on top of them, and point out patterns nobody asked me to look for. A clean file that nobody understands doesn’t help anyone. The useful part is getting people to see what the numbers are telling them.
There’s also been a self-leadership side to this that I didn’t expect. No one here hands me a daily to-do list, and no one checks my work before it gets used, so I’ve had to hold my own standard without anyone enforcing it. That’s harder than it sounds when you’re the only person who would ever know if you cut a corner. The bigger change for me, though, has been learning to zoom out. I used to think that doing my own piece well was enough, and now I pay much more attention to how my piece fits into everything else the team is deciding on.
I think I’m becoming a better leader because I’ve stopped treating my work as something I complete and then walk away from. When you own the information a team relies on, leading means making sure that information is right and that people actually understand it, not just that you technically did what you were asked. There’s no one for me to manage here and no title attached to it, but it still feels like leadership, and it’s the kind I keep reading about when I look into consulting, where the whole job is making sense of a business through its numbers and helping people decide what to do with them. I came into this internship thinking leadership meant carrying as much as I could on my own. Now I know it’s really about whether people can trust the work you give them enough to act on it.
