Update from Stockholm
The last couple of weeks have been the busiest of the internship so far. Most of my time has gone into the company’s web presence, which turned out to be a much larger project than it sounded like at the start. We manage several properties, and each one had its own website, set up at a different time, on a different plan, by a different person. Alongside that I have been building internal tools for administrative processes that were being handled manually.
On adapting
The hardest thing to adapt to has not been anything dramatic. Stockholm is an international city. The infrastructure works, almost everyone speaks English, and daily life is easy to navigate. I have not had a moment of real culture shock in the way the phrase is usually meant. What has been genuinely difficult is subtler, and it took me several weeks to even identify it.
The first thing is how decisions get made. In the American offices I have worked in, decisions travel downward. Someone senior decides, tells you, and you execute. Swedish workplaces run on something closer to consensus. Before a decision is considered real, it gets discussed, circulated, and quietly agreed to by the people it affects. The Swedish word people use is “förankring,” which means anchoring, and that is a good description of what is happening. The decision has to be anchored before it moves.
I found this difficult for a specific reason. I came in wanting to build things quickly, and my instinct when I had an idea was to go make it and show people the finished version. That instinct is rewarded in the US. Here it can read as having gone around people. I had to learn to raise something early, in a low-stakes way, and let it sit for a few days before I started. That felt like wasted time at first. It is not. The things I anchored properly got adopted. The things I built first and presented later took much longer to actually get used, even when they worked.
The second thing is the flat hierarchy, which sounds purely positive and mostly is, but it comes with a consequence nobody warns you about. Flat hierarchy means nobody is going to hand you a task list. There is very little checking in on you. For the first two weeks I interpreted this as being left alone because my work was not important. What was actually happening is that autonomy is the default assumption, and asking someone to direct you constantly reads as an inability to manage yourself. Adapting meant I had to become the person deciding what I should be working on, and then reporting outward rather than waiting to be told inward.
There is also a formality here that surprised me. People are relaxed socially, but the professional standards are strict in ways that are easy to underestimate. Punctuality is not flexible. Dress standards are more consistent than I expected. Being ten minutes late to something is a real signal about you, not a minor inconvenience you apologize for and move past. That was an adjustment coming from a student environment where lateness is normalized.
My strategy for all of this has mostly been observation rather than asking. I watch how the people who have been here longest handle a situation, and I copy the shape of it before I try to do it my own way. Speaking Norwegian has helped more than I expected, not because everyone here speaks Norwegian, but because it gets me close enough to Swedish to follow the tone of a conversation, and tone is where most of the actual information lives in a low-conflict culture.
In terms of professional development, the useful lesson is that adaptability is not the same as being easygoing. I arrived thinking that being flexible meant being agreeable and saying yes to things. What it has actually required is changing how I work, not just how I act. Slowing down before starting, managing myself instead of waiting for direction, and reading responses for what they mean rather than what they literally say. Those are habits, not attitudes, and they took real effort to build.
Vi ses!