The internship is winding toward its end, and the character of the work has changed with it. Less building, more consolidating. Most of the properties are now off the old platform and running on the setup I put together, which means the interesting problems have shifted from “can this be done” to “will this still work in October when I am back in Pittsburgh.” I have spent a lot of this week writing documentation, which is not what I expected to be doing and is probably the most valuable thing I have produced. Outside of work, July in Sweden is genuinely strange in a way I was not prepared for. A large share of the country takes vacation at the same time, the city noticeably empties, and everyone simply plans around it without apology.

Leadership before this internship

If you had asked me in May how I would describe my leadership style, I would have said something about leading by example, and I would have meant it sincerely without having examined it. In practice, what I actually did was take on the hardest technical piece of any group project myself, do it well, and assume that this counted as leadership. In student group work, it usually passes for it. The project gets done, it gets a good grade, and nobody complains.

Looking back, that is not leadership. That is being the most productive individual contributor and calling it a title. The tell is that when I worked that way, nobody else on the team ended up more capable at the end than they were at the start, and the work was not sustainable without me. Those are the two things leadership is actually supposed to produce.

How this internship challenged that

Working in a Swedish company challenged this view in a way an American company probably would not have.

The flat hierarchy here means authority is not the mechanism by which things happen. Very few people can simply instruct someone else, and the ones who could mostly do not. What moves work forward is agreement. If people are not persuaded, the thing quietly does not happen, and nobody tells you that it is not happening. As an intern with no authority at all, I had no option other than persuasion. I had to explain why something was worth doing to people who had every right to say no, and I had to accept that some of them would.

That reframed leadership for me as an act of communication rather than an act of decision. The version of me that shows up with a finished tool and explains how good it is was much less effective than the version that raised an idea early, asked what would make it useful, and adjusted before building. The second version produced things people actually used.

The second challenge was the one that came from being temporary. I am here for a summer. Everything I built is running on systems I set up, and for most of the internship I was the only person who fully understood any of it. That is a comfortable position to be in, and it is a genuinely bad outcome for the company. A leader who is indispensable has failed at something.

So the last few weeks have been an exercise in making myself unnecessary. Writing down where things are hosted, what breaks first, what to do when it does, who to call. Walking colleagues through systems slowly enough that they can operate them without me. This work is boring, it produces nothing visible, and I now think it is the clearest test of whether someone was leading or just working. Leaving behind an asset instead of a dependency is the whole difference.