Before this internship, if someone had asked me to describe my leadership style I would have said something about leading by example. However, I am not sure what that would have looked like in practice. What I actually believed was that a leader is the person who knows that should happen next and tells everyone else. Leadership was about having answers and being willing to take responsibility for them. It was a role that someone occupied, and that made them the one in charge. That definition has not held up for multiple reasons. The first is that I’ve spent this internship without any authority at all, and still had to figure out how to get an idea taken seriously. The second is that I’ve been working in Sweden, where this version of leadership doesn’t really exist.

Swedish workplaces are flat. There is not much visible hierarchy and decisions tend to get made by consensus rather than announced from above. My first read on this was that it was slow and indecisive. Nobody was really in charge. What I came to understand is that the steering is happening, just distributed across everyone in the room instead of concentration in one person. A manager here isn’t expected to hand down decisions. They’re expected to create a situation where the right decision gets reached, which is a different look from outside.

The other thing that reshaped my view was having to make an argument nobody wanted to hear. Part of my work involved evaluating whether the company should invest more in growing its social media presence. The answer I expected was that they should hire someone to run it. I built a model estimating how many customers social media actually brought in for each of the competitors, and the numbers didn’t support that. Even the strongest competitor in the industry converted just a few dozen customers a year. My recommendation ended up being to not make the hire and to redirect the effort somewhere else.

I really had no standing to make that argument. I was the newest and most junior person involved, arguing against what more experienced people already believed, in my second month. What I learned is that when you have no authority, the only thing you have is the quality of your reasoning and your willingness to show it openly. I had to back up my findings and explain where the numbers came from. I was always prepared to be wrong if someone found a flaw in my numbers. Being able to tell my supervisors what I wasn’t confident in helped make my argument stronger. It showed that I didn’t know everything and I was being transparent to them.

That’s the biggest shift for me. I used to think leadership meant having answers. I now think it has more to do this making your thinking visible enough that other people can engage with it and improve it. The version I brought with me assumed the decision is the valuable part, and treats the decision as something that comes from it. I wouldn’t say that I have become a leader over a few months as an intern. What I would say instead is that I have stopped thinking of leadership as something attached to a position. Most of what I’ve watched work here has come from people with no particular power in the room. They were willing to say the thing they actually thought before they were completely sure of it.