Legislative Intern: Office of Senator Charles Schumer

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Internship

January 2020 – April 2020

During my time at Senator Schumer’s office, I was able to gain a lot of experience and knowledge about our political system from the team I worked with. I specifically interned in the Senate Diversity Initiative in Senator Schumer’s office, where I learned how to be more independent and understand the importance of reliability, but at the same time learned a lot by asking questions and being open to help. Our job at the Senate Diversity Initiative was to find diverse candidates to endorse for positions available on the Senate, in order to help diverse each Senate office. We work with all Senate Democratic caucus offices, as well as Senate Committees and a few congressional offices.

Reflection 1: Leader-Member Exchange Theory

Reviewing the leader-member exchange theory and how that relates to my internship in the Senate Democrat Diversity Initiative, I found that my office atmosphere is very similar to this type of theory. While the process from Role-Taking to Role-Making was significantly faster in my opinion, there is an element of both that took place in my office environment. For example, the first day or two, there was a lot of introductions and understanding the roles that everyone plays in the office. The office is generally small though, so it was expected of us early, whether or not we were capable of performing or not, to take on assignments and work on our own work. Hence why I say that these phases move quicker than normal.

On the other hand, though, I believe that there are some elements of both existing in the stage I am at right now. While we all have our own goals and assignments that we wish to pursue, there is an element of establishing our skills and abilities for our manager. Instead of it being established more and more to gain trust in each worker, my manager gives us important projects to complete and determines what our skills and abilities are through action. I think, while this can be overwhelming at times, is a important aspect of building the leader-member bond and gaining the trust of my manager, as the I believe the more I show I am capable of completing these tasks without constant help or confusion, the more I will build trust in my employer. Another example of this relationship is the assignment I was given for a meeting. My manager asked me, post meeting, to writeup a summary about the talking points of the meeting and a brief description about each talking point. While he knew I was capable of simply writing up the talking points, he understood that giving brief descriptions of them all might be out of my knowledge level, being new to the team; so he made sure to let me know that I should try my best to create descriptions and anyone one of the talking points I didn’t feel comfortable writing, I would leave for him to finish. I think that this is a combination of the role-taking and role-making process, as while I was given this important assignment for a significant meeting, he still wants to test my skills and abilities, and establish my role, before moving closer and closer into the routinization phase.

The vision that my manager wants will eventually leave the state of our work environment where there would be routinization, as my manager wants to create an environment where we can all individually work on various projects and work independently. For now, I am learning more and taking in as much as I can, hoping to create a strong leader-member bond.

Reflection 2: Adaptive Leadership

According to Northouse, Adaptive Leadership is “about how leaders encourage people to adapt – to face and deal with problems, challenges and changes” (Northouse, 257). Understanding my office experience and how it relates and differentiates from Adaptive Leadership, I would say that the general atmosphere of our office is centered around mobilizing us, as interns, to tackle challenges and changes that might occur. The difference is that our manager, the head of operations in our office, is not the one who primarily focuses on encouraging us to tackle challenges. The person who takes on this adaptive leadership approach is our research assistant. While our manager focuses on teaching us lesson and picking us up when we fail, our research assistant demonstrates a lot of adaptive leadership approach, by giving us challenges to face and being determined in teaching us how to overcome these challenges, hoping to prepare us for future positions. For example, our research assistant gave us the task of helping him plan an intern and fellowship fair. He gave us challenging tasks, including creating the flyer for the event and coming up with a list of contacts for the event. The use of adaptive leadership was used through the fact that events can change in inevitable ways. Whether that be if key speakers or organizations who RSVPed cancel close to the event, if the event needs to change days due to inevitable problems, and other ways in which events can change. Throughout this process though, whenever we ran into an inevitable problem, he taught us ways to overcome these issues, through different steps and methods of working around the problem at hand. This use of adaptive leadership allowed us to excel and host an amazing event, which I know will help each one of us adapt in our future positions.

While our research assistant challenges us to deal with changes, he also cares about our own personal lives and uses his adaptive leadership to help us address issues in our own lives. This has really encouraged us to become better individuals and to focus on what changes that we need to better understand ourselves. He specifically uses a lot of the “get on the balcony” approach to our own lives. He encourages us to step out of the current situation we are in a look at the situation as a whole rather than from our perspective. Another technique he uses is that he helps us to differentiate the difference between our technical and adaptive challenges. Finally, he makes sure to regulate distress and help us to ensure that during adaptive challenges that we are not too distressed. Ultimately, he encourages us the most, through work and personal relationships, to effectively use adaptive leadership.

The major difference in my office, other than which leadership uses adaptive leadership, is the use of regulating personal distress and protecting leadership voices from below. While our office is great at some things, others can be improved upon. Specifically, when it comes to their own personal distress, it becomes very clear at times, and could really affect the atmosphere of the office. The other issue, protecting leadership voices from below, can be seen during meetings a noticeable amount. Whenever an intern, who is less inclined to speak their mind, speaks up in less conviction about an idea or plan, it can be hard to be open to their ideas, which can lead to these individual’s ideas being unknown.

Reflection 3: Theory to Practice

From my experience working in the Senate Diversity Initiative, I find that situational leadership was very present in my internship program, as in each project that we assigned to the others interns and myself, our leadership would use different styles in order to determine the most effective way to accomplish a task. As interns, we were given a lot of responsibility and freedom in completing tasks, as our office was small and everyone needed to focus on their own work in order for all of us to finish our tasks on time. This means that a lot of the time, our head director would use a directing style r in leading us in completing our tasks. A lot of less formal tasks were our head director giving us a task, showing us the what or how of goal accomplishment of the task, and then we would go out and attempt to complete the task with our head director checking in on us once in a while. It was a lot of directive behavior rather than supportive. In certain situations, though, when there was a big project being discussed, our head director would us the coaching style. For these big projects, he would still have the final say in goal accomplishment, but in these situations, there was a lot of more open discussion and encouragement when giving people tasks. He would ask everyone what they thought and what changes or opinions we have, and then encourage us to make our plans in action and take on these roles. This, I believe, was effective for the given situation because it allowed us to develop better, having to work on our own accord a lot of the time, but didn’t leave us out to dry, meaning that we could increase our commitment to the mission and have an overall increase in interest. This would allow us to move towards moderate to high competence and variable commitment, which allowed us to excel as individuals.

Ways that my internship experience wasn’t similar to situational approach was that there wasn’t a lot of use in supporting or delegating per say. A lot of the time, directive behavior was a necessity in order to complete our tasks and understand what the goal of the task was, meaning that while coaching was more preferred to supporting style, there was still an area of supportive behavior when it came to our leadership. At the same time, delegating style was not necessarily used. While I mentioned that delegating, as a vague term, was used in order to allow us to all complete our tasks, the behavior which was used more was directing, as we never were to complete a task with our own goal accomplishment in mind, as there was specific ways in which our head director wanted us to complete tasks. This shows that while certain leadership styles were used, our leadership did not always use each form of style or behavior in situations that maybe were needed to be used. It can also be said that other interns and my development levels would have increased more had our leadership used all styles and behaviors of leadership. Overall, while not all leadership styles were used, as stated before, I still believe that my leadership was effective in being able to develop others and myself for future positions.