Tweet

How to Reinforce Your Successful Teambuilding Efforts with Summer Interns

Written by: Dianne Crampton

Article Overview: School is out for the summer and many college students, hopeful to land a job now that hiring indications are more positive, have secured internships for the summer. How do you make this a successful teambuilding solution for your team and a rewarding experience for the intern? This article provides 7 tips for creating collaborative success.

How to Reinforce Your Successful Teambuilding Efforts with Summer Interns

School is out for the summer and many college students, hopeful to land a job now that hiring indications are more positive, have secured internships for the summer. How do you make this a successful teambuildingsolution for your team and a rewarding experience for the intern?

Leaders of companies anchored by team culture principles know how important it is to "onboard" a new team member into a company. Careful selection following by a systemized process helps new employees adapt to the culture and learn their roles and responsibilities in a carefully orchestrated set of sequences designed to optimize everyone's success.

When deploying a similar approach with interns, leaders have an opportunity to try out new talent and part ways at the end of the intern's tenure with an advocate who likely will have good things to say about the company. Ultimately this attracts new internship relationships and an opportunity to build the workforce with employees who culturally and strategically are the best fit.

Here are seven suggestions for optimizing your internship experience.

1. Identify Strategic Opportunities

Carefully identify strategic opportunities for interns who are schooled in social networking and research to analyze competitors' offerings, strategies, and systems so that your team has the information it needs to bring your workforce preparedness, systems and strategies in alignment for growth. By focusing your interns on analyzing the "other", the information they provide your team builds a sense of "us" and breaks down the natural tendency for interns to be pigeon holed as "the other" by your existing team. Should a job opening arise that is appropriate for this intern, you have already built your "we are us" relationship so that your team is ready to embrace this new hire with open minds and a sense of commitment.

2. Share Quality Information

Share as much quality information and data with the intern as possible. This should include information about your culture, how information and communication flows in your company and background context for their assignments as possible. In this way, your intern will know what works well for your team and what does not in order to minimize culturally inappropriate behavior, which will ultimately make more work for you. Be mindful and strategic in sharing information because the research results the intern ultimately provides you will only be as good as the quality of information and time investment you contribute.

3. Provide Context

Provide background information and context on the project they are contributing to. Explain the goals you hope to achieve and listen to the feedback you receive from the intern. Make this a dialogue so that you have a clear picture of what the intern understands before you let her loose on a project. Interns are no different from employees who become more engaged when they understand how their efforts contribute to the big picture and operational goals and who have confidence has they proceed to achieve those goals.

4. Develop Norms and Procedure Background

Provide background information on your team's norms and procedures so that what the intern provides flows naturally into your team's dynamic. From a human motivation perspective, there's nothing more frustrating and more defeating than to feel like you don't have access to the information you need to do your job or make decisions.

Continually coach the intern through this process on a weekly basis to avoid incidences of procedural conflict which can frustrate your existing team's goals. If the intern is to provide information to your team during team meetings, explain how your meetings are run and how information is shared so that procedural misunderstandings are avoided.

5. Debrief Accomplished Goals

As goals are achieved, debrief the process with your interns so there is awareness of the role they played in achieving goals. Learn what worked well for them. Ask them what their observations were about the process. Ask them what they felt about the process. Then ask them how they are going to apply what they learned to future goal achievement either with you or as their careers unfold. This will help the intern become an advocate for your company and to realize the wealth of opportunity you provided for their career advancement.

The debriefing also provides you with information on how to streamline your future internship offerings. And, if your intentions are to cross train your existing employees into leadership roles, interns provide a ripe guidance, training and development opportunity for these leaders giving you double value for your effort.

6. Hold Progress Meetings

Hold regular progress meetings to check on how things are going. If the intern has run into problems, you can correct them quickly by providing coaching, support and guidance.

7. Invite Insights

Ask your interns for their thoughts and ideas and listen carefully. They provide out-of-the-box observations and insights coupled with dynamic research that could help you launch new innovations or refine your goals.

Approaching internships from this collaborative perspective provides a rich experience for interns and a wealth of information for your team. And should job openings arise that fit the intern's credentials and experience, a good portion of your on-boarding procedures have already been satisfied.

Related Articles
  Free Labour - but is it right?
  Kick Into Fall
  Team Building Tips Take Your Team from Great to Extraordinary
  Your Best Summer Ever
  Back to School, Part 2/3: Internships – Creating an Internship Experience That Benefits Both Parties

Article Tags: college students, job, rewarding experience, successful teambuilding



Related Forum Posts
Re: Let me introduce myself, I'm Zacman - Hi Zacman, You are welcome to this great forum. How are you enjoying the cold. I prefer winter to Summer here in South Africa. The heat is so much that people nearly put on cloth here
Re: What's 1 word to describe what your business will be in 2012 - Successful.
Books for Women Entrepreneurs - There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here. It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new. In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment! 1. The Old Girl's Network 2. Mother's Work 3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women 4. Pitch Like A Girl 5. Workplace Warrior 6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer 7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery 8. She Wins, You Win 9. Napoleon On Project Management 10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do 11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years 12. The One Minute Millionaire 13. Talking From 9 to 5 14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions 15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success 16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded 17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful 18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End 19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide 20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen 21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business 22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker 23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business 24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises 25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy 26. The Promotable Woman 27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it 28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home 29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Re: Does Anyone have any New Ideas for a Business - An idea is only the beginning. The solution is the key here. I really like the term "turn key solution" and in fact use it as many times as I can in my life. Successful franchises and businesses know exactly what, who, how, where, when and why prior to ever dropping $1 in the bank account. This is what makes people millionaires. Harvest ideas into well oiled machines. A business needs to run itself and sustain itself. If you can show this on paper and show consistent growth in a real world scenario, you will always have a winner. Sounds easy, doesn't it? I'm still working on that myself. It's amazing how many difficult to answer questions come up. Persistence is then key.
Re: Are you an Opportunity Addict? - [quote="LoveInventions":1is64ff5]Successful inventors are the people who have one or two o.k. ideas in their life time but they execute them and make millions from them. Unsuccessful inventors are those that have 100 GREAT ideas daily but spend all their time coming up with ideas.[/quote:1is64ff5] Hi LoveInventions, So how do you or those successful inventors that you know decide on which "one or two o.k. ideas" to pursue?


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

A New Year in the Pharmaceutical Industry

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Log On

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.