Comments FeedRecently an intern joined our team and we been working on a couple of things together. As I am a permanent staff here so I guess people will tend to direct the information to me and I will then brief him and divide the work between the 2 of us with the his agreement of course…afterall he is not reporting to me.
Yesterday, there was some last minute urgent tasks and the meeting ended at 6pm which means it is unavoidable to OT for the night and also the need to work today which is a public holiday. However, I just can’t bring myself to ask an intern to work during a public holiday! Hahah … in the end I rushed most of the work last night and completed the rest in 3 hours today so that I still get my holiday. He offered help and even brought his laptop home … but I just thought why made an intern work OT. In my opinion, they should knock off on time and enjoy their holiday 
But this reminded me of something else … a conversation I had about a year ago. Sometimes actually our boss might not have expected us to work on certain things (back then was some testing on weekend) … yet we TAs / interns always expected ourselves to be involve. In the end, we are probably just putting expectations on ourselves.
Back then, when I see things from my perspective, I always thought “it is OK ar, I am more than willing to come and help out” and also partly because I felt that as part of the team I should help out. Now seeing things from another perspective, I kinda understand why at times actually some bosses / seniors don’t really want us to be involved during weekends, they just want us to enjoy while we can.
In this 1-2 years, I also observed that a good leader is not just about being able to deliver projects, managing timeline etc. Managing a team includes noticing who are not blending in well into the team, who are showing signs of unhappiness, getting the right person to do the right task yet still trying to stike a balance across the team (people tend to depend on the most capable people the most causing an uneven spread of work) and the need to enhance the rapport in the team.
I weren’t a leader in most of my school life, ususally if there is leader candidate in the team I will prefer to seat back and just be an active member. I take up leadership role only when there isn’t any leader candidate or no one wants to be a leader. I shun away from monitor or counsellor/prefect role. Though i know at times I was more like a leader than the actual leader because I was so active and trying so hard to drive things to success.
That mentality changed though, in later years in my uni. A project that screwed up causing me not getting the grades I expected puts me to think twice. Why leave the fate in others hand? Since then, the subsequent projects I started to volunteer as leaders. Asking people to work is not natural to me I must say, but is a good learning experience and at least things are in control I felt.
Now? I am not in a leadership role neither am I anywhere near. In fact, I am actually enjoying a team member role hiding behind the leads. Hahha…thats probably my comfort zone but I know as one progress on in life, you will need to take up more responsibility and inevitably a leadership role in future. I was told to be open about a management path not too long ago hahaha … I know I will when the time come but for now, I just want to dip myself deep into technical knowledge learning as much as I can ^__^