Management Tips I Learned from my Interns

Last week, Ryan blogged about mistakes that managers make. Yes, I admit I’ve been guilty of some of these faux pas. Last year I managed two writing interns and at times I struggled to balance their needs with the needs of my own boss’ deadlines. Often people who supervise interns have the responsibility to keep interns accountable but they are not senior enough to spend most of their time managing so they still have plenty of to do’s of their own. We see a lot of tips for interns, but here are some of the things my interns taught me.

Your way is not the only way.
Many times I thought I’d come up with the most efficient and productive way to do things, and my interns surprised me with another process that was just as effective and worked better for them. Both were excellent writers, so in my attempts to help them grow professionally, I’d sometimes forward suggestions for places they could submit their writing outside of the internship. One of my interns wanted to earn extra money, so I offered her a referral to an editor I work with regularly. I thought she would have made an awesome nonfiction writer (sort of like a mini-version of me), but I eventually realized that she prefers other genres that I don’t know as much about. And that’s OK, because it makes her happy. When she left the company to waitress and write poetry on the side, some people told her it was career suicide. It’s not what I would do myself, but I’m really proud of her for it.

You fixing their mistakes does not prevent them from happening again.
As I edited their work, there were a few reoccuring issues that I noticed repeatedly. At first, it seemed easier to just fix them and move on, but they kept happening and I got increasingly frustrated. Didn’t they notice that I always removed double exclamation points? Why did they keep using the past tense when I always changed to present tense? When I talked to the interns, I realized that fixing these items behind their backs excluded them from the editing process and prevented them from learning so they could fix it themselves next time.

Postponing bad news does not help anyone.
Toward the end of last year, my boss told me I had to choose only one for the spring because of budget issues. I hated to be the bearer of bad news (afterall, I really liked both of them), so I didn’t tell them right away, hoping maybe one of them would find another internship on her own. Neither one did, and around around early December Intern 1 emailed me to say that she really liked working here and she understood that the agreement was just for the fall, but could she continue into the spring? I had already told Intern 2 that she could continue (for various reasons that I won’t go into here), so I had to tell Intern 1 that unfortunately, I couldn’t extend her internship. Intern 1 did not take it well. She responded with some very choice words about how she’d never find another internship this late (she actually ended with a much better gig but that’s another story) and I had wronged her by withholding this information. We did not part on good terms, and I regret it. We both could have handled ourselves better, but I should have put aside my desire to be friends with my interns and stepped up as her boss instead.

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