Aug 1

Aug 1 You Only Learn If Your Team Is Up To The Task When The Work Begins

One of the most exciting aspects of being a manager is watching your employees grow and prosper.

The hard part is that when you hire someone, you only guess how they are going to perform. You wouldn’t hire them in the first place if you didn’t believe they’d be able to deliver. But, it isn’t until they start working that you find out if they live up to your expectations or not.

As talented and dedicated all the Wheaton College students on the WiN Team are, this past week began to show me how different each member of the team is. They bring different work ethics, approaches to projects and personalities.

It is crunch time for all of us with only two weeks left in the program and numerous projects are being worked on. While these students have completed plenty of group projects in school, none of them have been part of so many different project teams at one time.

Some have handled it well. Carving out blocks of time to focus on a single deliverable. Others jump back and forth hoping to cover all the bases. A few learned how much I despise the statement of, “I have nothing to work on at the moment.”

This week, the team focusing on Kushae by BK Naturals put their heads down and did nothing but create social media content for them one day. This may sound like a simple undertaking, but some of that time was spent learning Photoshop and Canva so that everyone could contribute to the image creations.

There was a big smile on my face as I reviewed the images and messages they developed. I was a little worried when they first signed the contract because of how much work needed to be done, but they stepped up and delivered. It’ll be fun to see the clients reaction to them all and even better when they start going live across their accounts.

We also had a big win this week with the delivery of a promotional video for the findSisterhood app.

This company was one that the team identified they’d like to work with earlier in the summer, so going from that desire all the way to a satisfied client was an excellent experience for all involved.

Founder, Ana Pompa Alarcón Rawls had this to say about our work:

"The WiN Team was amazing. When we worked together, they had the best attitude and were very professional. The result of their work is incredible. I'd immediately hire them for my own team. I especially want to point out how extremely friendly every single team member is, it makes all the difference."

On top of this work, there is a lot of brainstorming and strategizing going on for a variety of clients. We took some time to hole up in a conference room and focus specifically on the differences in the B2B world because three documents are being written for startups in this arena.

There is also research being done for an Influencer Marketing campaign and reviewing of financial documents to help a client do better. While not the focus of our work, our team caught a mistake in a client’s financial calculations that hopefully will help them in the future.

There is plenty of work still to be done in our final days. I know a lot of my time will be spent reviewing deliverables before turning them over to our clients.

From the beginning, my hope for this team was that they’d all learn new skills that would help them in their future careers and it feels like that is precisely what is happening.