VIRTUAL REMOTE Internship - Management Associate

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This role is for someone interested in gaining a lot of management experience. You will directly interact with others regularly (minimum, not maximum, of 5 hours per week). It will be challenging for you to get others to achieve better results, and it will also be challenging for you to inspire others to want to be compliant with rules.

Time commitment: minimum 5 hours per week, 120 days

Payment: see below

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This is a VIRTUAL internship. However, if your school requires you to visit a physical commercial location, it can be arranged for you to visit almost any Keller Williams branch that is convenient for you on a weekly basis. There is often extra space available in a friendly and professional atmosphere. If this option is used, neither that office nor its associates will be responsible for you. You will report virtually and only to Russell Bernstein.

SUMMARY OF LEADERSHIP ACTIVITIES

The internship program is comprised of 4 teams of more than 20 interns nationally. Interns perform their work alone with review by the CEO and supervised review by other veteran interns on their team (also reviewed by the CEO). Interns sometimes interact with interns on other teams. Some interns interact with clients or prospective clients.

Everyone records their actions, including details such as topic, assign date, completion date, rating, and learning. This information is analyzed for the intern's benefit in terms of how it quantifies the qualitative factors of the impact they had in this role for their resume. For example, "Jane consistently contributed 20% more than the minimum requirement, which was apparent in how often she volunteered for leadership actions, which likely caused team results to improve by 30% overall among 5 team members."

The 2 most challenging aspects of the system for interns are (a) actually recording their own actions and (b) sufficiently recording the learning experience such that the action is less about the work and more about the learning.

THIS IS AN INTERNSHIP PROGRAM. It is an opportunity for interns to learn, and it is a way to associate the experience with the interns career development. It is challenging for interns to view it as an internship. Many only want to either work or not work, so it's a constant battle between both sides to drive results through the various challenges of work, school, and life toward a successful UNPAID learning experience.

This Management Associate internship is not a job, and the roles of other interns are not jobs. It they were jobs, the leadership experience would be far more complicated. However, the goal of this role is to focus the learning experience on a core element of leadership, which is much more positive and sustainable, especially in the beginning of any leadership experience,

On one hand, in this role you will encourage those who take actions more slowly to be more diligent about recording actions. During this process, you'll likely notice areas where the CEO needs to improve communication and training. In other words, some interns feel left in the dark, and creating more action is sometimes just about giving more attention and confidence.

Alternatively, other inters are more independent and learn quickly. However, they often are also more resistant to more work when it lessens their perceived result. These individuals need more coaching on quality rather than quantity, and this manifests in the form of ensuring that they are reflecting satisfactorily on their learning experience in each action. For example, if the task is "making a chart", they will write "I learned how to make a chart" as their learning experience. However, the action is not the purpose of their learning experience (most of the work is redone by the CEO anyways). These interns need to not only be coached but also held accountable for reflecting more and writing something like "While making the chart, I learned a lot about how data, displayed in different methods, can be used to explain biases of the data itself."

Less often, but important to this role is conflict resolution. All of the interactions of interns on a team INEVITABLY result in conflict. It is critical to provide leadership to help resolve and prevent conflict on an ongoing basis. And examples include but are not limited to being an anonymous resource for disclosing conflict to leadership without disclosing the identities of either or both parties involved in conflict so that it can be addressed appropriately to the team. Another example might be performing surveys (written or verbal) to help cultivate more honest responses and feedback.

SUMMARY OF ANALYSIS

This is NOT an analyst role, but there is data to be analyzed. The interns, on 4 teams of more than 20 nationally has a "task sheet". They record every project that they complete, and everything is managed in an Excel sheet with a variety of fields about the project but also fields about time to completion, days in between assignment, the intern's rating of the task, and something they learned about it. This information is automatically analyzed in a series of pivot tables to help quantify their efforts for customers (so we can communicate our level of effort), to the team interns (so they can quantify their own impact and perhaps put it on their resume), and to leadership (so that we can understand fluctuations in performance and make changes to improve performance, including but not limited to preparing to recruit more interns, addressing dissatisfaction with tasks, rewarding unique individuals, etc.). The core action of this review process will be to read what interns wrote for what they learned and follow-up with the ones who wrote exactly what the action was. It is very important that the interns garner not only skills but also critically think about and develop a deeper understanding of why actions are completed rather than having the mindset "I have been assigned the task, so I must complete it". The focus of this internship is about developing leaders who may pursue a similar or related career, not about getting work done.

LIST OF ACTIONS AND TIME FOR THIS ROLE

Unique Software experiential learning opportunities

Career-related learning goals

Supervision/Mentorship

Payment

Course Credit (optional, not required)