Social Capital: One’s Most Important Asset

These past few weeks have had me reflecting on my people management skills. Over my four years of work experience and nearly two years in grad school, I have collaborated with individuals from varied backgrounds. From stringent government officials to discerning co-workers and my strong-willed sister, all unknowingly prepared me to collaborate with my peers of varying personalities in graduate school. School projects, however, work somewhat differently from real life projects, wherein, students come together with different underlying motivations. In my three and a half semesters and countless group projects, I believe I have managed to learn how to navigate through these motivations and varying personalities and encourage group members to work towards the common goal of a project. Thankfully, in my consulting project team, we all came in with a common goal: to learn as much as we can about the sustainable finance and impact investing space. While we come from different professional backgrounds, our quest for creating maximum impact binds us together through our project. This is not to say we do not have our differences and challenges. 

Being the highly motivated individuals that we are, we commenced the project with high energy and got into the nitty-gritty of it from the very first team meeting. All three members of my team (including me) come with different working and communication styles, which we neglected to discuss early on. This posed as a bit of a challenge, at least for me, as I like to have working relationships established from the inception of a project. For me, it is Project Management 101 to discuss expectations early on. As we got deeper and deeper into the project over the first few weeks, our different styles of working started cropping up creating communication gaps. This started weighing on me heavily as I did not want these differences impacting our project. At this time, I decided to open a dialog with my team about our expectations from the project as well as each other as team members. Our project relies very heavily on strict timelines and it was extremely important that each team member agrees and adheres to these timelines. With an honest back and forth, we were able to come to an understanding of what each team member requires out of the others and how we can collaboratively work on the project. 

While opening up this honest dialog seemed like an extremely daunting task to me, I am glad that I initiated it. I believe that our team and our project are better for it. Our team has a better understanding of how each of us works and how we would prefer to proceed further on the project. Our client is a highly driven individual and we as a team want to do our best to provide the best results possible. Working together and being on the same page will help us do so. I am a firm believer of having strong social capital, and hope that throughout the duration of this project, my team and I are able to build an even stronger relationship!