I spent most of the last year as an intern with Carestream Health, and those close to me know exactly how positive of an experience I had there. From the beginning to the end of my time in Worldwide Marketing Communications, I was a fully integrated member of the team and was able to learn from some of the best in the business. My manager at Carestream, JoAnn Linder, was one that I enjoyed working for very much, and I think she is an excellent leader of individuals.
One fear that many interns have when joining an organization is that they will serve the stereotypical internship experience retrieving coffee and organizing the office space. Fortunately for me, JoAnn operates under the mantra that people should take on as many projects and experiences as they are comfortable with and ask for.
In other words, her rope extends as far as one can take it.
This mindset allowed me to become involved in a wide variety of work at Carestream, meet as many individuals as possible and learn about everything from corporate communications to social media to Salesforce.com.
Part of getting so much experience at a relatively high level, as an intern, is the possibility of failure from time to time. That was never an issue for JoAnn, though. In fact, letting people fail is something that JoAnn embraces.
Once, for example, putting a new graphical design on Carestream’s iPad app led to an issue where users could not access content properly. While it was stressful and I was worried that it would lead to negativity, I found that I was energized and simply worked as hard as I could to find a solution. JoAnn was, of course, calm and did whatever she could to help.
JoAnn believes that the way individuals recover from issues is much more significant than the issue itself.
Another thing that I enjoyed while at Carestream was an environment of continuous education, both internally and externally. JoAnn takes professional development very seriously and took advantage of every opportunity to allow team members to grow. Attendance to community events and involvement in professional organizations outside of the office were always encouraged.
Internally, on the other hand, team members frequently shared relevant articles to help others understand their responsibilities within the organization. Training sessions were also held regularly for other employees on topics like effective blog writing and web analytics. Throughout my time with the company, a number of “Lunch & Learn” sessions were held, and I even authored a number of “Tips & Tricks” documents to help the team’s adoption rate of iPads.
At Carestream, sharing expertise is simply one component of having expertise.
I learned a lot at Carestream. But the most important lesson to learn was one that took the better part of a year to fully understand:
Empowerment + Failure + Development = Success.