Beyond Projects: The Art of Becoming an Indispensable Team Member

While common internship tips tell you to schedule coffee chats with every employee, go above and beyond on projects, and ask questions, these surface-level strategies often overlook a fundamental challenge: how to authentically integrate yourself into an established team culture and transform from an outsider to a valued colleague.

In my experience at Cisco’s hardware team in Austin, I noticed that the average employee tenure is quite high, more than about 10 years. Clearly it reflects the positive work environment and the team that makes each employee want to stay, and I have a few theories on why this is.

The Foundation of Belonging: Personal Connection

Firstly, everyone knows each other and a little bit about their personal lives. When being a new hire, it’s important to ask about the people you are going to work with and have a casual chat with people about the work they do, what they like to do at the office, etc. This breaks the ice and allows you to gauge who the friendly people are in the office. Sometimes your mentor or manager will help you with this by introducing you to the other team on your first day, but if they don’t offer, ask if they can yourself.

Navigating Informal Communication Channels

Secondly, the team has a lot of spaces/group chats with people on different projects. I find it reassuring that everyone on this team is included in the effort, which is shown through groupchats about the same software that people use, debug processess, general team questions, lab help, etc. As an intern, it helps to ask to be added to these spaces if they exist for you team and maybe even ask a few questions or engage in there a little bit. Some examples that I’ve done in those kind of spaces is if anyone had certain hardware that I was curious about, or replied about my findings for a certain problem that I was helping to debug.

Being involved with the team doesn’t have to be within your own project either. Ask to be invited to meetings that may not have to do with the project you are tasked with, or stand with your mentor as they talk about a problem with their manager, and listen keenly on the current events whether technical or nontechnical happening within the team. This allows it to make it easier to contribute yourself.

The Ultimate Objective: From Contributor to Problem-Solver

This leads to my ultimate point of the article, your goal for an internship/new hire position is to be able to contirbute to the team not just by doing your own projects, but also helping solve problems on the team for others. People will remember the times you’ve helped them more than the last conversation you had with them about their weekend. If you do the above things, you will get a few steps closer to this goal, and hopefully within a few months or a year you are already very knowledgable about the processes, programs, and the personal lives of the team that you work on, making you a functional employee that is indispensable.