Author: Jodi Glickman

Recently, the marketing director for a tech start-up told me that her CEO was furiously drafting job descriptions for a half-dozen summer interns. She was planning to bring a small army of youngsters on board to help push her business into overdrive this summer. As the director of marketing looked at her CEO quizzically, she asked, “you know you need to manage all those interns, right?”

Interns can be a great addition to your team, but beware of the well-meaning twenty-year-old who lands in your lap without any direction or guidance. If you’re planning to hire an intern (or two or three), here are four things to do before they walk through the door to ensure a successful summer for everyone involved:

Choose one or two specific projects. Interns are great for project-based work. Anything with a clear beginning, middle, and end is a good place to start — and if that project lasts between four and eight weeks, even better. Bringing a marketing intern on board to beef up marketing or a sales intern to increase leads is vague and intimidating. Instead, hire a marketing intern to launch a digital marketing campaign for college students or an HR intern to update the employee handbook.

The more discrete and concrete the project, the easier it is to identify objectives, give guidance, and measure results. And the better aligned the project is with the overall mission of your organization, the happier your intern will be — Gen Ys want to know that their work is needed and mission critical, so don’t come up with a project just for the sake of keeping someone busy. Mean it.

Put it in writing. Once you know what a prospective intern will actually be doing, craft a job description. Even for those who are hiring a colleague’s or client’s son or daughter, or others who decide to bring on an intern to meet a motivated and deserving college student (why not?), it’s still worthwhile to go through the motions and draft a job description. This will help you identify the goals and objectives of the internship, determine how you’ll measure outcomes and success, and communicate the qualifications and skills you’re looking for — great information for you to have internally and critical information for you to relay to your intern on day one.

Craft your sales pitch. Even if you think your organization’s value proposition is obvious, dig deeper. Think hard about what a twenty-something is going to get out of eight to 10 weeks of working side by side with you or your colleagues.

What will your intern walk away with? What skills and insights will he learn on the job that will help shape his career path, strengthen his network, or help him decide once and for all that advertising is the way to go (or not)? How much fun will it be? (That tech start-up in Chicago I mentioned earlier promised Cubs season tickets along with an office located in the heart of Chicago’s nightlife.)

Make sure you communicate your value proposition to potential interns up front and hold yourself to the standards you set as the summer goes on.

Know the difference between being a manager and a mentor. Do you have time to actively manage your intern(s) or are you better suited as a mentor? As a manager, you need to commit to a significant upfront investment at the start of the summer — showing your intern the ropes, making introductions, finding a physical place for her to sit and work, going for lunch on day one — and providing feedback throughout the summer. Add to that a weekly one-on-one meeting (at least) and suddenly, managing an intern can turn from an exciting prospect to a daunting proposition.

If you don’t have the appetite, the capacity, or even the skill set to manage your intern (be honest with yourself), then you’ve got to find someone else to stand in your stead. Look for a rising star in your organization who is excited about managing someone junior. This can be a great opportunity to give an individual contributor a first taste of the highs and lows of managing others. And commit to serving as a mentor yourself for informal coaching, guidance, and socializing, or tap others on your team for that role, too.

As with anything in life, the more effort you put in, the better results you’ll get out. Investing time and energy now will set your intern up for success before she even walks though the door.

Stay tuned for another post in June for tips on what to do once that internship starts — and how to manage it all summer long.

My husband, Eric, is an armchair entrepreneur. He has ideated, seeded, started, funded, built, grown, and sold dozens of companies — 10 times over — all in his head.

His best friend, Marc, is a finance guru. A whiz-kid investor who’s in it for the love of the game, not for the love of money. They are an unlikely pair: one a dreamer, the other the ultimate pragmatist.

Last week, Marc posed a simple yet profound question: “If you were a stock, would you bet on yourself?”

Eric’s response was swift and resounding. “Yes, I’d buy myself on margin,” he grinned. Because one day — one day — he was going to be a successful founder of [insert company name here].

Marc’s question gave Eric the ultimate litmus test of self-confidence. Up until that point, my husband hemmed and hawed incessantly: “Am I capable? Am I good? Can I launch a successful business?” Thinking about whether he’d buy stock in Eric Co., versus buying shares in Apple or GE or Zynga, gave him a whole new way of thinking about the world.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur, a general manager, a corporate lawyer, or a brand strategist. The question remains the same: Would you buy stock in yourself? Do you believe in your own potential so deeply and absolutely that you’d make that investment over any other?

If your immediate reaction is “yes,” then you’re in great shape. You know what you are worth. You see your future value and potential, and know that you are increasing in value every day. You believe that whoever employs, engages, partners with you is lucky to have you on their side.

If the question gives you pause, however, then you’ve got some work to do. If you wouldn’t buy stock in yourself, why not? What’s holding you back? Who or what could possibly be a better investment? Equally important, how can you improve your skill set, beef up your network, or make a lasting change to make your stock rise?

As the workplace continues to evolve, each and every one us is a free agent. There’s no such thing as the 20-year gold watch for service; careers today are patchworks. Freelancers make up a third of U.S. workers and Millennials will have 15 to 20 jobs over the course of their lives. To stay competitive in this economy, you will need to continually disrupt and reinvent yourself. And if you don’t believe in your own abilities, no one else will. You need to buy into your own story.

This, of course, makes us all in the business of sales. We are selling ourselves, our skill set, our vision, every day — when we’re looking for a new job, angling for a promotion, meeting a new client, competing for new business. And as any spokesperson or salesman knows, you’ve got to use and love your product. No one wants to buy a Surface that Oprah endorses from her iPad.

Marc’s question to Eric lit a fire under his derriere. It served as a call to action, a shot of adrenaline — an “aha” moment where Eric said, “yes, I’d bet on myself.” And now he’s doing it: starting a venture he didn’t think he could.

It turns out that self-confidence isn’t ambiguous or amorphous — it’s actually quite simple. Recognize your gifts and talents, and own them. Hone them. Invest in yourself until you feel comfortable convincing others to do the same. Then go out and sell your value proposition to live up to your potential.