Tell me about a time you led a team.

Sophomore summer at the boutique, the senior associate on my deal team got pulled onto an emergency staffing for another client three weeks before our sale-side CIM was due. I was the intern, but the analyst above me was already pulling 90-hour weeks on a separate live deal. The MD asked me to coordinate the CIM workstream — not build the whole thing, but run point with the company's CFO on data requests, manage the timeline, and flag anything that needed escalation.

Three concrete things I did. First, I rebuilt the data request list — the original had 64 items in no clear order. I reorganized it into four buckets (financials, customer/contract data, legal, ops) and prioritized by what the modeling required first. The CFO told me later that was the moment they took the workstream seriously.

Second, I set a daily 8am check-in with the analyst — fifteen minutes, just to align on what each of us needed from the other. That meeting probably saved 10 hours a week of the back-and-forth that would have happened otherwise.

Third, I made one decision I almost didn't make — I escalated to the MD that we were going to miss the original CIM date by four days. The senior associate, when I'd talked to him, had said "we'll figure it out." I decided four days was a real number that should be in the MD's calendar, not a number we hoped to recover. He moved the deadline that afternoon.

We shipped on the revised date. The CIM signed an LOI six weeks later. The lesson was that leadership at the junior level isn't about authority — it's about reducing other people's uncertainty.