How to Deal With Communication Breakdowns as an Intern?

I am doing a virtual internship in IB this summer. So far, it has gone relatively well, but I think one of the biggest challenges of a virtual internship is that communication is not always perfect. Most of the guys I am working with will give me detailed instructions or a broad mandate and an example of something similar that they've built to base my work off of. This system generally works well, and I can reach out with any questions that I have along the way. However, one of the junior employees I work with gives detailed but useless instructions and gets pissed at me when my product is different from his expectations. For example, he told me to research a list of ~50 venture-backed firms in the software sector, and note their investors, revenue, and anything else that I think might be important in a notes column. I spent hours pouring through articles and databases to determine things that I thought would be important (size of last round, post/pre-money valuations, etc.) and noting revenue figures and listing all of the investors (a lot of the co's had 10-20+ funds invested). I then sent him the file with my findings, and he is pissed that I didn't include the size and series of previous rounds or the "at the very least how many times greater the most recent round was over their previous raise" (as well as a bunch of other things, like how he only wanted the led investor, or that the sources I referenced were sources he easily could have looked at). His justification for this was he had sent me a slide deck, "and I should have been able to figure out what matters by looking at the slides that had similar information to what was requested." Going forward, if I get an assignment like this from this guy, I will have an idea of what to do, but this is not an isolated incident with him giving me instructions then being mad that I followed them, but didn't read his mind. I realize that this might be getting a bit ranty, so I will cut to my broader question: How do I address people getting mad at me for either misinterpreting their instructions or following them but not producing the product that they desired? I feel like, in these instances, I haven't been in the wrong, but they still want me to apologize and make sure it doesn't happen again. I want some clarity on how to proceed, should I accept that shitty superiors are part of IB and take the heat, or should I talk to him to see if there is a way we can improve communications? Any advice would be greatly appreciated as apart from this guy, everyone has been great, so I am gunning for that return offer.

 

Maybe this wasn't clear in my post (the irony), but I wasn't planning on going above him. I was more thinking about getting on the phone with him for 5-10 minutes and saying -- I feel like a lot of things have been getting lost in translation, I want to help/ support you to the best of my ability what can I do to improve our communication to make sure I produce the product you are looking for? I was under no circumstances planning to go to anybody else.

 

I think this is understandable and sometimes people are unclear. A way to avoid this is by Over-Communicating. So before you take a deep dive make a not of what you plan to bring as your end product and double check to make sure that's what is needed. e.g To make sure we're aligned, we need the 50... and I plan to use xyz as my metric. Is that in line with what you're thinking?

 

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