Autopilot off — my first impressions being on SAP Social Sabbatical
It’s Friday evening, past 6pm, my colleagues and I are sitting in an airport waiting for a delayed flight to take us home for a short weekend.
By this time and after a week full of customer meetings, impressions and too little sleep, I’m not really attentive anymore — and so when scrolling through my inbox, I need to read multiple times to understand the implications the next few sentences:
Dear Franziska,
Congratulations! You have been selected to participate in the SAP Social
Sabbatical for global engagement 2024 program.
We are delighted to inform you that you have been assigned to the Manila,
Philippines team.
All of a sudden I’m more than awake. When I look up from my phone I can’t stop myself from a loud “WOW!” and a huge smile (just imagine my colleagues gazing at me).
Fast forward 3 months and we’re already more than one week in on our social engagement in the Philippines. But before I begin sharing my learnings so far, for those among you who don’t know what SAP Social Sabbatical is all about, here’s my brief summary:
Yes, it’s a sabbatical, but really a sabbatical from your current role at SAP. Upon careful selection, SAP is sponsoring you (and a team of 11 other talented colleagues) to go on an 4-week work assignment tackling a specific challenge of a well established NGO or social enterprise in an emerging market. Assignments circle around the acceleration of impact businesses and / or the empowerment of youth-in-need as well as sustainability overall. You agree to dedicate time and commitment to pre-departure prep calls as well as post assignment follow-ups. Overall, it requires lots of personal reflection throughout the entire process (e.g. what skills do you bring, what do you hope to learn, how would your manager describe your work ethos, how do you provide and receive feedback, how do you derive decisions with team members you barely know?)
In my opinion SAP is providing us an immense opportunity, on the one hand to give back to society and deal with relevant yet challenging problems, on the other hand, to build and bring back essential management skills, be it personal and people leadership skills, empathy, or awareness of doing business in emerging markets. Certainly, it is also a huge (financial) commitment towards our sustainability strategy — especially in times of global layoffs.
But back to my experience: as soon as you arrive in the host country, time flies and so we have been briefed to turn off the autopilot, leave our role behind and focus on providing an impact from day 1. To do so, here are my top 3 learnings from week 1:
- Building trust:
Without trust, people are neither going to share details with you, nor will they follow your recommendations. And it’s the details that will help you navigate the scope, action items and eventually recommendations. In the Philippines, trust is built over food. Not only is it common to have 5 (!) meals a day but also do people feel comfortable to share details when they can snack simultaneously. So keep in mind to leave some room for dessert.
- Individualism vs. collectivism:
When engaging with the host organization, acknowledge the environment you’re operating in. The Philippines are a collectivist society. They will come with an “I serve you” mentality, rather than the (for most of us) familiar, “I before you” approach. And so my team colleagues had to actively stop me from asking more questions during the interviews we conducted with our host, just to ensure that our counterparts can dedicate sufficient time to their lunch break.
- Decision matrices help set emotions aside:
The main goal for week 1 was to narrow down the scope to a manageable but meaningful extent. After a few rounds of interviews with different stakeholders of the host organization we quickly learned that there are just too many directions we could provide input for. We came to the conclusion to prioritize quality over quantity, eventually even going into execution mode in some areas rather than providing a long list of could-haves and nice-to-haves. As it was a short work week and time was limited, we could not hear out everyone’s preferences and go into lengthy discussions which may not even have added value to the host organization, so we came up with a decision matrix and point system to score potential focus areas by importance, urgency, simplicity and proficiency. This approach helped to shorten the decision making process and sustained our motivation and team spirit.
If you now are curious to read more about the Philippines, the host organization and our assignment or just want to follow along some personal highlights in the upcoming weeks, make sure to follow me on LinkedIn.
Lastly, some memories around fun activities and moments to share from week 1:
