Collaboration, Rwandan Style
I landed in Kigali, Rwanda on Saturday to start my four-week long social sabbatical. Working with a small team of SAP colleagues, I’ll help Starlight Africa, an organization dedicated to increasing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education amongst Rwandan high school students, to develop a communications and marketing plan that will help them expand their reach.
But before heading to Kigali with 11 other SAP employees, we were asked to come up with a team name. We chose “ubufatanye,” which means collaboration in Kinyarwanda — one of Rwanda’s four official languages. Team ubafatanye will be divided into four subteams, each paired with four local NGOs and non-profit organizations.
As we learned in our prep sessions, ubafatanye is the name of the game. Truly understanding our clients’ needs so that we can help them achieve their goals, starts with a foundation of intentional partnership.
While I’m a collaborative person by nature, two years of mostly working at home has made me more “heads down” than usual. That’s one among many reasons I’m excited to work side-by-side with my client and fellow SAP employees for the next month.
Here are three ways I expect to live the spirit of ubafatanye over the next month:
1) Forge a deep connection with my client — to help understand our clients’ challenges and develop a proposed solution, social sabbatical participants use the design thinking methodology. Active listening and empathy are key tenets of design thinking, “a human centered approach to innovation.” As we work with the various social enterprises and non-profits, we’ll gain a 360 understanding of our clients’ challenges, connect more authentically to our them, and hopefully, become better equipped to support them.
Moreover, I’m excited to build more immediate, in-person relationships with the Starlight team. After living for so long in the virtual work world, you lose the nuance of a glance or the ability to read someone’s body language. Those communication tools are even more essential when working in a team of people from different countries and backgrounds. Being in person, we’ll have the opportunity to develop that more intuitive relationship with our client, which I expect will enrich our collaboration.
2) Expand my SAP family — having worked at SAP for 15 years, I’ve developed relationships with people that cross years and continents. Some of us have known each other since before we became parents and now have children in college.
As our Kigali team works to support our clients, we will also help each other navigate a new country, support each other through any challenges we have, and share new experiences, I anticipate that these colleagues to become new members of my SAP family for many years to come. There’s something magical that happens in person: from the shared joke that becomes increasingly funny when shared as a group to being there for one another when something unexpected happens. It’s only been one day and I’m already feeling those relationships grow and deepen.
3) Appreciate the bonds within my own family — traveling abroad for a month when you have a husband, teenager, two dogs and are in the middle of a house remodel, is not a solo act. It takes requires the most profound kind of partnership and collaboration.
I would not be able to do this without a strong ethos of ubafantanye within my own family. My husband is my most important partner, who’s holding down the fort while I’m away, making this experience possible.
So here’s to four weeks of collaboration and growth. Let the fun begin!
#SAP, #SocialSabbatical, #Rwanda, #Kigali
