Day 1: Arrival in HCM City & Team Mekong
After nearly 23 hours of travel, two flight segments, one layover in Tokyo, five movies, 10 episodes of Insecure, many work emails, several Spotify playlists, and numerous naps, I finally arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday, 1 April! I pulled up to my hotel a little after midnight, showered, unpacked, and was in bed by 2:30am…ready to start my first full day with the team in HCM City on Sunday!
Sunday morning, after breakfast, we all gathered for a day of introductory meetings / team building activities. My other 11 team members and I were warmly welcomed by Natalie and Phuong Anh (our partners from PYXERA Global*), Eva (a member of the global SAP CSR team), and Koert (our SAP Social Sabbatical mentor who participated in the Buenos Aires program in April 2016).
For the Social Sabbatical program, SAP partners with PYXERA Global, an organization which helps to facilitate mutually beneficial partnerships between the public, private, and social sectors. Each side of the partnership will leverage their own unique attributes to tackle complex challenges. Our team is lucky to have representatives with PYXERA Global and SAP on-site with us during our first week!
We’ve had weekly “pre-work” calls since February in preparation for our assignment, which has been great preparation. It was great to finally meet Natalie, Koert, Eva, Phuong Anh, and the other team members in person! Together Team Mekong represents 10 nationalities and various board areas within SAP. Everyone is very friendly, excited to be in Vietnam, and eager to start working with our NGOs!
After hearing more about logistics and understanding SAP’s CSR focus, Natalie and Koert led Team Mekong (our chosen team name — which represents the Mekong River) in a series of team building activities.
The first activity was designed to share and discuss our MBTI (Myers-Briggs) scores. For each category, Team Mekong was asked to split up based on the our individual score and answer questions with others who scored similarly. We were all surprised to find that of our 12 team members, 11 were labeled as Extroverts and only one person was labeled as an Introvert! As the activity progressed, we learned that while we each have received one assigned category (Thinking vs. Feeling, Sensing vs. Intuition, etc.), we each have varying percentage levels for each category. This means that attributes of the “opposite” category may still apply in certain instances! This exercise was a great way to get to know one another and how we can best work with one another over the course of April.
I had previously done the assessment during an internal HR team meeting a couple of years back and was interested to see if my type or percentages changed. I found that my overall type essentially remained the same, but my percentages for each area changed quite a bit. For example, two years ago, I had a much higher percentage in the Thinking category. This time, I was 1% Thinking, which means that there’s no true differentiation between Thinking and Feeling. I found that I am both an ENTJ/ENFJ!
After breaking for lunch, Koert led a robot Lego-building activity, which was great. (Alyssa — we should definitely do this activity for our Fieldglass interns!) Team Mekong was split into two groups of six. Each group consisted of three architects and three engineers. The architects were tasked with designing a robot using a set of Legos and the engineers were tasked with building the robot. One by one, an architect and engineer would meet in order to collaborate together for the building. Each meeting was structured to be one minute with a specific set of requirements (ex: only the architect could talk, the engineer could only ask three closed questions, the architect could ask three open questions, etc.).
As you can see from the above photos, we learned the importance of listening, asking the right questions, and that assumptions can easily be inferred…but not always correct. Clear communication is and will be incredibly important for our assignments!!
Vietnam has been great so far. I’m looking forward to getting to know and working with Team Mekong over the course of the next month!!
