Inspiration, Collaboration and Bringing in Big Changes
When I got selected for the Social Sabbatical program my reaction was excitement and dread in equal parts. Excitement to be part of this amazing program and a dread to think about leaving my children aged 7 and 3 behind for a month. The good thing was that I got the selection news around 6 months before my actual travel date in February. So, I got plenty of time to convince myself that everything is in place and the world will not end if I am off from home for a month.
Inspiration
My sub team in Thailand (Kevin Bird, Abassin Sidiq and me) was assigned to the organization ‘Klongdinsor’ working with the disabled community in Thailand. It was incredibly moving to be just around the team and understand the work that they are doing for the disabled community in Thailand. Their flagship program is called Run2gether which brings more than 2000 people together for a mega run event. A disabled person is paired with a guide runner to compete with others in more than 50 categories. It is a celebration of human spirit and camaraderie. Klongdinsor also work with the community to enable education and career opportunities. They conduct career fairs, training programs and job matching between candidates and companies.
Collaboration
Klongdinsor wanted our team to deliver a data management strategy for their organization. They had many projects that were running in parallel with project managers handling each event as it comes. They wanted a strategy to consolidate the data at one place and draw insights from them. This would help to make the vision of its founder Chatchai Aphibanpoonpon to make Klongdinsor a data driven company a reality. The biggest learning for me was on how to think of solutions that would work in the context of the end user. After working many years in a corporate company like SAP, you tend to jump to time and tested solutions in the corporate space and try to translate it into smaller scale projects. But sometimes for a process or a new project to work it has to be translated into the language and context of the end user’s environment.
Bringing in Big Changes
The key takeaways from Social Sabbatical program for me has been,
1. Creating solutions with end user impact
Spending time on understanding the context of end user is so important when you come up with solutions. You want to push for change as the current way is not giving the desired results. But there is a reason that there is an old way of working — they gave them the success that made the organization what they are today. So, when creating solutions, we have to walk down a path of fine balance to achieve success with new ways of working that would work for the organization.
2. Understanding people and their cultural background
Working with a highly diverse team brought with it its own challenges as it takes time to understand the place from which a person and his/her ideas are coming from. But the experience taught me how you can still push for what is required if you can articulate the solution concept in a way that is relatable to people.
3. How to push for buy-in for your ideas
Communicating your viewpoint clearly during discussions. Sometimes when the situation s not relatable or when a discussion is not going in the way you want it is easy to feel disengaged and forget about the purpose and value that you can add to the solution. The biggest learning for me was adding your viewpoint whenever possible. Even when it doesn’t get embraced in the first discussion, you can always come back to it in the subsequent meeting and push for a buy in
The social sabbatical program is a great experiential learning platform that SAP is providing for its employees. I am grateful for the SAP and Pyxera for designing this wonderful program that is so unique and impactful.
